by Rana Bose
We didn’t go into our apartment right away. We returned to our car and then approached our apartment through the underground garage. We heard the wail of sirens outside. I was shaking a bit. I had never fully realized until then the violence I was capable of. Or, was it that I had changed into something else? I had also not known that such an operation could be swiftly carried out by a non-military team with such precision. Gerry went to the sink and insisted we all wash up. Then he sat and poured himself a glass of Bushmill. His eyes closed as he swallowed the drink in one gulp. Then he opened his eyes and shrugged his shoulders.
Chapter Thirty
The Two Things That Happened
in the Beginning
Dishonourable and discredited as they were, they still managed to pull off their escape.
A rather florid description of their unexpected getaway appeared in the tabloid, Miroir de Montreal: “The two-storeyed sand-coloured villa has a kidney-shaped swimming pool located just fifteen feet from the large glass doors of the magnificently proportioned family room, which faces south. Beyond it is the azure sea. In the family room are marble statues of Greek goddesses looking out through the chiffon curtains billowing over the remarkable view. That is where the nearly naked bodies of the chiropractor and his society wife, each partially covered by an open white bathrobe, were found hanging from the ceiling fans by their Bahamian butler. He reported it was his job every morning to water the numerous cascades of red bougainvillea flowers that decorated the room.”
That night the BBC news announced that a Hellfire missile from a drone had made a successful strike in the hills surrounding Kandahar. It was reported that several extremists had been confirmed killed. It was also mentioned that, according to an as yet unconfirmed rumour, there may have been civilian casualties.
But I was used to that now.
Chapter Thirty-One
Not Coming Back
It was his birthday.
I took a cab and arrived at her doorstep at eight in the evening, just as the sun had disappeared abruptly, leaving no indication of reappearing until the next week. She stood at the top of the stairs. The light behind threw a halo around her untidy hair; loose strands of tenderness floated about her face as a reminder of having come here and found one’s bearings, built a small livelihood and slowly lost it—and the fan overhead created waves of migrant sadness. The lines and shadows on her face were Afghanistan: incisions and trenches burrowed deep, repeatedly, where once there had been smooth, pastoral placidness. The shine of her forehead had faded. She looked fragile.
I had called her last night to tell her I would come over and she had replied with only one word: “Please.” I walked up the last few steps. She offered her arms and then withdrew them suddenly, sobbing. I put my arm on her shoulder and she said, “Sorry.” Then she turned and walked away towards the kitchen.
How could Ava Gardner say sorry?
Someone whose legacy is such that she is invariably cast as a resolute survivor; someone who holds together with silence and fortitude in the face of any loss. What a sentence, for a nation, for a people, for a person! For a split second, she had betrayed the turmoil of her emotions, but she was not one to burst into hostile tongues. She never did. Her thoughtfulness and enormous scepticism, combined with a charming demeanour, had always confirmed to me that reason and empathy would triumph in the end.
And yet there she had stood, dismantled, disfigured, son-less, in the darkness of a staircase with the fan turning slowly above. What does it matter who your ancestors were if you do not know where you will go next?
She returned from the kitchen, the teacup tottering as she brought it out with a slice of chocolate cake on a plate. “Today is Nat’s birthday,” she told me. “Please have some. Darjeeling.” She placed the cup and cake on the table.
What does a mother do on her son’s birthday when she doesn’t know where he is, when there is no one with whom to celebrate? Who else but me would remember the excited discussions, the books read, the stories shared?
It was I who had travelled with her from Brooklyn, from somewhere in Poland—or was it Russia, maybe Germany? It was I who had settled in a cold water flat with her mother while she knitted socks; I who had seen her walking with a spring in her step when Moshe’s hat flew off on Bagg Street; I who was there when she got married; and I who had watched as Moshe engraved tombstone after tombstone. And it was I who had seen Moshe lying on the pavement gasping, who had called Nat who had come rushing.
Why the fuck did Nat have to go to Afghanistan and leave us all in despair? There was nothing redeeming about it, not even switching sides to become some mujahedeen. What good did it serve? What did it prove? It was their war, their battle! How could he win? For that matter, who would even know where he went? Who would ever find out or care what he had done?
Mrs. Meeropol went back into her bedroom while I slowly, mechanically, and pointlessly dismantled the layered chocolate cake, not knowing what to do next. I had already given her a brief description of my encounter with Nat. I had already informed her that he was convinced he was suffering from trauma and nothing would help him recover. She knew he had gone there as part of a private security outfit and had switched sides to act with the militants in the hills. How could this be anything but a nightmare to her? Through the partly open door I saw Nat’s bed still neatly in place, a huge folded duvet covering the bottom of it. Everything tidied, organized, and anticipating.
After a while she came out and sat down, her nose redder than before. She had tidied herself up. She tried hard to smile and asked, “How is Myra?”
“She’s good,” I replied. “Tell me, has Nat written to you?”
“A long time ago. Perhaps the week you came back. Short note. I don’t think he has any plans to return.” She looked away as she said that.
“I think he’ll come back,” I said. “But we’ll all have to make our utmost efforts to provide him support. It’s going to be a tough ride. He’s seen it all.”
“I think your grandfather knew that would happen. He was a great man. Nat wrote to me about him, mostly little things. He said Afghanistan turned out to be exactly as he had said it would be; that he had even predicted there would be forces amongst the Taliban with whom we would have to negotiate. And it seems that way now. It is always grey in between.”
She was a different woman, no longer the energetic, conspicuously well-informed debater and counsellor. She had become shy, distracted, a citizen of a faraway country, an immigrant yet again. For the first time, I realized that she was nearly seventy years old, perhaps more. I felt bereft and emptied out. My notions about her glamour and command over the challenges of daily life, her resolute upbringing and history, suddenly evaporated.
“Mrs. Meeropol, is there anything I can do to help you? I really don’t want to intrude, but you know what Nat has always meant to me.”
I saw a crease form between her eyes. Her lips trembled. “Well, you do know that I have always loved you like my own. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know.”
She shuddered, then put her hand out. “Tell me, can you look after the business? I don’t trust anyone else. You can have whatever share you want. I don’t care. I just want you around, looking after it.”
“Yes, I’ll do the best I can. I don’t have any interest in shares.”
I walked slowly away from her place that night and then hailed a cab to take me home. There was no moon, nor any fog above the Main. The cab made a tight turn onto St-Urbain and headed south.
I reached home and couldn’t find Myra. I was surprised because it was late. She had not often gone out since we had moved in together. I immediately switched on the desktop to check for emails. There was only one, from Shaheed, and it had no subject heading.
“Dear Brother Chuck, I regretfully inform you that our brother and fellow freedom fighter, Azmat, wa
s martyred by a missile from a drone fired by the Americans at 11:15 hours today Afghanistan time. Along with him were martyred two other brothers, several villagers, two women, and a five-year-old child with whom Azmat was playing when the drone struck. Please convey our deepest condolences to his mother, about whom our brother often talked. We send our deepest sympathies to you as well.”
I called Mrs. Meeropol and told her I had to come over right away. I hung up after the one sentence to stop her from asking questions. But I think she knew by my voice. My insides were turning over and my forehead felt numbed. My fingers could not hold on to the receiver.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Double Funeral
RK once took a massive drag on his Bergamot-flavoured cigar and announced that gravitation has no impact on the mind. You can’t bend it or force it in one direction. If you spin a coin around, it ultimately settles down to a zero kinetic energy state and the two component forces in the vertical and horizontal—to roll and to spin—are eventually overpowered by environmental friction and gravity. The coin settles to a dead stop.
When you are unconvinced about going to war and yet you wade into it, it’s like the fog of war. When you are in a state of indecisiveness and your personality is split, then unexplainable attractions and utter contempt collide. As would a fog of emotions. When you are in exile, a quiet madness seizes upon you. Citizenship means you have to have your feet on two shores. The coin always hobbles to a stop. Not the mind.
As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t much of significance being said or done at the service in the Bagg Street synagogue. There was no body to be washed, no casket with holes on the sides to let oxygen or earth enter. Eulogies floated over the audience and evaporated into the benevolent air. The actor had turned soldier, or maybe guerrilla, in a faraway land. He baffled everyone. Had he been a turncoat? Had there been a conversion? Was it convincing? Had the seeds of it been there all along? Who had seen the signs? Those were the questions in the lanes and streets outside, but not as part of a genuine conversation on how it might have happened. Rather, as a playful dance of words to avoid the issues.
Not even the death by drone of one of our own could bring the situation home.
The reality of Afghanistan was not in the heads of the colourful groups who trooped down St-Laurent past the synagogue, careless flesh overflowing their purple and green dresses, licking quickly at the sides of their ice cream cones, stopping and staring at those of us gathered for the service, wondering who had met his maker.
A soldier died. No, no, not a soldier, an actor from the neighbourhood. Wrong! A fighter from Afghanistan. Afghanistan? What was he doing there? Whose side was he on? The service is in a synagogue? Yup! ’Cos he was a Jew. No body, though, because he was blown up by an IED. Ha! It was not an IED, it was a missile from a drone. No! Really?
And on. Did he convert? Did he get radicalized?
Inside, the hubris of eulogies encrusted with a thick varnish of local hypocrisy overflowed; sentimental hyperbole poured out about the most trivial aspects of his life. His final call, his last actions, was scrupulously avoided. He had perished where no one on the Main would ever have gone. It added to his allure as an eccentric, an original, a local hero. And so, he was to be released from the Main like a Hollywood idol who had died prematurely.
I overheard the usual suspects whispering about “what really went wrong” and “what a shame” in spite of his “wonderful family.” To them, his conversion was inconceivable. I knew that his vitality and resolution went everywhere with him. I knew that he learned by himself and worked from there. Too much was trop for him. In Kandahar, he had done what he did on the Main: quietly learning what was what, going about it with courage, and asserting his beliefs quietly but firmly. Nobody talked about that. Maybe because nobody knew.
I was lucky to have made the journey to see him, to remember him smiling in the middle of a parched terracotta field. I considered myself a changed man, having avenged the murder of Ms. St-Onge. Having thawed out the cold case, with the help of others. There was humanity left. Some justice was still available.
The local city councillor insisted on saying a few words on how Nat was known in the neighbourhood as a do-gooder. “He raised funds for community activities! Organized street fairs!” Of course, this feckless jackass didn’t have the gumption to state that Nathaniel Meeropol came from an idealist legacy: his great-grandparents in Russia were people who were selfless, involved, excited by thoughts of righteous change; folks conspiratorial by tradition who planned revolts, organized change on the side of the rabble, and remained unabashed in their dissent with the status quo. I listened to his lack of historical consideration, his inability to expand his one-dimensional imagination. His horrendous misrepresentation continued. Why was I getting angry? Why had rage begun to race through my veins?
Mrs. Meeropol insisted I speak. “Tell it like you feel it, Chuck. Please.” She said it clearly, with trepidation perhaps, but not doubt.
I spoke. The first ten minutes were about how we had grown up together. The Rebbe had tears in his eyes when I described how Nat had stood alone at the corner of Bagg Street after Moshe Meeropol had passed on; his shirt untucked, a cigarette hanging lose from his lips, looking down at the street. And I recounted how when I’d put my arms around him he had said, “Whoa! Let’s go get a beer!” And everyone there smiled, because what I said fit, they knew him just like that. I was telling it like it was.
Then I told them about Afghanistan and exactly what he had said, in the few words he had used. There was a stunned silence. I insisted they were not my words—they were his words. And a few people nodded, knowing that would be true. I repeated exactly what he had told me, “We got no business here! Canada’s got it all wrong.”
I told them that Nat was a man who had, at the end of his life, lived beyond the Main, had travelled to where his ancestors had lived. I told them, “He went to Kandahar, where the Karakoram, Kunlun, and Hind Kush met the Pamir and the Himalayas, and the collision created the roof of the world. He had gone where the Tajiks met the Persians, the Pashtun, the Kadjar, the Kyrgyz, and the Uighur—where travellers, his ancestors, had navigated between the Caspian and the Black Sea and moved back and forth seeking new societies and freedoms.”
“No country,” he had said, “should ever be party to such missions of falsehoods as ‘Enduring Freedom.’” I looked at my grandmother when I said this. She was there with my parents. She knew where it came from. RK and Nat had merged and were going to leave together. It was a double funeral. The end of two stories. The plane crash and the drone strike.
I didn’t know where my voice was coming from, but I couldn’t hold it back. I held the podium and looked at the people in front. Everything was out of focus, as if a sheet of water separated me from them. There were over two hundred people from all corners of the Main. At the back stood the bartenders, the fly artists who had removed their hoodies this one time, walkers, film editors, agents, club owners, store keepers, those with no known address, the activists from the local anti-poverty coalition, his past girlfriends and, yes, Myra, all sitting there and looking straight at me. Even a few bouncers turned up and together held their hands to their chests in salute.
Later I sat like a child next to Mrs. Meeropol, my head staring up at the ceiling.
When we stepped out, it was as if the entire neighbourhood had turned up outside. The police had sent a few squad cars, just in case. Family members from Brooklyn had arrived late and were moping around, lost. Mrs. Meeropol did her best to greet the family.
Gerry left for Africa the week after sitting shiva, intent on resuming his work with the laptop distribution project in African schools. Myra and I took him to the airport, hugged each other, and fell silent. Finally, he said, “I’m happy you’ve found each other.” We wished him well.
We drove back from the airport without a word being spoken between us. She we
nt into the bedroom and lay down. I put my legs up on the coffee table in the living room and fell asleep.
I started to work four days a week at the Meeropol Monument Company. I took the orders, talked to the clients, engaged the workers, kept the books, ordered the marble, called up the truckers, walked around the tombstones, and inspected the writing. I felt the tombstones to ensure there were no sharp edges and ensured that all the writing, the star, the lion, or the scroll, was uniform and well centred.
Mrs. Meeropol came twice a week, and I often went back to her house and had dinner with her. She had lost weight and looked drawn. We didn’t discuss Nat anymore. She often sat on a long easy chair with her eyes closed, looking out at the sun as it streamed through a stained-glass section in her library. The colours fell on her face and, to me at least, Ava Gardner again lay there, Chagall-ed and segmented. I updated the computer in her house with key figures every week and she perused them. There were seven employees on the payroll, and I finally arranged for automatic deposits. She paid me more than the Enterprise or my old courier company had done. In the beginning the workers were not fond of me, but they soon realized that Mrs. Meeropol treated me like family. If they had problems she’d say, “Ask Chuck.”
I walked to St-Urbain and took the bus to the metro on my way home. I no longer felt unsafe in any way. Perhaps I didn’t really care.
Reporters approached to do a profile of me in relation to the scandal involving two Montrealers who committed suicide in the Bahamas. They wanted to start by saying that I was the son of the owners of a well-known fusion restaurant on Guy. I told them to take a long hike in a large forest in a very distant land. When I told her that, Ruth Meeropol had smiled and even giggled.
