Читать книгу Foregone - Russell Banks - Страница 8

Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who’s pushing it, I forget why I agreed to this. Tell me why I agreed to this.

It’s the first time he’s asked her. It’s not a question, it’s a light, self-mocking, self-pitying joke, and he says it in French, but she doesn’t seem to get it. She’s Haitian, in her mid-fifties, a little humourless, brusque and professional—exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse. Now he’s not so sure. Her name is Renée Jacques. She speaks English with reluctance and a French he understands with difficulty, although he’s supposedly fluent, at least in Quebecois.

She reaches over him and opens the bedroom door and eases the wheelchair over the threshold into the hallway. They pass the closed door to the adjacent bedroom that Emma has used for her office and for sleeping since Fife started staying awake all night with the sweats and chills. He wonders if she’s in there now. Hiding from Malcolm and his film crew. Hiding from her husband’s sickness. His dying.

If he could, he’d hide, too. He asks Renée again to tell him why he agreed to this.

He knows she thinks he’s only whining and doesn’t really want her to answer. She says, Monsieur Fife agreed to make the interview because he’s famous for something to do with cinema, and famous people are required to make interviews. She says, They have already been here an hour setting up their lights and moving furniture and covering all the living room windows with black cloth. I hope they plan to put everything back the way it was before they depart from here, she adds.

Fife asks if she’s sure Madame Fife—her name is Emma Flynn, but he calls her Madame Fife—is still at home. She didn’t go out without telling me, did she? He lowers his voice as if talking to himself and says in English, I fucking need her here. She’s the only reason I agreed to this goddamn thing. If she isn’t there while I do it, I’m going to shut it down before we start. You know what I mean? he asks the nurse.

She doesn’t answer. Just keeps pushing the wheelchair slowly down the long, dark, narrow hallway.

He tells her that what he plans to say today he doesn’t want to say twice and probably won’t have the chance to say again anyhow.

Renée Jacques is nearly six feet tall and square-shouldered, very dark, with high, prominent cheekbones and eyes set wide in her face. She reminds him of someone he knew many years ago, but can’t remember who. Fife likes the sheen cast by her smooth brown skin. She is a home-care day nurse and doesn’t have to wear a uniform on the job unless the client requests it. Emma, when she hired Renée, had specified no uniform, please, my husband does not want a uniformed nurse, but Renée showed up in crisp whites anyhow. It spooked Fife at first, but after ten days he has gotten used to it. Also, his condition is worse now than when she first arrived. He’s weaker and more addled—only intermittently, but with increasing frequency—and is less able to pretend that he is only temporarily disabled, out of whack, recovering from a curable illness. The nurse’s uniform doesn’t bother him as much now. They’re ready to add a night nurse, and this time Emma has not specified, please, no uniform.

Renée pushes the wheelchair across the kitchen, and as they pass through the breakfast room, Fife flashes a glance out the tall, narrow twenty-paned window and down at the black domed tops of umbrellas fighting the wind on Sherbrooke. Large flakes of soft snow are mixed into the rain, and a slick grey slush covers the sidewalks. Traffic sloshes soundlessly past. Gusts of wind beat in silence against the thick walls of the fortresslike grey cut-stone building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the entire southeast half of the third floor. The archdiocese of Montreal used the building to house the nuns of the Little Franciscan Sisters of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted it into a dozen high-ceilinged six- and seven-room luxury apartments.

Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and said she was glad to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked Renée to tell Fife that she will come out to see him when the film people start the interview.

Yeah, well, I can’t do this if she’s not here. You know what I mean? he asks again.

Renée says, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and the man doing the interview and the people who will someday watch the movie on television, can’t he pretend that he’s talking to his wife, the same as if she was there in reality?

He says, You talk too much.

You asked if I knew what you mean about wanting her to hear you in the interview.

Yes, I did. But still, you talk too much.

She slides open the heavy pocket door to the living room and shoves the wheelchair over the high threshold into the darkened room. The Fifes’ apartment was originally occupied by the monseigneur who supervised the seminary. It’s a wood-panelled three-bedroom flat with a formal dining room, parlour, reception hall, office, and library that Fife uses as an editing room. He bought the apartment in the late 1980s when the bottom fell out of Westmount real estate. Leonard Fife and Emma Flynn are childless, bilingual, socially attractive, and artistic semi-celebrities, and over the years they have adapted the rooms to suit the overlapping needs of their professional and personal lives.

Nothing in the room is the way he remembers it. Instead of entering a large high-ceilinged living room with four tall curtained windows, a room comfortably furnished with mid-twentieth-century sofas and chairs and lamps and tables, Fife has entered a black box of unknown dimensions. He can feel the presence of several other people in the box, perhaps as many as four. Their silence is sudden, like held breath, as if caused by his entry, as if they don’t want him to know they have been talking about him. About his illness.

They exhale, and he hears them breathing. His sense of smell and taste are nearly deadened, and his sight has turned cloudy, but his hearing is still reliable.

Over here, Leo! It’s Malcolm, speaking in English. He says, Vincent, give us some light, will you?

Vincent is the cameraman—though he prefers to be called director of photography. DP. He asks Malcolm if he wants the houselights on. So Leo can get his bearings, he adds. Good morning, Leo. Thanks for letting us do this, man. Really appreciate it. Among friends Leonard Fife is known as Leo. Vincent is a tall, pear-shaped man with narrow shoulders and head and the delicate small hands of a jeweller. He’s wearing his pink-rimmed designer eyeglasses today. He has a blond moustache, wispy and ill-trimmed, pouting red lips, and watery pale-blue eyes.

Malcolm, too, says good morning and thanks Fife. Let’s hold off on the lights for now, Vincent. It took us a fucking hour to get it totally dark, he says, and all the lamps and light fixtures are unplugged and moved.

Vincent hits a handheld switch, and a small, sharply cut circle of light appears on the bare wooden floor. It’s where Fife will be interrogated. He remembers that section of floor being covered by the kilim carpet he and Emma brought back from Iran in ’88. Fife would prefer to keep the room in total darkness, forget the pin-spot, just let him be a disembodied voice speaking from empty dark to embodied dark. But he knows what kind of film Malcolm has planned.

Fife hopes he won’t have to hear Malcolm and his crew tell him again how great he looks. He got more than enough lame, lying compliments from them last month when they came up from Toronto to visit him at the Segal Cancer Centre and someone had the bright idea to shoot this interview.

Actually, he thinks it was his idea, not Malcolm’s or anyone else’s. And it wasn’t because he thought he looked good enough to be on-camera: he knows what he looks like. It was because he knew he was dying.

A woman’s voice trills out of the darkness, thanking him. Fife recognizes the voice as Diana’s, Malcolm’s producer and longtime home companion. They are all grateful to him, she says. Her thin, high-pitched voice sounds to Fife like a repressed shriek. Fife has always hated her voice. Anytime you want to take a break, she says, or rest or whatever, just do it. Don’t push yourself.

Malcolm and his crew are based in Toronto, and everyone is speaking English now. To Renée, Diana says, Bring the wheelchair over here into the spotlight, will you, dear? We’re not going to film the chair, just Leo’s face, neck, and shoulders, sometimes straight on, sometimes in profile or from behind. Everything else will be blacked out. She says it with the authority of a grade-school teacher.

Renée probably couldn’t care less how they intend to shoot Fife, but she understands Diana’s English well enough to place his wheelchair directly under the pin-spot.

It’s the style you invented, man, says Malcolm. Backlight the off-camera side of the subject’s face, nothing else. He steps up to the wheelchair and lays a hand on Fife’s shoulder. Seemed only appropriate, he says. Right? Hope you don’t object.

No, I don’t object.

Consider it a protégé’s homage, man.

A protégé’s homage. Fair enough, I guess. What are you using for a camera?

Vincent answers. The Sony FS7.

Who else is here? In the room, I mean.

Malcolm says, Sloan’s over there in the corner. She’ll mic you and run the sound with that and a boom, if we need it. The Sony’s sound needs help. You met her a couple times in Toronto.

I remember, Fife says, cutting him off. He believes that Malcolm is having an affair with the girl. She’s Nova Scotian, a pretty redheaded kid with freckles and can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Malcolm is close to fifty now. How is that possible? Fife has ex-students, protégés, who are old enough to have inappropriate affairs with interns and famous enough to be able to hook and land the financing and distribution for a filmed final interview with Leonard Fife, himself a documentarian, but too old and sick now for inappropriate affairs and famous only in certain unfashionably leftist quarters, a filmmaker who couldn’t raise the money on his own for a project like this.

Malcolm MacLeod films the history of Canada, soft-focused liberal takes on early settlement, les coureurs de bois, the native peoples, Loyalist immigrants from the War of American Independence, American slaves who followed the North Star on the Underground Railroad, hockey, Cajun music. He’s the Ken Burns of the North, and now he’s documenting his old professor’s final confession. It will be his mentor’s last interview, and Malcolm has written out twenty-five questions designed to seduce Fife into making the kind of provocative and sometimes profound remarks and observations that he is famous for, at least among those who know him personally or studied with him at Concordia back in the 1970s and ’80s or read interviews with him in the Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques and Cinema Canada in the ’80s, when it was run by his friends Connie and Jean-Pierre Tadros.

Fife tells Renée to park him wherever they want him and then please bring Madame Fife in here, he has something important that he must tell her.

Renée moves his chair into the circle of light. She sets the brake and disappears into the darkness beyond.

Fife wants to know where the camera is located.

Don’t worry about it, man. All you got to do is sit there and do what you do best.

Which is?

Talk.

Talk? That’s what I do best?

You know what I mean. What you do better than anyone else. What you do best, of course, is make your films. You sure you’re feeling up to this, Leo? I don’t want to push you, bro. We don’t have to do the entire shoot today, if you’re not up to it. Maybe just a couple hours or so, or until we use up the first card. We can come back tomorrow to continue.

Diana chimes in and confirms. We can stay in Montreal all week, if it suits you, Leo. We can download and edit in the hotel as we go. There’s no need to shoot it all in one day and go back to Toronto for the editing.

Fife says, No, I want to keep you right here. Until I finish telling everything.

What do you mean, everything? Diana asks. Malcolm and I have worked up some great questions for you.

I’m sure you have.

The young woman, Sloan, has stepped from the darkness into his circle of light and is miking him. She clips the tiny mic onto the collar band of the long-sleeved black mock turtleneck shirt that has been part of Fife’s uniform for decades. He likes being touched by her. He likes the mingled odour of cigarettes and sweat and minty shampoo. He can’t catch the scent of much, but he can smell her. Young women, their scent is different and better than that of middle-aged and older women. It’s as if desire and longing for desire have distinct and different odours. When Emma leans down in the morning to kiss his cheek before leaving for their production company office downtown, he inhales the smell of English breakfast tea and unscented soap. The odour of a longing for desire. This young woman, Sloan, she smells of desire itself.

It’s not fair to notice that, he thinks.

But it is true. And Emma’s morning smell is not unpleasant. Just empty of desire and filled with a wish for it to return. He wonders what he smells like now, especially to a young woman. To Sloan. Can she pick up the odour of his medications, the antiandrogens he was on for months and the Taxotere and prednisone he started this past week? Can she smell the biphosphonates he’s taking to keep his bones from breaking under the weight of his body, the morphine patches, the urine dripping from his bladder into the catheter and tube emptying into the bag hooked onto his chair? The bits of dried feces clinging to his ass? To Sloan he must smell like a hospital ward for chemically castrated old men dying of cancer.

Tell me again why I came home from the hospital, he says to no one in particular.

Malcolm says, Well, I imagine you’re a hell of a lot happier here. With Emma being close by, I mean. And everything that’s familiar.

Fife says, There’s no more being happy or happier, Malcolm. He’d like to add—but doesn’t—that for him now there’s only more pain and less pain, more and less nausea and diarrhea, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion. Forget happy and happier, he says.

C’mon, Leo. Don’t talk like that, Malcolm says.

I believe I can talk any damned way I want now.

Yes, that’s true, you can. That’s why we’re here today. Right?

Right.

Sloan puts her headphones on, and the darkness swallows her.

Where the hell is my wife? Fife asks the darkness. He can still smell Sloan.

Right behind you, Emma says in her low smoker’s voice. Renée told me you wouldn’t do this unless I’m present. True?

Mostly true. Maybe I’d do it, but differently. Very differently. If you weren’t here, I mean.

Why? This is for posterity. I’m not posterity, she says and laughs. I’m your wife.

It’s easier for me to know what to say and what not to say when I know who I’m talking to.

You’re talking to Malcolm, she says. You’re making a movie.

No! No, I’m not. Malcolm and Vincent and Diana and Sloan, they’re making a movie. They’re here to film and record me, so they can cut and splice my image and words together and make from those digitalized images and words a one- or two-hour movie that they sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Company so it can be resold to Canadian television viewers after I’m gone and before I’m forgotten. Malcolm and Diana won’t be listening to me and watching me. They’re too busy making a movie about me. I’m just the subject. Different thing. But if I know who I’m talking to, I can be more than a subject. That’s why I need you here.

Emma asks Diana for some light so she can find someplace to sit.

Sloan, Diana says, give us some light. But Sloan is listening to Fife through her headphones.

Vincent reaches for a wall switch and flips on the ceiling light, and Fife sees that they have pushed all the furniture against the far wall opposite the blacked-out windows, making the living room seem as large and empty as a hotel ballroom. With all the furniture clustered in front of the fireplace and built-in bookshelves, the room feels tilted onto its side, as if they’re passengers on a cruise ship, and the ship has struck a reef and is listing and is about to go down. Fife suddenly feels nauseous. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit. The ship is sinking. All hands on deck. Women and children and sick old men first.

Emma crosses to the pile of furniture, and the ship lists a few inches farther in that direction. She sits on the sofa by the wall and crosses her arms and legs.

Be careful, Fife says to her.

What? Careful of what?

Nothing. Diana, please shut off the room lights. It’s disorienting. The spot’s okay, but I don’t want to see the room. Or be seen in it.

Oh, c’mon, Leo, you look great, Diana says. Really, you do.

Definitely, Malcolm says. You look great. Too bad we’re only going to shoot your beautiful, brooding bald head.

The light goes out, and Fife is once again illuminated solely and from above by the Speedlite. The ship is levelled, and his nausea passes.

You know the drill, Malcolm says. Ready?

Yes. Ready as I’ll ever be. Or ever was.

Ready, everyone? Vincent? Sloan?

Yes.

Yes.

Diana?

Yes.

Malcolm says Fife’s name and the date, April 1, 2018, and location, Montreal, Quebec, and claps his hands once in front of Vincent’s FS7. The camera is attached to a tripod on a track that orbits the circle of light on the bare floor and stares at the featureless, flat-black side of Fife’s face, like the dark side of the moon. The unseen side is lit by the overhead spot. His silhouette has a molten golden edge, a penumbra surrounded by impenetrable black space. Malcolm is right, Fife still has a beautiful, brooding bald head. At least in profile. The illness and chemo have dissolved a quarter of his body, liquefying his flesh, pushing forward the long arc of his nose and his cheekbones and prominent chin and the plates of his skull. He looks like a polished Roman coin.

For a few seconds everyone is silent, waiting for Malcolm’s first question. But suddenly Fife says that he’s going to answer a question that no one knows to ask today. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked privately and in public and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would be either stupid or insulting. And to ask it on this particular occasion would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.

The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?

For nearly fifty years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the US military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. For half a century Leonard Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed on the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum. He’s claimed it ever since that day.

The truth, however, as always, is more complicated and ambiguous. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm MacLeod’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by MacLeod and produced by his wife Diana in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is in some ways a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who admired Leonard Fife for being one of those sixty thousand Americans who fled north in the late 1960s to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question their past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are thought to have been forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.