Читать книгу Exile - Ann Ireland - Страница 6

RITA SAT IN HER STENOGRAPHER’S CHAIR, SPINE erect. I watched as, without thinking, she tilted the gooseneck lamp so it bathed one side of her face in light, while she nodded, talking to some invisible person on the phone.

“That’s possible,” she said. Then, “I might.” Her body coiled, as if she were mapping out the next gesture. I saw the dancer in her now. She replaced the receiver in its cradle and stared at the wall while I pretended not to notice. I was playing with Andreas on the floor. We were constructing a tower from his alphabet blocks, an elaborate enterprise with a wide base and a gradually diminishing point, like the Chrysler Building in New York City, famous for its art deco elegance. The boy was impatient at first, and always glancing towards his mother as if to ask, may he do this.

“That was your father,” she said after a moment, and Andreas watched her face, waiting to hear what this meant. We were so close I could hear his breathing speed up, feel his damp body shiver with excitement.

She lifted one slim leg and swung it over the other. In another day I would have to enter my students’ quarters, but today I was still inside a real family.

“He’ll pick you up tonight.”

“Will I spend the night at Jane’s?” the boy said.

She nodded. “You will spend the night at Jane’s.”

When he returned to our block-building construction, I saw that his face was flushed and suddenly he wasn’t tentative at all. He placed three blocks one after another to finish the peak of the tower and gave a small smile of satisfaction. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his fingers, so small and beautifully formed, almost elegant, tiny chipped fingernails with half-moons.

“Thank you for playing with him,” Rita said later that night. The boy had just left and she gazed out the window, watching him pull away in a shiny new car with his father and the woman called Jane. “It’s been a rough year for us.” Her face hollowed under the sharp cheekbones, as if something had just drained out of her.

“Anything you need before bed?” she said. “Cup of tea? Sandwich?”

No thank you, there was nothing. I could hear the distraction in her voice. Tomorrow afternoon I would be driven to the residence and she would no longer have to take care of me. I thought of her lying in bed tonight, knowing that I was in her son’s bed, caught between his sheets, his reptile mobile catching each breeze from the open window. Perhaps we were both less alone than we thought.

In the morning Rita took me for a tour of the neighbourhood. She talked quickly as we roamed the winding streets of Chinatown, past the florist with its bins of fresh cut flowers, and a restaurant where heroin addicts nodded over platters of guy ding. An ancient cook stood out front in his stained apron, his forehead shiny with sweat. He flipped through a tabloid newspaper and sipped something out of a metal cup. I told Rita that there was a place like this near the old port in Santa Clara. She didn’t respond to this observation. I wanted to tell her how we journalists would often stay up all night, that we prowled in a noisy throng through the old town, a dangerous area after dark, and how our presence would instantly fill a tiny restaurant such as this and transform it into the most sophisticated café in the city.

Instead Rita clipped along the uneven sidewalk swinging her arms. “I never get time to do my own work,” she said. “There’s always something gets in the way.”

Like a refugee poet who lands on your doorstep with nothing but his ugly shoes and a single volume of verse.

“I wonder if I’ve lost my chance, if I’m too old.” She hesitated for a moment in front of a street vendor displaying cheap jewelry.

The rain had saturated everything into darkness, the asphalt, the sidewalks, even the buildings had been drenched, leaving a pungent scent of wet cement and wood. A girl stood at the corner in her tight skirt, drawing on a cigarette while a cluster of kids in sports uniforms raced by.

“I do not think you are old,” I told her. “An artist can be any age.”

“Not a dancer,” she said. “Our knees go.”

She moved so smoothly, with such grace, like an animal who is natural in its home, unlike I, who seemed to step through this dizzy space, never sure if each foot would land correctly. I wanted to touch everything I saw, to see if it was awake or dead. Even the neon sign which jumped in its tube seemed dreamlike. It is good to travel, I told myself. Everything is new.

“I like watching you,” she said with a smile. “You see so much.”

“And now you see me.”

We laughed and for a moment her face relaxed.

A stationer’s shop was wedged between a restaurant and a post office. In its window were those mottled notebooks with firm covers, a timeless style, and an arrangement of pens and pencils.

“I would like to go in here,” I said.

“Why not?” she said with a gentle smile. “You’re a free man.”

I selected two notebooks with ruled paper and three pens with medium-thick points and a plastic envelope to contain them.

“Excuse me,” I told Rita, “but I have no money.”

“No hay problemo.” She rummaged in her purse and gave me my first Canadian money, a green twenty-dollar bill decorated on one side by a drawing of a handsome duck and its mate, and on the other by a middle-aged woman wearing pearls.

“The Queen,” Rita said, responding to my puzzled look.

“The Queen of Canada.” I smoothed the bill before passing it to the clerk. “She looks like one of my mother’s sisters.” When we left the shop I tucked the package under my arm and said, “Now I’m a writer again.”

“Next up is a pair of decent shoes.” She nodded at my sneakers fitted with Velcro tabs, the kind worn by old men who are unable to reach down and tie their laces.

“And wine,” I said, grinning. “To celebrate. And Canadian cigarettes.”

She frowned. “I don’t know if I have enough money.”

“But your CAFE friends, they will pay.” I thought of Professor Syd Baskin in his well-manicured house and soft leather slip-on shoes. I had landed in the care of an important organization, one that was able to influence the government of foreign countries and circumvent the wishes of such powerful men as the General. Just thinking this gave my step a new buoyancy.