Читать книгу Exile - Ann Ireland - Страница 5

RITA LEANED OVER TO POUR FROTHY MILK into my coffee cup and I stared down the front of her blouse. This was an unexpected gift, buoyant cleavage for the just released prisoner and I was grateful, painfully so. She licked milk off her finger and smiled.

“Enough?”

Her son was watching, his spoon dangling into a bowl of Mini Wheats, hair drooping over his smooth round face.

“Yes, thank you.”

“How long’s he staying?” the boy asked in a mopey voice.

“Just through the weekend,” his mother replied. “Then he’ll be moving to the campus.” She looked at me. “Syd called about lunch later today. He asked if you were nice. I said you were.”

“Do you think I am nice?” I asked the boy, who shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

His mother and I laughed, a nervous clatter. I was handed soft rolls with a tub of jam to go with the dish of eggs. It was easy to be astonished by the presence of such food in my hands as I sat in this modest kitchen in this city at the edge of the continent.

The walls were decorated with copper moulds of leaping fish and Andreas’s scribbled drawings. Welts showed where the plaster had been repaired and painted over. On the tiny counter were several appliances, their cords crammed into a single outlet. I hadn’t eaten in a kitchen since I was a child, only in formal dining rooms with sober mahogany furniture, or in restaurants and cafés. I had expected something entirely different, that I would be sitting at this moment with a group of men wearing suits in a high-ceilinged room, stacks of documents shuffling across a table, self-important throat clearings and speeches.

Andreas ate one Mini Wheat at a time, tilting it this way and that in his teaspoon, then prying at its lacy strands with his teeth. His small body was clothed in seersucker pajamas displaying pictures of rearing horses, and he stared at me with his mouth full of cereal. When I smiled, he flushed and looked away.

The professor lived on a wide, tree-lined street.

“This area’s very expensive now,” Rita assured me as we parked next to a mailbox. “Sydney bought years ago, before the Hong Kong money flooded in.”

To my eye, the houses were not imposing, mainly wide bungalows coated with siding, or the ubiquitous grey stucco. Yet there was a cared-for look to the lawns, which were rimmed with flowers and rows of clipped shrubs, and the cars belonging to these householders were of the understated but expensive breed. The air seemed cooler here, more perfumed.

“You’ll meet the lot of us today,” Rita said, reaching behind to grab the bottle of wine from the back seat. “The entire board of the Vancouver branch of the Alliance.”

It was Sunday and the rain had finally let up, revealing, as promised, the shimmering backdrop of mountains pressing against a crisp blue sky. Our mountains at home are more rounded and ancient, buffeted by wind and ocean spray and the searing heat.

“They’re dying to set eyes on you, Carlos, after such heroic efforts.”

I scraped my shoe on the front stair to remove a clump of grass. She’d spoken lightly yet the words went directly to my heart. I could imagine these heroic efforts: who had been bought off, what layers of officialdom had been bribed or threatened, and what other worthy men had been overlooked because, I, Carlos, had been selected. If only my clothes were finer, my jacket tailored, as they would be at home. I wanted to make a good impression, but something was happening; I felt a clumsiness in my body as I arranged myself to enter the house. A smile had popped on my face, but it was too soon.

“We’ll go through to the patio.” Rita pushed open Sydney’s front door without knocking. The foyer was dark, lined in varnished wood, and smelled of lemon polish. Directly inside was an umbrella stand holding a single canvas umbrella, alongside it a bench made of cane. The tile floor gleamed. A mirror, oval-shaped within a gold frame, held not a smudge. Above, a chandelier dangled dozens of crystal teardrops which twisted in the breeze of our arrival, speckling the walls in light.

“His place is always like this,” Rita whispered.

I followed her through the front room, which was a small cube, barely containing the heavy dining table and leather-seated chairs. I wondered if all rooms in Vancouver were so cramped. How odd that in a land with so much space the rooms were meanly proportioned. Perhaps in a northern climate it was easier to keep such spaces warm.

“William Morris paper.” Rita indicated the walls with their pattern of foliage.

She’d told me earlier how our host was an expert on the French Enlightenment philosophers and had named his thirteen-metre sailboat Rameau’s Nephew after the novel by Diderot. I spotted a photograph of this craft on the cluttered surface of his fireplace mantle.

We travelled through a miniature sitting room, rimmed by glass-fronted bookcases and framed posters of Impressionist painters from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and on toward the back of the house.

“Is he homosexual?” I said, gazing at the art nouveau lamps.

Rita touched my shoulder. “Shhhh. Of course he is, but old style, very discreet.”

The kitchen was large and bright, oddly spacious in comparison to the rooms we’d just passed through, with built-in pine cupboards and terra cotta tile. Every surface was immaculate, as if this were a showroom, not a workplace. There wasn’t a trace of food preparation and no encouraging smells. Where was his maid, his cook?

Rita slid open the glass door at the rear and poked her head out.

“Sydney?” She trilled his name. “Your guest of honour has arrived.”

The chatter of the small assembly abruptly stopped and seven people rose to their feet as one.

So I entered their world, the smile now taking over my face, and with it came the realization that this smile could never be broad enough, or warm enough, that my existence was an automatic disappointment, even to myself.

“Welcome, Carlos, welcome.” A handsome man of about fifty with a thatch of grey hair embraced me. “I am Sydney Baskin, president of this little cadre of radicals.”

I bobbed from the waist, grinning, a parody of the grateful refugee. So alert was I to any hint of dismay that when I spotted a tightening of my host’s smile I wanted to say, “Be patient, I am not yet sure where I am.” Wicker chairs were set in a semi-circle around a little pool made of flagstones and cement. The bottom was painted blue, and darting through the water were delicate fish, orange and black. I thought of the irises back at Rita’s house, and the flaming bird of paradise. Perhaps these were official CAFE colours.

Sydney introduced me to the half-dozen people in his garden, and each shook my hand with boisterous enthusiasm.

“Welcome, my friend!” Professor Daniel Rose, a stooped man with unruly hair clapped me hard on the shoulder. “We’ve been waiting for this moment!”

There was a strong whiff of gin and I recognized the giddy smile of an amateur boozer.

“Daniel,” a woman, surely his wife, reached for the back of his shirt and tugged.

There was an awkward pause until Syd said, “Please make yourself comfortable,” his voice a fraction too loud, his gesture just a little theatrical as he pointed to the empty chair.

Obediently, I sat down on the blue cushioned chair next to the fish pond, my spine erect, an awkward pose, so I swung one leg over the other in an effort to look casual, but it still didn’t feel right; there was no space with the pond in the way.

So I placed both feet flat on the flagstones, hands on my lap. I never sat like this, not since I was a child at Sunday school. The little group stared expectantly, and I thought, do they want me to sing a song now? Perhaps there will be a speech and a salute to my health. Something was anticipated, but what it was, I had no idea. I eyed the tall pitcher full of pink liquid, creaking with ice cubes.

Finally a woman with pale cheeks said, “Thank God it stopped raining. You must have gotten a terrible first impression of our city, Carlos.”

“Yes,” I said, then added quickly, “no.” I felt myself redden. Sydney poured drinks from the pitcher into tall opaque glasses. A slice of lime plopped into my glass followed by a sweet fruity smell. Sangria? After a slug I felt instantly better.

“The patio is very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Syd replied.

I felt proud of myself, this simple exchange perfectly rendered.

“You are staying at Rita’s?” a woman called Sandy Peeple said. She wore a sleeveless tunic over tights, like a medieval courtier.

“Just for the weekend,” Rita answered. “Then he’s into the university.”

“Yes,” I pitched in gamely. “The Chair of Exiled Writer. At least I will have a place to sit.”

Their laughter was a little forced.

“Where will he live?” Sandy continued.

“I organized a spot at the married students’ housing, right on campus,” said Sharon, the full-breasted woman who was the wife of the slightly bombed Daniel Rose. “He’ll be sharing with Rashid.”

“Good old Rashid.” Syd glanced at me. “A lovely guy. Pakistani. He wrote incendiary essays that were taken to be anti-Muslim. Had to get the hell out.”

“Married students?” I reached for a dish of peanuts on the low glass table. “But I am not married.”

Everyone laughed again. They thought I was making another joke. My coordination was off and the peanuts tipped into the fish pond. I lunged for the dish, but it was too late.

“Oh my God,” Sydney cried. “If the fish eat nuts, they’ll die!” He leaped off his chair to begin the rescue.

The next five minutes we spent trolling the floor of the pond, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, plucking nuts one by one. The water was cold, yet toasted lightly on top by the sun. When a fish brushes your skin it is like an infant’s sigh.

“Look out for Blackie,” Syd warned. “He bites.”

Rodolfo’s striped shirt, the one he insisted I take with me, was spattered with water and a slowly seeping nervous sweat.

Sharon Rose touched my elbow and whispered, “Syd’s very high strung. Don’t worry.”

I loved the way she spoke, in a slow unhurried voice, her lips cracked under scarlet lipstick. She popped one of the rescued nuts in her mouth and I knew she was doing this for me, so that I would understand that nothing was wasted.

Syd took one of his oversized linen napkins and mopped himself up, carefully dabbing his forearms and each finger in turn. When he saw me watching, he gave a quick fretful smile.

We settled back into the wicker chairs and I heard Sharon mutter, “Crisis over, thank God.”

Rita was unpeeling plastic wrap from three bowls full of cold noodles and salad, and mixing their contents with a pair of tongs. There was a musty smell, some Indian spicing, and no bread to be seen. And no protein for energy and endurance. Even in my basement cell Marta would bring skewers of grilled meat along with the crusty bread my people live on.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly. “There is no meat?”

“Poor Carlos,” Rita laughed. “Syd’s a strict vegetarian.”

“Vegetarian, yes.” I nodded. I had an aunt who practised this regimen, not for health reasons but because she was convinced that dead beasts continue to claim their souls.

China plates with scalloped rims were passed around, followed by the bowls of food. I helped myself, using the pair of wooden tongs while Rita held each bowl in turn. I felt my hosts’ polite stares, and the quick, forgiving smiles when a noodle slopped to the ground. The plate was too little, almost a saucer, and I’d misjudged what it could hold.

“This is quite an occasion,” Sydney said when we’d finished serving ourselves. “Shall we toast our guest of honour?” He lifted his glass and waited while the rest of the party mimicked the gesture.

“It’s been a long and sometimes arduous journey,” Daniel Rose proclaimed. “For all of us.” He slipped an arm around his wife’s back and I watched her smile stiffen.

“Particularly for Carlos,” she said.

I lifted my own glass. “And I would like to salute all of you, to thank you sincerely, and thank you Canada.”

“To your new life,” Sandy said, her eyes moist with feeling.

“To my new life.”

We all drank, paused, then drank again, then simultaneously placed our glasses on the table, and I wondered if this was a ritual here in Canada, that all must follow the gestures of the honoured guest.

Rita touched my forearm. “Now would be a good time…”

I remembered, yes, the poem.

“Carlos would like to read to you from one of his recent works.”

“Wonderful!” Frank Peeple slapped his knee in a way you knew was foreign to him. His wife gave him a puzzled look.

Rodolfo’s jacket was folded over the back of my chair and I searched through its pockets until I found the crunched up piece of paper and my eyeglasses.

The guests were quiet during this bit of activity, and stared into their drinks.

I announced that first I would read the poem in Spanish, then Rita would read it in translation: we had worked this out a few hours earlier.

I smoothed the paper on my knee, cleared my throat, and as I read they leaned forward on their chairs, intent. Plates sat on their laps, untouched, attracting wasps and flies which were discreetly waved off. As I read, sun sifted between the branches of the arbutus tree and toasted the goldfish. A couple of guests knew enough Spanish to let out little grunts of appreciation at appropriate moments. There was a regular thump in the background — the kid next door popping baskets, slamming the backboard. Such a normal, everyday sound. An orange cat prowled the length of the fence, back arched, claws reaching out and tugging the air.

I knew my poem by heart and never looked at the paper. When my gaze swept past Sharon Rose I saw that her eyes were wet and a streak of mascara had run down her cheek.

When I was finished, I bowed my head and Rita began, in English:

“The Prisoner’s Song.”

It was all about bread, the loaf that I had seen fall from the wagon outside my basement prison. It was the most ordinary kind of bread, like a French baguette, only chunkier, the kind that in my country appears at every meal, and with every cup of coffee. The bread of everyday life.

I gulped my drink as she read. I was shaking. Not just my hands but my chest and gut. I felt faintly nauseous from all the vegetables and too much sweet sangria. It had been so long since I had been with a group of people that I had to relearn the rhythm of speaking and listening. Not only in my own language, but now in English, which felt like a blanket being constantly tugged away. Rita read on and I couldn’t understand a word of it, my own poem.

Sydney, the president of CAFE, refilled my glass. The fish rolled over in the pond, briefly displaying their bellies to the sun. They reminded me of sunbathers on the coast, unashamed of their bodies, seeking heat and light.

Rita’s voice rose and fell, and I realized that she had finished. There was a long communal sigh as we sat back in our chairs, allowed to be comfortable again.

“Your poem is very strong, very moving,” Sandy Peeple said.

“Thank you.” Sweat was gluing my hair to my forehead. But this woman didn’t flinch. When she uncrossed her long legs I caught a flash of blue panties.

“May I ask you some questions?” she said.

“Of course.”

I was puffing. Was it possible they couldn’t see?

“Please tell me to back off if you don’t feel like talking about it.”

I waited.

Her face tightened as she sought the correct words. “Can you tell us more about what you’ve been through in recent months?”

“What do you desire to know?”

“How were you treated during your imprisonment?” Her face tensed another notch.

“Excuse me, ‘treated’?”

“I’ve read, of course, accounts of… torture.” She whispered the word, like some people whisper the word “naked” or “cancer.” Her gaze fell to my hand and I realized, to my embarrassment, that she was staring at my finger. Or rather, where the tip of my finger had been. My mother, one Sunday morning, had slammed the door of a taxi and my toddler fingertip had been neatly sliced off.

“Please excuse me, Carlos. I quite understand if you don’t want to talk about this.”

I dug my hand in my pocket, then, realizing that this would make it even more certain to her, some unspeakable altercation forming in her fevered brain, I pulled out my hand and let it sit on my knee. It was nearly dusk and the lilacs had begun to seep their sweet scent into the air. I was used to the sounds of chaos, of sirens and honking; even in my basement, with a window inches from the sidewalk, the racket of city life filled my ears.

“It is something I cannot speak of now.”

Everybody nodded. I smelled a whiff of embarrassment. They were relieved, but perhaps also disappointed. For hadn’t they worked hard to bring me here? Rita had told me all about the benefit, the book sale, the barbeque, a mass poetry reading, and a special plea to members clear across the country. I was grateful for the rhythmic slap of the basketball next door.

“You can smoke if you like,” Sydney said, passing an immaculate ashtray.

I felt them watch as my jittery fingers worked to light a cigarette.

Finally Sandy Peeple cleared her throat and said, “I write a little poetry, too.”

“Everybody in the department of English writes poetry,” Syd said. “Carlos, you have little competition. Other than you, the only genuine artist here is Rita. She scrapes by with her contracts at the Grad Centre and performs her strange theatricals for tiny but avid audiences.”

“Shut up, Sydney,” Rita said.

I ignored this exchange and looked only at Sandy, whose intense brown eyes peered from behind her glasses.

“I think you are a good poet,” I said.

She didn’t blush. “Why?”

“I can tell that you have real feeling inside you, by the way you speak.”

There was another embarrassed silence. I was being too earnest, too personal. Yet at the same time I could see that I had given Sandy pleasure.

Sydney made a snorting noise then exclaimed, “All this must seem incredibly decadent to you.” His arms spread, encompassing the patio with its wicker furniture, the table laden with half-eaten food, and the pristine bottle of brandy which I was waiting for him to open. “Our lives are soft,” he went on. “They have the texture of futons.”

“Do not feel guilty for your lives,” I said. “Why should you give up anything? You are just normal people leading normal lives in a normal country. It is how it should be.”

“But how many thousands are there like you?” Lucy said. She had been sitting back, watchful. She was younger than the other professors and wore a pair of overalls, like a teenager. Her hair was pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail. “Not just in your country, but all over the world. Prisoners of conscience.”

“What can you do for all these people?” I was getting impatient. This was beginning to sound like the discussions I had at home with my pals in the café. We got the most sentimental and vehement when we were drunk. And the next morning we went back to the newspaper and wrote our tepid columns.

Sydney cut himself a slice of soft cheese and wrapped it around a grape.

“Who among us could endure a fraction of what Carlos has been through?”

There was a respectful silence as each pondered the question. Sharon had folded her arms over her chest and was staring at me with an odd expression. Her eyes were no longer moist.

“Excuse me.” I rose to my feet. “I must go to the toilet.”

Again my knees banged against the table and again the peanuts spun off, this time safely to the ground. My head was throbbing: they all had stories constructed for me, much better tales than mine. How would I avoid disappointing them?

Sydney gave me instructions, which I couldn’t understand, and so I found myself lurching through his house, opening and shutting doors to closets, a laundry room, a study. Somewhere rock music was playing and its pulse vibrated through the walls.

Finally, seconds away from pissing in a corner, I raced down the hall and flipped open the last door. A young man, shirtless, lay across a narrow bed. There was the sweet smell of hashish. Music was pounding from a boom box at his feet. The room was dark, except for one flickering candle. The boy lifted his head off the pillow and said in a sleepy voice, “What d’you want?”

“The toilet.”

“Other end of the hall.” He squinted. “You the poet?”

“I am.”

“Close the door on your way out.”

Above Sydney’s toilet was a framed print showing a cherub pissing into a pool of tiny red fish.