UNKNOWN CANADA
Twenty-Five Years in the Backwoods — Wolves, Bureaucrats, and Other Wildlife
A man moves to the forest to be left alone. The forest turns out to be fully staffed.
Twenty-five years ago Boris Kriger drove north out of Toronto on a nice day, kept going until he got tired, and bought a house on a hill with six and a half acres of impassable bush. He had been in Toronto three days. He was looking for silence.
What he found was a bear knocking at the back door, wolves killing a deer in the driveway, a doctor’s receptionist with the hide of a mammoth, a school curriculum with clapping in it, a satellite technician who explained that the trees were in the way and had been since 1890, and a government inspector who could not close his file until he had looked inside a poodle.
Unknown Canada is a book of comic essays about the country nobody puts in the brochure: the small towns north of the cottages, where the hotel rules once advised guests that revolver shots were not a cause for alarm, and where a century later everybody is much politer and almost nothing has changed.
It is very funny. Occasionally, without warning, it isn’t.
Contents
Author’s Note and Disclaimer 5
Prologue: Two Hundred Kilometres North of Everything. 7
Part One — The Dream and Its Immediate Collapse. 11
Why Nobody Distils Maple Syrup. 11
Confession of a Provincial Terrorist 25
The Theory and Practice of Clapping. 62
Night Fishing, Outcome Unknown. 95
Part Three — Escape Attempts. 113
In the Provinces, Even Rain Is Entertainment 156
How I Became a Canadian Dissident 205
The Oedipus Complex of an Immigrant 213
Author’s Note and Disclaimer
This is a work of creative non-fiction, and the emphasis belongs on both words.
It is a book of comic essays about living in a small place. It is not journalism, not a memoir of record, and not a statement of fact about any identifiable person or institution.
Every individual described in these pages is a composite, assembled from several people, from hearsay, from the author’s own worse qualities, and from invention. Names, occupations, physical descriptions, family arrangements, locations and dates have been changed, merged, relocated and made up. Conversations are reconstructions written long after the event; they represent the sense the author took away, not a transcript, and no reader should treat any line of dialogue as the words of a real person. Events have been compressed, reordered, combined and exaggerated for comic effect, which is the whole purpose of the exercise.
Any resemblance between a character in this book and an actual person, living or dead, is unintended and coincidental. Nothing here is offered as an allegation of wrongdoing by anyone. Where officials, tradesmen, medical staff, teachers, clergy or government departments appear, they are comic types of the kind found in every country on earth, and are not portraits of, and make no assertions about, any real office holder, employee, business or public body.
All opinions, complaints, diagnoses of national character, theories of history, propositions concerning maple syrup and conclusions about the human race are the author’s personal opinions, expressed as satire and hyperbole. They are not statements of fact and should not be relied upon by anybody for any purpose whatsoever, least of all a serious one.
Historical and factual material quoted from published sources is acknowledged at the end of the book. Any errors in it are the author’s.
The author and the publisher accept no liability for any loss, injury, offence, indigestion or disappointment arising from the reading of this book, or from any attempt to act upon it.
The passages set in italics were written later, some of them much later. They are subject to everything above.
* * *
Revolver shots are not a cause for alarm.
— from the rules of the Albion Hotel, Huntsville, Ontario, in the eighteen-seventies
Prologue: Two Hundred Kilometres North of Everything
There is a document on the wall of my house, in a frame, behind glass.
It was issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Province of Ontario, and it certifies that I did not kill a deer.
Nobody had accused me of killing a deer. There had been no complaint, no charge, no injured party in a position to make a statement. The certificate exists because an inspector driving past my driveway on a February afternoon saw two bearded men loading something into a truck, and decided, on his own initiative, to establish who had done what to whom, and could not close the file until he had looked inside my poodle.
I have moved that piece of paper four times. I have taken it down to paint a wall and put it back up again. Guests ask about it. I tell them it is complicated and change the subject, and afterwards I feel the particular shame of a man who has just refused to tell a story he has been telling for twenty-five years.
This book is that story, and about twenty-five others.
* * *
I came here because of a dream. I want to be honest about that at the outset, because it explains everything that follows and it does not reflect well on me.
Since childhood I had carried an image: still water, green hills of a comfortable size, a safe forest, and no neighbours. No people at all, in fact, or as few as could reasonably be arranged. I had lived in cities and I had had enough of them. I had lived in a country where going to work on a Saturday morning meant being stoned by two different sets of people for two incompatible reasons, and I had had enough of that as well.
So one clear day my family and I drove north out of Toronto, and because the day stayed clear we kept going, and when we got tired we stopped, and where we stopped we stayed. The whole decision took about six hours and involved no research of any kind. We had been in Toronto three days.
The hills were where the dream had said they would be. The lake was there. The forest was there, and it was on our own land, six and a half acres of it, most of it impassable.
The population was not what I had ordered.
* * *
What I had failed to understand, and what took me some years to accept, is that the wilderness is not empty. It is administered.
There are bears in it, and wolves, and foxes, and a great many mosquitoes, all of them protected by a ministry that takes a considerably warmer interest in their welfare than in mine. There are neighbours, whom you will meet exactly twice: once when you arrive, because that is the custom, and once at a funeral, assuming you are invited. There are tradesmen who will not work in weather. There are secretaries with the hide of a mammoth. There are volunteer firemen whose grandfathers threatened to burn down what the fire had missed. There is a school in which the curriculum includes clapping.
And there is more paperwork per square kilometre of uninhabited forest than I have encountered anywhere else on earth, including two countries that were officially organized around it.
The city I fled was a simpler place. In the city, at least, when a man ignores you it is because he has somewhere to be.
* * *
I wrote most of what follows about eighteen years into the experiment, when I was still keeping notes in the manner of a visiting anthropologist who intends to go home eventually and publish.
I am now some years past a quarter of a century here. I have not gone home. There is no longer anywhere that would qualify. Somewhere in the middle of all this I stopped being the man who observed these people and became one of the things they have to put up with: the neighbour at the top of the hill who does not come out, who has to be visited twice in a lifetime, and who will tell you at length, with total authority and no evidence whatsoever, why nobody around here distils maple syrup.
I have added, here and there, a few paragraphs written now, in italics, about what became of the people in these pages. Not to every chapter. Only where time turned out to have a better ending than the one I had.
The last of those paragraphs is about the certificate on the wall, and I will get to it.
And one more thing before we start, because I have been advised to say it and because it happens to be true. This is a book of stories, not a deposition. The people in it are composites, assembled out of several neighbours apiece; the names are invented; the dialogue is what I remember, which is not the same as what was said; and I have moved events around, joined two winters into one, and improved a punchline wherever a punchline could be improved. Nobody in these pages is a portrait of any actual person, and any resemblance to one is the accident of a small district in which everybody, sooner or later, behaves like everybody else.
What I can promise is that none of it will seem unfamiliar to anyone who has spent a February here.
Part One — The Dream and Its Immediate Collapse
Why Nobody Distils Maple Syrup
Why does nobody make moonshine out of maple syrup?
I am serious. People distil spirits out of everything. Out of an axe, out of a pair of old tracksuit bottoms, out of a broom, out of skis, out of the covers of back numbers of magazines. But not out of maple syrup. And on the face of it there is plenty in it, and more than that, the resulting liquid would have a genuinely original flavour and would mask the frank bouquet of fusel oil that ruins so much amateur work. Why the injustice?
For a long time I was too shy to ask the neighbours, and I want to report that in the end I never did ask. You ask a question like that, and then you look around and the whole country is distilling maple syrup and going to pieces, and we shall have to start looking for somewhere else to emigrate to.
One explanation offers itself immediately. Maple syrup is expensive, and by selling it as syrup to unsuspecting elderly ladies who eat it with pancakes you can make enough money to drink yourself, by more conventional means, into a condition of grey wolves and small devils under the pillow.
* * *
Consider the process, if you like, and judge for yourself.
You take an ordinary tree by the surname Maple and by nationality tree, growing independently and of its own accord directly under your nose. The Indigenous people were the first to work out how to collect the sap and reduce it to sugar, and it is generally held that whatever they worked out, we too can eventually manage, since it is not gods who fire the pots, and it is certainly not gods who wash them.
A diagonal cut is made in the maple and a small stainless steel spout inserted. The sap is then carried to the boiling stations, which stand out in the woods, where it is boiled over an open fire and everything superfluous is driven off until nothing is left but syrup.
To produce one litre of maple syrup by this method you must collect and boil down forty litres of sap.
Forty.
I would like to draw the reader’s attention to that number, because it is the number that runs the entire district. It explains the price of the product, the character of the people who make it, and the general local view that anybody in a hurry has not yet understood the situation.
And it does, admittedly, suggest that distilling it would be uneconomic.
* * *
But perhaps one ought to try anyway. What if it worked. What if one were to open up a new national drink and a new face for Canada altogether. Maple whisky. Maple vodka. There is something in those words that smells faintly of a forgotten dream, of the days when strong drink was hard to come by and therefore precious. But there has been a revaluation. We, exhausted by maple syrup, would now like something new.
And what is there to strive for when you have arrived? There is nowhere further to run. Behind you, so to speak, lies Moscow, and in front of you a suspiciously quiet ocean. The roundness of the earth can drive a man to despair.
The urge to intoxicate ourselves is presumably in the genes. It was alcohol that made us what we are, since on a clear head this world, and our own position in it, is very poorly digestible.
Judge for yourself. What are we? Incomers with reputations crippled by an East European accent. Self-abasement is not the answer, of course. But when you look at the local competence, at the polish of that superb ability to extract use from everything, from a plain wooden post if necessary, it becomes sad and then unbearable: for the years spent for nothing, for the eternal fidgeting search for the maternal breast, for the hard-won happiness of a worthless catch, for the apathetic wakings in the morning and the equally apathetic descents into sleep at night.
* * *
Twenty-five years on I still have not asked anybody, and I have come to believe that the question is not really about alcohol.
The people here can turn anything into something. They take a tree that grew by itself and make out of it, at forty to one, a product the world will pay for. And what appals me, on the bad mornings, is not that I could not do it. It is that it would never have occurred to me to try, because I would have been standing under the same tree working out what it meant.
They have the tree. I have the meaning. On the whole they seem to be eating better.
Canadian Elephants
There is a considerable population of elephants living in the Canadian backwoods.
I am aware that this will be disputed, and I am prepared for it. Their membership of the elephant family would be obvious even to Darwin, who as we know could not be shown an animal without immediately drawing conclusions from it, and whose conclusions were the real disaster. In this case no conclusions are required. Canadian elephants are descended from the ape, as is everything else, the ape being a creature so thoroughly studied that it can now be established as the ancestor of practically anybody, including, my frowning reader, you.
The purest specimens are found among receptionists and administrators, and the three great habitats are schools, hospitals and government offices. On these three pillars rests the modern system for the humiliation of man, which represents an extraordinary advance on the old one: it humiliates far more thoroughly, and there is nothing whatever you can point to afterwards. Even in the cities such people find their social position intolerable and must top it up hourly at the expense of whoever comes through the door. In a small town the process goes further. Here the hide thickens. Here it acquires, in mature specimens, a faint bloom of hairiness across the shoulders, distantly recalling the outer surface of the mammoth.
I want to be clear that I am not complaining. I am reporting. I merely looked, and observed, and I am doing my best to maintain a cool scientific objectivity, in the manner of the man who first described the elephant and did not permit personal feeling to enter into it.
* * *
Last week I dropped in on my family doctor.
I am not going to describe my family doctor here. He is a separate subject and requires his own chapter, and sooner or later he will get one. For the moment it is enough to say that he was not in.
He was not in because his receptionist said he was not in. His baritone was at that moment coming through a badly closed door in a rolling, unhurried way, discussing something at length with somebody, but the receptionist said he was not in, and in matters of this kind the receptionist outranks the evidence.
I should explain that our local physicians have advanced so far into modern science that they have learned to achieve a quantum state, within which the uncertainty principle necessarily applies, and no observer can say with confidence whether the doctor is in his office or not. You may hear him. You may not conclude from this that he is there. To measure his position you would have to give up all knowledge of his momentum, and the receptionist is not going to allow that either.
She then made me feel like an inferior sort of slug, which is a thing she does the way other people whistle, without conscious effort and without ever quite finishing the tune. I bore it. I snapped back once, mildly, in the way of a man who has decided to be dignified and has already spent most of it.
And then, on my way out, I stopped, because the woman behind me in the queue had begun to speak, and I have never in my life been able to walk away from a conversation of that quality.
She needed a nurse. There was a procedure she needed to have done.
“The nurse isn’t in,” said the receptionist, in the tone of a woman who has just been invited to something disgraceful in front of witnesses.
“But I need“
“I’ll ask the doctor. Perhaps he can help.” She said this without the smallest embarrassment, having announced his absence to me eleven seconds earlier, and while his voice continued to come through the door behind her like weather.
“Please. If you would.”
“But I need to know what the procedure is.”
“I can’t tell you that,” the woman said quietly, and looked around the waiting room at the assembled sick, who had all stopped reading.
“Then I can’t ask the doctor about you.”
“But I need to have the procedure done.”
“I need to know what the procedure is.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“And I can’t ask the doctor about you!”
They kept it up for several minutes. I have heard string quartets with less structure. Each phrase came back a little firmer than it went out, and neither woman altered a single word, and it became clear that this could continue until one of them was carried out.
I wanted very much to intervene. I did not. I went home.
“What business is it of mine?” I said to myself on the drive, and I said it in a tone I did not entirely believe, and by the time I got to the door I had forgotten the whole thing.
* * *
In the morning the telephone woke me. It was my doctor.
I could not believe my ears. In this district a call from your physician is an event of the order of a meteor strike, and I sat up and arranged my thoughts and prepared to raise, at last, the small matter I had come about the day before.
He was not calling about that. He was calling to sort out our relationship.
His receptionist had reported that I had behaved provocatively. She was demanding that he strike my family off his list.
Now, I am not a saint and I do not claim to remember every syllable I have ever uttered, but I could not for the life of me recall saying anything to that woman more inflammatory than good morning. My working theory is that she had woken up under a low grey sky, and that under those conditions any sentence at all arrives as a declaration of war.
“Your receptionist is mistaken,” I said.“I did not attack her.”
Somewhere behind my ribs a small warm feeling had begun. The prospect of being obliged to find a new doctor produced in me a sensation of classical happiness, foaming and cloudlike, in which all my ailments were at last correctly identified and cured.
“She says your manner was extremely aggressive.”
“No. I have a Slavic accent. Whatever I say sounds rude to the Canadian ear. It can’t be helped.”
I had learned this manoeuvre over long years among the elephants: the best defence is to hint at your own foreignness, thereby placing your opponent, gently, at the edge of a discrimination complaint without ever naming one.
“The word Slav,” I added, without much fire,“is where English gets the word slave. What do you expect from an etymology like that?”
Then I sat back and enjoyed the silence at the other end, which was of excellent quality.
“I don’t see what that has to do with the incident,” he said.
“If I remember correctly, you diagnosed me with a nervous disorder when I complained of dizziness and high blood pressure. So what exactly is surprising you? My behaviour is a direct confirmation of your diagnosis.”
I want to record that I had not planned that sentence. It arrived on its own, fully assembled, which happens to me perhaps twice a decade, and always on the telephone, and never in writing.
So I am now looking for a new doctor. He did not throw me out, precisely. But something had cooled, and I would not trust that man to take a wart off my back, although in fairness I must say he removes warts beautifully and visibly enjoys the work.
* * *
When, I want to know, will we be liberated from this surplus human contact? Think how good it could be. You open a website. You choose a time. You arrive, and you are seen, and at no point does anyone with the self-regard of Cleopatra and the working methods of Caligula stand between you and a prescription.
And when will it finally pass into history, this elephantiasis of the people who perform dull and unnecessary work, who lead private lives as flat as the bottom of an empty pan, and who take it out on everyone who comes within reach?
Because I said nothing to her. That is the part I keep returning to. Imagine what would have been done to me if I had actually stood up for the woman who was refused a procedure because she declined to announce its nature to a room full of strangers. If I had spoken up for her, I believe I would have been arrested and the town would have lynched me by suppertime.
And if the man were any good, one could at least respect the arrangement. But he is not even a charlatan. A charlatan claims to know something. This one has stopped claiming anything at all, except the ability to defend his receptionist from a coarse Slavic barbarian who dared to answer her back.
People have learned to injure one another so finely, with such precision, that I would cheerfully spend everything I own and take my chances with my health to prove myself right and see that unhappy creature answer for it. And I know from experience that the moment I actually took hold of her, in earnest, for even half a minute, there would be nothing left of her or her doctor at all. No hide. No hairiness. Nothing.
But this is vanity, and it is the black idleness of a small place. What I need is to get out, to the cities, where the scandals are grand and wholehearted, and where a man can meet a real Canadian elephant instead of the counterfeit article.
* * *
Nineteen years later I still live eleven kilometres from that office, and I have had four doctors since, and two of them were excellent. The receptionist retired a long time ago. I saw her once afterwards, in the grocery store, entirely alone at the end of an aisle, holding two brands of soup and comparing them for a very long time, and I stood at the other end of the aisle and did not go past her, and I have never been able to decide which of us that was for.
Confession of a Provincial Terrorist
For once in a very great while I was invited into polite society, which in the Canadian backwoods is an event of some rarity, like an eclipse, and requires about the same amount of preparation and produces about the same amount of temporary blindness.
I prepared thoroughly. I read a book about how to behave. I read most of a second one. I formed a plan, and the plan was this: I would say nothing that was not agreeable, I would agree with everything, and I would not, under any circumstances, start anything.
The dinner was given by a colleague, a Canadian to the bone, who had found himself a fiancée out in Alberta, and who was, as they say, engaged at last. In the manner of everything that reaches us from the still faintly wild West, she was large and impressive. Not the province. The fiancée. I had resolved to demonstrate to this daughter of Alberta the refinement of the upbringing we bring with us from the old world.
I overestimated myself. I have to say that at the outset, so that nobody is disappointed later.
* * *
On the lawn in front of the house I was met by the groom’s brother.
He had once worked for us for two days, through his brother’s good offices, until he resigned voluntarily under the pressure of an aching sense of his own uselessness. But out on that lawn, among forty complete strangers, we achieved the enchanted state of nodding acquaintance, which in such circumstances is worth more than kinship. It is a wonderful thing, in a strange house, at a party of people you will never see again, to catch sight of a familiar face, however unpromising.
The brother was a creative man. He was an artist, with all the deficiencies that follow from it. He was an alcoholic, a drug user, and a professional stripper. Some years earlier the elderly girls from our office had gone to see his act and had returned strangely disappointed, which I have never understood, since the same women had been known to sigh indecently when I took off a sweater in a warm room, and I am a tightly packed sack of I don’t know what, whereas the brother was, by any measure, an extremely enviable specimen. Perhaps it was the chronic sobriety problem. On the day of the engagement he had already got well ahead of the schedule and was standing on the lawn only in the technical sense.
It should be said that every respectable Canadian family is required to contain one member who is the family’s shame, its worm in the apple, the father’s one unlucky shot. Call it what you like. The brother filled this office with distinction, and I say so without the least malice. I am simply setting down what I saw, in a spirit of cool observation, having decided that day to be calm, which is to say passive and contemplative.
It did not last.
* * *
You see, I have never once in my life succeeded in having a measured conversation about the weather. Out of the simplest exchange of nothing at all, I invariably produce a dispute.
“Warm today, isn’t it,” said a small elderly lady, probing me with the practised feelers of standard social conversation. This form of talk is called small talk, which I have always thought understates it.
“Beautiful,” I said, warmly, and rather proud of myself for managing an ordinary human noise.“Not like yesterday. Yesterday was dreadful. That heat!”
And then, because there is a part of me that cannot leave an intact sentence alone, I added:
“Global warming, no doubt.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think that troubles us here. Our winters are very severe.”
“I don’t believe we’ll have a winter this year at all,” I said.“I’m strongly in favour of global warming.”
This was received as an outrage of the first order, although I am fairly sure I was making a joke.
“But New York would go under!” said an entirely grey gentleman, from somewhere off to the left.
“Let it,” I said, and this time I was not joking.
“So you’re a terrorist,” said the grey gentleman, also not joking, at some volume.
Everyone turned. The drunken brother of the groom sobered instantly and hiccupped with real feeling. Forty people looked at me with the alert, expectant faces of a crowd waiting for a man to begin shouting extremist slogans and detonate himself in front of the buffet.
“Mm,” I observed, weightily, in my own defence.
It did not satisfy them. Something further was required. Some account had to be given of my position on the drowning of a metropolis which is beyond all epochs, the city that never sleeps, the city that has run out of surface on which to affix another stamp; our stern father New York, our Rostov-on-Hudson; and I stood there while everything an immigrant contains sloshed slowly from one side of him to the other.
“The thing is,” I said, and coughed, and started again.“The thing is that I don’t like large cities. I suffer from a nervous condition. Crowds bring on a panic.”
“Unconvincing,” sighed the grey man, looking around at the assembled crowd.“We observe no signs of panic in you whatever. If anyone here ought to be panicking, it is us.”
And with that sentence, for reasons I still cannot reconstruct, my grey judge released the pressure a little, and the party resumed.
The groom’s mother, passing behind me, delivered a look that would have taken paint off a fence, and said:
“You’re not in a hurry, I hope? You won’t even stay for dinner?”
Now: my wife, who knows me, had prepared me for this dinner by feeding me a full plate of dumplings before I left, so that I would not once again disgrace us all by eating the guests out of house and home. I was nevertheless extremely interested in dinner, and I assured the mother firmly that I would be staying.
* * *
Dinner was a disappointment.
Several platters of thinly sliced sausage cannot, in my professional opinion, be described by the proud phrase dinner party. I do not know from what buried reserve of civilization I found the strength to say nothing about this, but I did. Presumably the business with the drowning of New York had had an ennobling effect. I withdrew in silence with my plate, on which lay a portion of food that could be described as modest only by someone being kind, and sat down on the far side of the swimming pool, at a distance from the main body of guests, intending to peck at whatever God had sent and then to slip away simply and unnoticed.
The grey man sat down beside me.
The groom had informed him, it emerged, that I was a writer, and one of the cleverest men he knew. The groom often said this to me and I never took it as a compliment: first, because I do not consider myself clever, and second, because in comparison with the local population a household iron may pass for a sage.
The grey man was not satisfied. He very much wanted to expose me as a fraud and an adventurer with a taste for large statements. He began again on my occupation, and my views on the world, and on the environment and related matters.
I gave him everything. I laid out every paradox I own, shocking him with each new proposition in turn.
“The federal government should be abolished,” I said, spitting out an olive stone.“I am extremely fond of olives. And I am not fond of governments of any kind. Isn’t that strange?”
“So you’re not only a terrorist, you’re a separatist.”
I choked on a soft drink. The thick cloud of incomprehension gathered over us again.
“Well, the thing is that Prince Peter Kropotkin, the father of anarchism, argued“
“An anarchist as well?” gasped the grey man’s wife, who had materialized beside us out of clear air.
At this point, understanding that I would be reported to the authorities by lunchtime tomorrow, I set down my plate and delivered my customary monologue, beginning at the beginning, which is to say with global warming.
The logic of my ravings, and I concede it is a specialized taste, ran as follows. Fighting climate change is a utopia; Mars is warming too, which suggests the causes lie somewhat beyond our reach. Large cities should be broken up over time. The internet should let people live, learn and work at a distance. And not everybody in a society needs to work at all, because automation has reached the point where it is cheaper to pay the majority a benefit than to manufacture expensive jobs that produce nothing anybody needs.
“And what will the idle do?” said the grey man, who was not letting go.
“They must be educated and occupied with the arts.”
“Utopia. You cannot get there from where we are.”
“I don’t dispute it,” I said.“But one has to choose a direction.”
I said a great deal more. The grey man and his wife now listened without interrupting. Their breathing was still irregular, but I formed the impression that they no longer regarded me as an immediate danger and would probably not be reporting me to the police, though they might well raise the matter with the local psychiatrist.
Understanding at last the effect my sermons produce, I returned to the subject of my nervous condition and my general instability, and began gently winding in the line.
* * *
The atmosphere was cleared, in the end, by the groom’s brother, who by that hour was comprehensively drunk.
He entered the swimming pool twice, fully dressed, executing on each occasion a pirouette of some ambition. Several children witnessed this and sustained injuries of a lasting spiritual character, and in about a decade their mothers will be asking one another why the young people of today are so frightened of water.
He concluded his performance with a third immersion, undertaken with a purpose: to retrieve a plastic turtle from the bottom of the pool. This was to be a gift for the smallest child present. Unfortunately the diver had gone in with a lit cigarette, which alarmed the infant considerably, and when the magician surfaced, still smoking, and offered up the trophy, the child struck him firmly on the hand and ran to his mother, and the turtle was left to dry out, unwanted, at the edge of the violently chlorinated water.
Afterwards the brother, giving off chlorine at some distance, went to apologize to the groom for the drunken exhibition, and the groom, who was furious, said through his teeth that it was fine, that everything was fine, brother.
* * *
The bride, I should record, turned out to be a woman of formidable persistence. Nobody had ever succeeded in fencing in that free Canadian heart, and yet a plain girl from a ranch had done it.
“Listen,” I said to the condemned man, in a confidential whisper.“Where did you find this treasure?”
There followed a standard love story, which I forgot immediately and therefore cannot reproduce. It was something along the lines of: she caught me with an oar and I happened to hit her with a ski pole. This is a common method of introduction among the local population. It ended with the news that they would shortly buy a ranch and raise cattle.
“But you hate animals,” I objected.
“No, I’m fine with them now. The ranch will be enormous. They’ll be grazing a long way off.”
I sighed. He was going. A free soul. He would spend the rest of his life collecting manure behind cows and walking on tiptoe in front of a cowgirl.
* * *
It was time to leave, and here I followed to the letter the principles I had read about in the book on good behaviour. I approached the group of elderly people in order to thank them for a delightful evening.
In honesty, I had intended to say goodbye only to the groom’s grandmother. Unfortunately I had forgotten which of them she was, and so I said goodbye to all of them, individually, in turn. I was met by a row of grim expressions.
I then turned to the brother of the groom, who was at that point winding himself around a section of fence, and said:
“Have you dried out yet?”
The question could be taken two ways. What I meant was the simple physical drying of a man who has been in a swimming pool three times. It could also be understood as a remark about his drinking. Everybody became extremely uncomfortable, and I, pleased to have observed the proprieties, went off to take my leave of the young people. The look with which the young people saw me off suggested, on the one hand, that the apple does not fall far from the tree, and on the other, that unfriendliness in this district intensifies from generation to generation.
On departing I announced that the finest thing a person can do with a life is to make children. This was my parting instruction, after which I withdrew with dignity.
I do not believe that company will trouble me with an invitation again.
* * *
Shocking other people has become, I am afraid, second nature.
Only yesterday I acquired an enormous wooden spoon, carved out of a root. I very much wanted to try eating borscht with it. People have their private perversions; there is no obligation to advertise them universally.
But no. At the table, with the whole household assembled and guests present, I produced my spoon with pride and began noisily taking borscht from a bowl whose diameter exceeded that of the spoon by only a little.
Silence fell. Everybody pushed their plates away and, for some reason, did not want to eat any more.
So am I not a terrorist after all, even if only on a provincial scale?
Revolver Shots
Now and then one would like to understand where the various types of human being come from. This is particularly absorbing in the provinces, where many generations stay in one place and the population does not get stirred very often.
Clearly one must turn to history in order to establish why my good neighbours are so unsociable — in seven years we not only failed to exchange a word, we failed to lay eyes on one another — or why the local man prefers to sit at home half hungry, smoking something homegrown, rather than go out and earn the price of something more nourishing.
It began about a hundred and forty years ago, when a man named Hunt settled on the shore of what was then an empty body of water and decided that a town would arise here, which was subsequently, of course, called Huntsville.
And where was I at the time? If I had shown a little initiative the place would have been called Krigersville, although on reflection that does not sound like anything at all, so perhaps it is just as well that I showed no initiative and arrived somewhat late.
At any rate, Mr Hunt prohibited the consumption of alcohol on his side of the river, with the result that every drinking establishment in the district concentrated itself on the other. I want to note this because it is, in miniature, the whole history of moral legislation, and it took one afternoon.
Looking at the old photographs, one is struck by how closely the subjects resemble the people who live here now. The same Johns and Franks stand holding substantial beer glasses, only the clothing is better. And invariably a necktie is knotted around a filthy neck. Naturally. The nineteenth century was splashing about on all sides. The epoch obliged.
In 1877 a correspondent for some minor newspaper, passing through the village that would become the glorious town of Huntsville, reported that it was a wretched consumptive little settlement of perhaps a hundred souls. Another journalist, in 1879, called for an end to the drinking and the shooting, which between them were carrying off most of the young men. A colleague added fuel by observing that the streets of the settlement were full of dead horses, heaps of manure and assorted refuse, together with a quality of mud that would have done credit to any Indigenous village of the era of Jacques Cartier.
* * *
The manners of the period are best preserved in the rules of the local hotel, which bore the proud name of the Albion.
I set them down as they were, in substance, and I want to be clear that I have not invented a word of them. They come out of a local history pamphlet, Larry D. Cotton’s Whiskey and Wickedness, volume three, covering Muskoka and Parry Sound from 1850 to 1900, and if you doubt me you may go and look.
Gentlemen who retire to bed without removing their boots are charged above the standard rate.
Three knocks at the door signify that a murder has occurred and that you are required to attend the inquiry.
Guests are asked to write their names on the wallpaper so that the management may know they were here.
Should you require the missing leg of a chair, it will be found in the cupboard.
Revolver shots are not a cause for alarm.
Kerosene lamps carry a surcharge. Candles are free but must not be left burning all night.
Guests are asked not to tear strips from the wallpaper to light their pipes, the wallpaper being required for the register of names.
If it rains and water comes through the hole in the ceiling, the umbrella is under the bed.
The rats are not dangerous, even when they chase one another across your face.
Two gentlemen sharing a room must come to an arrangement regarding the use of the single chair.
Where no towel is available, guests should use the blanket.
* * *
The amiable character of the local population also expressed itself during the great upheavals.
The worst fire in the history of Huntsville occurred in 1894 and burned out the entire town centre, on precisely that side of the river where, by Hunt’s bequest, the consumption of strong drink had been forbidden. As soon as it began, the townspeople sent for help to Bracebridge and Gravenhurst. The volunteer brigades arrived after the fire had been extinguished.
Since the saloons were on the other side of the river and had not been touched by the flames, the firemen went directly to them. After several glasses of whisky they started a fight, and the quickest of them were arrested by the local constable. The remaining firemen surrounded the constable and delivered an ultimatum: if their comrades were not released immediately, they would complete the destruction the fire had failed to achieve.
The prisoners were released immediately, and the fire brigades left town on the next train.
* * *
This is how a knowledge of history allows a man to enjoy the present.
Walking now through the streets of my own town and finding on them neither dead horses nor heaps of manure, I am filled with an aching pride in the difficult road this district has travelled.
All civilization, of course, came to us from Toronto. Without the settlers from that splendid metropolis we should still be living in the cramped circumstances of the backwoods. But the locals now dislike visitors. For two months of the year, July and August, the shops run short, the narrow streets become impassable with cars, and there are queues and noise everywhere. And then the summer ends, and our town sinks into a sweet oblivion, and covers itself gradually with autumn leaves, which small parties of Japanese visitors arrive in coaches to admire, and then everything is covered with snow and nobody disturbs us until the following summer.
Is this not happiness: to enjoy all the benefits of a civilization that arrived here purely to serve crowds of holidaymakers, while competing with those holidaymakers for space in the world for only two months a year?
Now, when I recognize in a local resident some feature of his ancestors, I no longer become angry or surprised. The savagery and the filth that nourished this population at the dawn of its existence simply beggar the imagination. On the other hand, the whole story is a source of hope. Perhaps other wild places of human habitation will in time acquire noble, or at any rate acceptable, features. Perhaps in another century and a half the Russian village will be a respectable resort for city people.
We are so accustomed to condemning everyone and everything. We are so pleased with our own civilization, without pausing to consider that a hundred years ago people in this town were defending themselves from rats with an umbrella and ignoring revolver shots in the next room.
Give it time. It will all come right in the end, provided humanity does not lose its way, and provided no frightening aliens take up the question of our re-education.
Counting Puppies
I did not want to see anybody.
I sat down at the piano. Somebody came in. I ignored them. I played louder, in the manner of a man who has noticed nothing.
It was my son-in-law. Without stopping I said,“What do you want?”
“Oh, you play beautifully,” he said.“Is that Chopin?”
“No. It’s rubbish of my own composition.” I understood perfectly well that he had not come for the music.
“I’m terribly hungry. Feed me,” he admitted, which I respected.
I was pleased to see him and pretended to be furious.“There’s nothing in the house. Go and buy something.”
“Really, it’s wonderful music,” he said, and you could see from his eyes that he wanted very much to eat.
At that point I came to my senses and realized I had been rude, and began to apologize, and he did not believe a word of it, because it had been audible in my voice, that what do you want, with the whole flavour of it intact.
I am not a sociable man. Relatives once a week would be ample, once a month would be handsome, but they come for my wife. She is charming and she cooks well when she is in the mood, and with guests she is always in the mood, which is how I benefit: sometimes fried potatoes, sometimes something more substantial.
My general position is that people should not see each other too often. It produces a permanent low discomfort, as though somebody were pressing his life upon you, or as though you were pressing yours upon him.
In my youth I used to say that lovers can never live under one roof. I now know this to be nonsense. If it were true, how would love ever take the roof off?
* * *
In any case I was obliged to exceed my quota of human contact, because the bitch had whelped. Six puppies. Which is a stock that has to be moved, since we already had three dogs, and this brought us to nine, exactly like the Queen of England.
I placed an advertisement in the local paper, and then it began.
What breed are the puppies?
Basset hounds.
What do they look like?
Like basset hounds.
Yes, but what do they actually look like?
Would you like me to describe all six?
Do they like to run?
These dogs have superb hunting qualities: an excellent nose, great reliability, and an appetite of an order rarely seen in nature. You will do a great deal of running with them. They have been used for centuries on fox and rabbit. Their ears are so long that they occasionally step on them with their front paws while walking.
Ah. Well, not many people hunt these days. It’s a pity they’re so active. You see, the thing is, I’m disabled.
Ah. Then you have nothing to worry about. These dogs are extraordinarily lazy.
Another call.
Will I look energetic next to this dog?
Oh, absolutely. These dogs are extraordinarily lazy.
Really? Only I was hoping to take him along on my morning runs.
Then the buyers began arriving at the house in person. They handled the puppies. They looked at them from underneath, and lifted their tails, and inspected them in ways I will not set down here. I do not have words for these people.
Meanwhile my wife was worrying. What exactly were we going to do with nine dogs? It is amusing until you say it out loud, and then it is a pack. In fact at the beginning there were ten, because the father of the six had also formed an attachment to another female, who never conceived. She was an aggressive animal and we passed her on through a colleague of mine who kept livestock and also, for reasons of her own, a donkey. The mother of the puppies, by contrast, had spent the entire courtship evading him and pressing herself against walls, and conceived anyway.
I am a scientist, announced one visitor.
Excellent. Albert Einstein kept a basset. He will help you discover the theory of relativity, or if necessary close it.
I’m a political scientist.
Then the dog will not be able to help you.
* * *
After that I did not want to see or hear anybody. I unplugged the telephone and sat down again at the piano.
Somebody came in. I ignored them. I played louder, in the manner of a man who has noticed nothing.
It was my son-in-law. I said,“What do you want?”
“Oh, you play beautifully. Is that your own composition?”
“No,” I said grimly, lying,“that one’s actually Chopin,” because I understood perfectly well that he had not come for the music.
Part Two — The Population
The Deer in the Driveway
Everyone has the daydream. A small house at the edge of a great forest, no neighbours for miles, nothing at the window but nature gazing in with its clean uncomplicated eyes. No traffic. No people. Above all, no people.
I want to report, as a man who actually did it, that the daydream is accurate in every particular except one. Nature does gaze in at the window. It just isn’t gazing at the view.
We ended up with six and a half acres of forest about two hundred kilometres north of Toronto, in a district that looks as though a glacier dragged one enormous paw across it and left the scratches full of lakes. Some of those lakes have no roads to them at all. I know they exist only because a satellite photographed them, which is a strange thing to say about a place you can walk to. Somewhere over our heads there is a piece of machinery whose entire job is to look into other people’s backyards without being asked. In my old country we had a word for that and it did not involve satellites.
Now. Before I can tell you what happened, I have to explain the business with the bear, because otherwise the story makes no sense and you will think we are unwell.
For most of our marriage my wife and I called each other Bear. Both of us. The same name. It functioned less as an endearment than as a call sign, a way of establishing across two floors of a house that a transmission was about to begin. I have loved teddy bears since I was small and I took the name as a compliment, which it may or may not have been.
When we moved into the woods we had to retire it. There was a real bear. We never saw him, but we knew his work: a wrecked wasp nest one summer, and later the screen door on the back of the house torn open by something that wanted in at three in the morning and was not a raccoon. Under those conditions you cannot shout Bear! into your own house on a whim. When somebody yells Bear, everyone needs to agree instantly about what is meant. Safety, as they say, has no room for poetry. So I lost my nickname. I am now called something considerably less dignified that I would rather not write down, and I have made my peace with it.
So: a morning in February, no particular morning, and I am at my desk writing a letter to relatives who had become geographically distant as a direct result of my having achieved my dream. I had got as far as explaining how wonderfully peaceful it is out here, far from the predatory bustle of civilization, when I heard my wife scream from the other end of the house.
Bear! Bear! Bear!
I want to be clear that I ran. I did not stroll. I ran, in slippers, down the hall, while my imagination assembled for me, at speed, a fully realized bear: a bear that had failed to hibernate, a bear that had had a difficult year, a bear that was at this moment coming through the glass.
We have no gun. There is an object in the house that resembles a gun, but it is not one. I am frightened of weapons in a way I recognize is not entirely reasonable. I hide the bread knife. My family have on occasion had to tear the loaf apart with their hands like early Christians, which lends the breakfast table a certain scriptural gravity nobody asked for.
I arrived at the sliding door. There was no bear.
There was a deer lying on the snow with its belly opened, and there was a great deal of blood, and back among the trees, not far, keeping still in the way that animals keep still when they intend to come back, were two wolves. Possibly three.
“Where’s the bear?” I said.
“What bear?” said my wife, with real fear.
“You were shouting Bear, Bear, Bear.“
“I was calling you.”
So that was settled. We had not been attacked by a bear. We had merely been attacked by wolves, which put everyone at ease, and we went out onto the deck and shouted and waved our arms until the wolves withdrew into the trees with the unhurried manner of diners who have been interrupted by a phone call and fully intend to return to the table.
You can read the whole event in the snow, if you want to, and I did not especially want to. My wife had seen it through the window: the deer coming across the yard in enormous bounds, almost airborne, and the wolves trying to hang off it, and then one bound landing wrong. The tracks say the same thing. The tracks are very long and then they stop.
I called Jim.
Jim lives at a distance that in the city would be an unrelated postal code. He is Scottish-Canadian, which around here is not a heritage but a weather system. He spent most of his life doing not very much, then finished a degree in his late forties and became a psychologist, and now works on call at the hospital, where his job is to sit with the families of people who have just died. Against all reason this has left him with an aggressively cheerful disposition and a talent for saying pleasant things with a small blade in them. He is also a sixties man on principle: he pays as little attention to the government as the government pays to him, he grows a crop in the back that our climate has no business supporting, and he owns a rifle with which he will shoot anything that walks into his yard without troubling himself about seasons or licences.
He said he’d come right over. I assumed he would arrive with the rifle. He arrived with his wife, which is a different kind of protection, and I have never decided whether the rifle was left behind out of courage, out of tact, or because it was somewhere under the porch.
He came across the snow in that bouncing walk of his and looked the carcass over like a man pricing a used car.
“Are you keeping the meat?”
I made a sound. I waved both mittens at him. The animal was half eaten and belonged in a horror film, not a kitchen.
“Would you like the meat?”
Jim considered this for a while and then shook his head in a way that meant he had plenty of meat and nowhere to put it, which I did not believe for a second. I think he was being delicate. We had spent a number of evenings over beer discussing Goethe, on account of a gap in his education that opened when a man starts his education at forty-eight, and I had once given him an English Faust to fill it, and he had been touched, and now there was a whole architecture of politeness between us that a dead deer could not be allowed to damage.
“Well,” said Jim,“since you’re leaving him to nature, I suppose you’ll want to get rid of the body.”
This is a thing I have come to love about the English-speaking world. Nothing is too obvious to be stated slowly and with dignity.
“Yes,” I said.
“You can’t leave it. By tonight you’ll have every carnivore in the district in your yard. Unless you’re making a documentary.”
“Mm,” I said.
“And a truck can’t get back here. We’d have to drag it. But we can’t drag it, or you’ll have blood the whole length of the yard, which brings us back to the carnivores.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ll fetch a sheet of plywood and we’ll slide it out to the truck,” said Jim, and did not move.
“Excellent,” I said.
“I’ll take my son-in-law’s truck. He’s got an old Ford.”
“Of course,” I said, running out of ways to agree with a stationary man. The school bus was due. I did not want the children coming up the drive into a nature documentary.
Jim went on looking at the deer. Eventually his wife Joanne, who is about half his size, patted his shoulder and said,“I think it’s time to go and get the truck, dear,” and he said yes, yes, and set off through the snow.
“He’s a thoughtful one,” Joanne said, and turned to my wife, and the two of them began a conversation about the trials of marriage to thoughtful men.
I excused myself, having realized I was standing in a snowbank in slippers.
Here I must confess something. Inside, changing my boots, I sat down. From the sofa I had an excellent view of the driveway, and I am a man who likes to reflect on the deeper meaning of an event precisely at the moment when he ought to be helping. Changing footwear took me longer than it strictly needed to, and by the time I had finished, Jim was back with the truck, and the three of them were sliding the deer across the snow on the plywood like a toboggan.
Perhaps I won’t be needed, I thought hopefully, and began taking the boots off.
Then I watched them try to get it into the truck bed, and fail, and I began putting the boots back on, because somewhere inside every educated and excessively thoughtful man there lives a small gentleman who insists. Then I calculated that by the time I got out there they would have finished and I would look worse than if I had stayed inside. So I began taking the boots off again. The deer would not go into the truck. I put the boots on for the third and final time and went out.
I approached, surveyed the scene, and announced with authority that they were doing it wrong. I was insulted in two languages. But I proposed laying the plywood on a slope and pushing the animal up it, and they tried it, and it worked, and I was so proud of my contribution to management that I barely had to touch the deer at all.
“Well, that’s that,” I said cheerfully, and turned to go inside.
A car had stopped at the end of the driveway. A tall unfriendly man in a thick sweater got out and came toward us. I rolled down the window.
“What have you got in there?”
“A dead deer.”
“Under what circumstances did it die?”
“Wolves. And you would be?”
“Ministry of Natural Resources.”
We got out of the truck.
“Whose property is this?” said the inspector.
“His,” said Jim with tremendous readiness, and began drifting toward the treeline.
“Stay where you are,” said the inspector.“It’s out of season. I’m required to investigate any animal mortality.”
“Even chipmunks?” I asked. His face did not move. He began going over the carcass looking for a bullet wound, which was ambitious, given how little carcass there was.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.“I didn’t bite him.”
Jim also declined to confess.
“You’ll notice,” I said,“neither of us has blood in his beard.”
This, unexpectedly, engaged him. He looked hard at my face. I do not trim my beard for months at a time and the effect is not reassuring; a boy in town once caught sight of me, backed up, and sat down. But the inspector was a serious man and understood that even if I had personally attacked the deer, the wounds would have been smaller, my mouth being of ordinary size by local standards. Still, something in his procedural soul had been stirred.
“Do you have dogs?”
“A poodle. Zhuzha. She’s been in the house all day.”
“I’d like to examine her mouth.”
I would like you to sit with that sentence, because I have sat with it for years. Somewhere in an office there is a form, and on that form there is a line, and to complete the line a grown man must drive into the bush in February and look inside a poodle.
“Maybe you could protect the population from the wolves instead,” I suggested.
“I’m not satisfied it was wolves.”
“Then who was it? Me?”
“If it wasn’t your dog, it was coyotes. Describe them.”
“Grey. Wolves. Large ones.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and went off to interview Zhuzha, who was the gentlest creature I have ever known and who had epilepsy, and who would not have caught a deer if the deer had lain down and asked her to.
“Can we take him into the bush?” I called after him.
“Go ahead. If it turns out it wasn’t your dog, I’ll issue you a certificate confirming you didn’t kill the deer. Then if the animal is found later, you’ll have documentation.”
“May I ask how you came to be here?”
“I was driving past. I saw people loading a deer. I decided to investigate.”
“Mm,” I said, and we drove off.
The truck shook horribly. We got about two kilometres up a badly plowed road.
“That’ll do,” said Jim.“The wolves will find their lunch from here.”
He turned around and immediately buried the truck in the snow, and I had time to picture the two of us walking home in the dark, but the old Ford climbed out, and we drove on a little and got out to unload.
The bed was empty.
We looked at it. We looked at each other.
“What the hell,” said Jim.
“Maybe he ran off,” I said.
We stood there staring into an empty truck bed streaked with blood, in the posture, I imagine, of the first people to look into a certain empty tomb.
“There has to be a rational explanation,” said Jim, and put both hands on his head. I had previously believed this gesture to be the exclusive property of elderly Jewish men, and seeing it performed by an elderly Scot I concluded that centuries of persecution had been based on a misunderstanding.
Then I spotted, well off the road, roughly where we had been stuck, a dark shape on the snow. Another deer, I thought, which is really too much.
“Ah!” cried Jim happily.“He slid out while we were spinning!”
He was delighted. The unpleasant part of the job had automated itself. We did not go and look. We drove home.
Passing his daughter’s house, we found her husband clearing snow on a small tractor. He looked up at two bearded men emerging from the forest in his truck and his face did something complicated. Jim had not asked to borrow it.
The son-in-law came over and looked into the bed, which was extensively decorated.
“I’ll wash it out before I bring it back,” Jim said.“We had a thing to do.”
“A thing. In the woods.” He paused.“Where’s Joanne?”
He was, I think, becoming concerned for his mother-in-law, having long suspected his father-in-law of being unsound, and holding no view of me that I would want recorded. But at that moment his tractor, left to its own devices, began rolling gently down the slope, ignoring his questions, and he ran off after it, and the fate of Joanne was never established.
We went back to the house and drank brandy and discussed the injustice and cruelty of the universe, which is what brandy is for. The women reported that the inspector had stayed a long while, that he had looked into Zhuzha’s mouth, and that he had also, briefly, inspected the cat. In the end the wolf tracks proved measurably larger than anything we kept indoors, and he had issued his certificate with visible reluctance. It is a serious offence to kill a deer without a licence out of season. There are large fines. There is, occasionally, jail.
I saw Jim off and sat down to finish the letter I had started that morning, the one about how peaceful it is out here. And so, I wrote, we are settling in locally, by taking food away from wolves.
It was fully dark outside. The cold carried a sound across the yard that the human ear has never learned to enjoy.
We then held a family conference on how to defend ourselves from the wilderness, since life had begun to resemble a nature program with an unusually high budget. My son proposed a real gun. My wife proposed a fence. My daughter proposed moving to the city.
I thought about it for a while and proposed building a city around our house.
Nobody has ruled it out.
The Theory and Practice of Clapping
The school my son attended was the sole source of enlightenment for a large and heavily forested portion of the earth’s surface, and it stood in a settlement called Dwight, which consists of perhaps two hundred houses that have agreed, without ever discussing it, to be a place. The pupils were the children of loggers, farmers, masons, people who sold each other land, people who drank, and the rest of the local intelligentsia.
After several years there my son began to resemble a logger, and I took him out and taught him at home. We had by then switched the house from wood heat to oil, which is progress by regional standards, and a logger in the family had become surplus to requirements.
I don’t want to be unfair to the school. Schools are mirrors, and not flattering ones. A school produces exactly the citizen the surrounding population has ordered. If everyone within forty kilometres is a drinker, the school will courteously supply the next generation of drinkers, on time and to specification. The problem is never the school.
My son was accepted locally with reluctance. He was renamed on arrival, from Yasha to Jacob, and the district then set about fitting his character into the available slot, and his character declined. He was born in Jerusalem and spent his early childhood being moved around Scandinavia, and he found the local ideas about how a person should behave unpersuasive.
The teachers spoke to him often, and eventually they spoke to us. Which is how, one afternoon, Mrs. Mann informed me that Jacob was having serious difficulties with clapping.
“With what?” I said. I was already searching my memory for some theorem I had failed to retain.
“With clapping,” she said, without a flicker.
“Forgive my ignorance,” I said.“What exactly is clapping?”
“In music class I play a recording of a song, and the children clap along in time. Your son doesn’t always manage it. I think it would help if you worked on it with him at home. I’m happy to show you how.”
And she began to demonstrate.
I want to record that I held out for about four seconds. Then I laughed in a way that could not be stopped, that had nothing to do with my opinion of Mrs. Mann, and that continued well past the point where it could be recovered as a social event. Somewhere in the ruins of my conscience I understood that this was rude. I could not do anything about it.
Mrs. Mann stopped clapping and waited politely for the fit to pass. Then she smiled. Then she began, very faintly, to laugh along, out of sheer good breeding rather than any real sympathy for a middle-aged man collapsing in front of her over an established element of the curriculum.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was now in genuine danger of getting the hiccups, which would have finished me.
“Not at all, not at all,” she said, and handed me a tissue for my eyes, which I consider one of the great acts of Canadian diplomacy.
I pulled myself together.
“But the boy is in grade four,” I said.“Is grade four really the place for clapping? Your students still don’t know their times tables.”
“Well, to begin with, grade four is combined with grade three. I simply give them slightly different work. And clapping is an integral part of the ministry curriculum. It develops a sense of rhythm.”
“I see,” I said.“We’ll work on clapping at home.”
We did not work on clapping at home. But I have thought about it more than she could possibly have intended, and I have come round to a position. A country that puts clapping in the curriculum and the times tables somewhere behind it has made a decision about what kind of citizen it wants, and the decision is not stupid. It wants people who can stay in time with the group. It wants them to be pleasant. It wants them, on the whole, not to invade anybody. If you have ever lived in a country that taught arithmetic superbly and rhythm not at all, you will know exactly what such a country does with the arithmetic. So perhaps Mrs. Mann was right and I was the one out of time, which is, after all, the diagnosis she offered in the first place.
* * *
The next incident also involved Mrs. Mann, though this time she was more puzzled than concerned.
The class was assigned to build a kaleidoscope. My son made a cardboard tube, lined it with mirrors, filled it with coloured glass, and then, because the assignment had not specifically forbidden it, wrote an advertising jingle for the product and attached it to the side:
Never, ever lose your hope,
Buy yourself a kaleidoscope!
If you have an ugly wife,
Bring some colour to your life!
He was nine. Mrs. Mann took this to be evidence of something. I took it to be evidence that the boy had understood advertising more completely than the curriculum was prepared to acknowledge, and I said nothing, because there is a limit to how often one family can be summoned in a single term.
* * *
Then there was the day the school called to say that Jacob had hit his head and was seeing double.
We drove there at speed, collected him, and set off for the hospital. Somewhere on the highway my old paramedic instincts, which are the only professional instincts I have ever possessed, began quietly filing an objection. There was no bump. Nobody had seen him fall. He was seeing double in a manner that seemed unusually well organized.
“I think you made it up,” I said gently,“because you wanted to come home. That’s all right. I’m not angry. Just tell me honestly. Nothing is double, is it?”
“Double,” said Jacob, and turned to the window, deeply offended.
“Because if it’s true, we’ll spend the entire day in an emergency room, they’ll take blood, and by evening we will both want to die. If you made it up, we’ll laugh about it and go to a movie.”
“I made it up,” said Jacob.
We laughed about it, and I turned the car toward the cinema.
“Only please don’t do that again,” I said.“If you don’t want to be at school, or you want to come home, just call me and I’ll come and get you.”
“Okay,” said Jacob happily, and looked at me with clear, entirely single-vision eyes.
I mention this because it was, in the end, the best investment I ever made.
Years later, grown, he repaid it. I had an appointment with the dentist and did not want to go. Understand: when a tooth hurts, you can bear the ordeal, because you know what you are buying. But my dentist had become expansive and wished to fill a tooth that had not yet finished rotting. This struck me as speculative.
I suffered. Voluntarily entering that chair felt beyond me. And my son picked up the phone.
“My father’s been held up in a meeting. Unfortunately he won’t be able to come.”
We then went and ate three orders of coconut shrimp each and spent the rest of the day extremely well.
* * *
His last act of public service at that institution involved skates.
He had outgrown a pair and found a buyer at school, and the transaction was completed for ten dollars, which is the correct price for a pair of used skates and roughly the going rate for a childhood in that district. He then came home, opened the closet, and discovered his own skates sitting inside it.
He had, it emerged, carried home somebody else’s skates and sold them.
His instinct, which I want to describe as entrepreneurial rather than criminal, was to sell the second pair as well. I stopped him and persuaded him to return them to the school, on the grounds that a boy ought to give something back to the institution that had instilled in him such a durable aversion to clapping.
* * *
Three years into home schooling he met his old classmate Daniel in town. Daniel had reached grade seven. I asked what they were studying.
“The times tables,” Daniel said, with some pride.
“And the clapping?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said.“The clapping too.”
The Trees Are in the Way
I abuse television in public whenever the opportunity arises, and I watch it. This is not hypocrisy so much as physics. A running television generates a field. Whatever you are doing in a house where one is on, you will drift toward it, sit down in front of it, and stay. It is the hearth. It is the fire at the mouth of the cave. Our ancestors gathered around a flame that at least cooked things; we gather around one that does not, and we go on gathering.
The problem with television is not the machine. It is the contents. Hundreds of channels of nothing, out of which you must pan, like a man in a cold river, some small nugget that feeds a part of you other than the blink reflex. It cannot be true that the whole point of our existence is what that screen believes it is. It cannot be. And so, sustained by this possibly naive hope, we keep watching.
For years we had a modest additional comfort: programming in Russian. Not because the programming was good. Because your first language holds on to you by the suspenders, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Then the company that supplied it was swallowed by whatever swallows such companies, and we were left with a dish on the wall pointing at an empty sky. It is still out there in the corner of the yard, unbolted and face down, its ears full of snow. A short unhappy love story between a satellite and an antenna: he stayed up, she stayed bolted to the brick, and nothing came of it.
Then a large Canadian company arrived at the realization that in Toronto every second person is an immigrant, and assembled a package of foreign-language channels. I ordered it and settled in to wait for the installer, which took two weeks, which by local standards is brisk.
He appeared on a grey morning. He was a man, technically. Long service in the beer trenches had worn the distinction down to something more geological than personal, but no reasonable observer would have filed him under women either. He began by pretending he had no idea why he had been sent, and after a short conversation admitted that he understood the mission perfectly, and went out with visible reluctance to take down the old dish and put up the new one.
Before leaving the house he tested every available reason not to work. His unwillingness was so concentrated that it stayed behind in the hallway after he had gone and put two cats to sleep, along with a fly that had come indoors in September and then decided to overwinter rather than face the trip south.
I did not go out with him. It was sleeting, and I was wearing my professional uniform, a dressing gown. This was a mistake, and I knew it was a mistake.
Tradesmen in our part of the country cannot bear a homeowner who does not participate. They hold, as an article of faith, that no adult in these woods can possibly have anything to do that outranks standing in freezing rain handing over a wrench. There are no immigrants here to take the exotic work, so every trade is carried out by the proud descendants of the men who first walked in and started cutting, and in them there still burns the guild pride of the knights of the crowbar.
Deeply insulted, my technician trotted around the house for two hours and prepared to leave. I went to check the television first. It said: NO SIGNAL.
I stopped him by standing in the doorway, thereby cutting off the retreat.
“Bad weather,” he said, and looked at his boots.
“Before you arrived, every other channel worked perfectly. And the weather this morning was worse.”
“Trees are interfering with the signal.”
“We have lived here six years. Those trees have been standing for about a century.”
“I don’t have time to keep working on your dish. I’ve got five more calls. They’ll fire me if I spend two hours at every address.”
“So you’re in a hurry to go and disable the television in five more houses today?”
“The weather is bad and the trees are in the way, and I’m not losing my job over it.”
“Has it occurred to you that this is precisely how a person loses a job?”
I regretted the sentence immediately. Unemployment is not a threat in this district. It is a rumour of a warm bed with a small monthly deposit attached, comfortably sufficient for beer.
“I’ve got nothing else to tell you. If you like, I’ll pull the wires out and file a report that your house is unsuitable for installation as long as it’s surrounded by trees.”
“Our entire region is trees,” I said.“How would you feel if I came to your house and ruined your reception?”
He stopped. This was, visibly, a new manoeuvre. He gave it real thought.
“I’d feel bad,” he admitted, and he smiled.
“Right,” I said, sensing an opening, the way an amateur psychoanalyst does about twenty seconds before the session collapses.“So what would you do about it?”
“I’d take the advice of the technician,” he said,“who explained that the weather is bad and the trees are in the way.”
I let him go. There was nothing there. Somewhere in the conversation I had pushed too hard and offended not the man but the entire structure of his worldview, and he was now prepared to die on my driveway rather than either think or, failing that, simply do the work without thinking, since he clearly valued his mental faculties so highly that he refused to spend any.
I sat down in front of the dead screen. Playing with the remote, I discovered that some of the new channels did in fact appear, while most of the old ones had gone for good. That is: the weather was bad for certain programs and perfectly acceptable for others. Somewhere above the cloud the god of winds was operating a censorship regime according to his own taste, admitting what he liked and blocking the rest.
I sighed and went to complain, which is how the humiliation properly began.
Having dialled the number, I descended through the menus and arrived at an automated employee, a program designed to understand my answers. It could not understand my answers. It informed me, courteously, at intervals, that it had not understood and would I repeat. I have an accent. I have had it for decades. It has survived three countries and it was not going to be talked out of existence by a machine on a Tuesday.
I cursed automation, robotics and the entire scientific project, and put down the phone. I wanted to cry from helplessness. And it would be one thing if I were pursuing something worthwhile. This was television. This was nonsense. And I could not do it.
My wife, correctly reading the situation as pre-revolutionary, took the phone herself and within a few minutes had produced a living human being. I seized the receiver and delivered everything I had. The human calmed me and promised a new technician.
In three weeks.
I nearly wept into the phone. The receiver remained unmoved. Enormous corporations have driven out the small ones and now, comfortable in their monopoly, have become ruder and more indifferent than any government office I have ever stood in, and I have stood in the finest.
The weeks passed. We watched Russian programs, which the new dish did receive, and everything else remained unavailable, which gave the household a strange, one-sided cultural life, like a man who can hear only the left channel.
The second technician arrived on a clear, sunny day, which deprived him of the weather. He was younger and not as far along in his career. It emerged in conversation that none of these men actually work for the company at all; they are contractors, hired job by job. Which means the first one had been lying to me about being fired, on top of everything else, and had done so with real feeling.
He worked on the dish for five minutes, after which the Russian channels also stopped.
I did not shout. I had, by this point, an almost religious calm. I stood at the foot of his ladder like an apprentice and handed him screwdrivers and bolts.
“Trees,” he said.
“Which trees, exactly?” I asked, having decided to hire someone and cut them down.
“All of them,” he said.
“So what do we do?”
“You’d need to sink a pole and mount the dish on that,” he said, and immediately added, so that I would not get ideas, that he does not do that.
“And where would this pole go?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, delighted that I was not going to fight him.
He paced out a distance from the house, consulting the sky, and stopped in the middle of the driveway.
“Here!”
“How do we get the car past it?”
“You can go around,” he said, indicating the ditch.
I understood at that moment that one of us had lost his mind and that the evidence was not conclusive either way. He headed for his van.
“Wait,” I called after him.“Nothing works at all now. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Just do something. How am I supposed to look my children in the eye? Everything worked for five years. I asked for one thing, some Russian channels they don’t even watch, and now there is nothing. They’ll lose all respect for me. They’ll take up drugs, or enlist. These things have happened in families that couldn’t afford a television.”
“It isn’t about money,” he said, with a crooked little smile that said: what a mercenary man you are, and how much of the world you must think is for sale.
“But you’ve made it worse!”
He came back fast, and the speed frightened me, and I was right to be frightened, because his face had changed and he was saying he would now pull out every wire and file the report.
And then it came to me.
“What if,” I said,“we also put the old dish back up? Both of them. At the same time.”
He stopped. The proposal interested him professionally. And, to my astonishment, he agreed, on one condition: I would sign a statement confirming that proper installation at my address is impossible and that I would not complain again.
I said I would sign anything at all if the television worked.
He bolted the old dish up beside the new one, so that the wall of our house now looked like a small listening post monitoring a country that no longer exists. In theory the old channels came in on the old dish and the new channels on the new one. In practice nothing came in on either. He said this was normal and I should call the company.
Then he got up decisively and left, without taking the signature.
I phoned. For one hour a patient stranger walked me through what to connect and what to disconnect, which button to press and which to leave alone. And with two dishes on the wall, everything worked.
So we sit, the whole family, in front of the screen, on which there is absolutely nothing to watch.
I would like to end this with a conclusion, and I have one, though I don’t much like it. Two dishes is more antenna than the house needs, both installers were right in their way, and neither of them was ever going to be moved by argument. What moved it was giving up on being right and proposing something slightly insane. This is, I have come to suspect, the whole method of living in the Canadian bush, and possibly of living anywhere. Nobody out here is going to be persuaded. But almost everybody will help you do something ridiculous, and afterwards, if you’re lucky, it works, and then you can sit down together and watch nothing at all.
In Search of Trouble
Most of us who took shelter in Canada came looking for quiet. We had had enough of wandering about the curved surface of the earth and were hoping for a long rest from the dangers and inconveniences of our own countries.
The locals, by contrast, go looking for trouble with a persistence that has to be admired. This is especially marked in the backwoods, where life is calm, orderly and monotonous, like a roll of bus tickets. Conversation here is almost entirely composed of stories about broken legs, split heads and other self-inflicted damage. They are proud of their bruises. Above all they treasure the unforgettable sensations associated with cracked ribs.
None of these injuries, under any circumstances, may be connected with work or with any other productive process. By the unwritten code of the district, the damage must result from snowmobiles, from climbing rocks, from taking a canoe over a waterfall, or above all from walking across a national park on snowshoes at forty below.
* * *
I should say at once that I have never performed any such feat and therefore cannot offer the reader the authentic experience of walking through deep snow far from the last outposts of civilization. Jack London can, and did, at length, in the passage everybody remembers: the snowshoe going through, the leg coming up an exact half-yard, the beginner collapsing after a hundred yards, and then the silence, which he considered the most convincing argument for a man’s mortality ever devised, more convincing than storms or earthquakes, because it does not argue at all. A man alone in it is frightened by the sound of his own voice, understands that he is a worm, and begins, very much against his will, to think about God.
I quote from memory and I am aware that quoting it at all is a form of showing off, given that I have never gone further into the bush than the end of my own driveway in slippers.
Which brings me to Cameron.
* * *
Cameron is the partner of one of our colleagues, a vivid personality with a colourless biography. Where the local people of Scottish descent find these names I have never established. Like most of the men here he is a carpenter. In his private life, however, Cameron is an explorer.
At some point he got it into his head to walk the length of Algonquin Park on snowshoes. This is a park roughly the size of a small Middle Eastern country.
The first attempt ended in a full-scale rescue operation involving the local emergency services and a helicopter.
This did not prevent a second attempt, which also failed.
On the second occasion he was recovered several days in by a party of honest poachers, who found a frostbitten but still breathing body and, judging it inedible on the grounds of general desiccation combined with persistent freshly-frozenness, delivered him to his family, thereby interrupting the private conversation with God described above.
It should be recorded that Cameron took dogs on both expeditions and returned from both alone. On the first, his favourite dog was eaten by wolves almost immediately. The fate of the second dog was never established. There are people in this district, not friends of his, who suspect that Cameron ate it himself. This is presumably why, when he began preparing for a third expedition, his partner declined to lend him a dog. She informed him, tenderly, that he was welcome to die on his own and the animal had nothing to do with it.
On the third attempt Cameron’s luck turned, and at forty below he crossed the park from north to south, thereby accomplishing a feat worthy of a genuine idiot.
And what, you will ask, happened after the achievement of a lifelong ambition?
Nothing in particular. Cameron set off on a fourth expedition, by the identical route. That one required the helicopter again.
* * *
Where does it come from, this appetite for being killed?
Boredom, you will say, and I would agree with you, except that I keep returning to the other possibility. Perhaps God has genuinely left the churches, and if you want a word with him now you have to put yourself entirely at the mercy of the White Silence.
* * *
The colleague who told me the Cameron epic is herself devoted to dangerous pastimes.
She savours her injuries. She has fallen off horses. She has played women’s field hockey with what I am reliably informed was a ball made of cement. She has jumped out of aeroplanes, and off high places head first while tied to a rope by the ankles, and has roller-skated across thin spring ice, and has climbed a greased pole for prizes while, and I want to be accurate here, substantially undressed from the waist up.
But her true subject is the evolution of bruises.
“I had one here the size of a frying pan,” she says with pride, indicating a well-upholstered knee.“It started out crimson, then it went blue, and then the edges turned purple and the middle went black.”
She says this with real regret, the way a man speaks of a house he used to own.
Her son then contributed his own memories: riding an old sofa through the rapids of a mountain river; jumping off a cliff; an attempt at flight from the roof; and a game of baseball as a result of which he was operated on in the reconstructive facial surgery department. Plus assorted minor mischief.
* * *
From all of which one may conclude that however calm and orderly a man’s life may be, he will, if he genuinely wants to, find as much trouble as he requires.
We immigrants are not in this league. We have nothing to set against these titans, these pioneers, these builders of a great northern country. One wants to stand up and sing something solemn, in memory of all those who left this world before their time, whose lives were cut short in the triumphant pursuit of a truly magnificent bruise.
Socks
I want to report the leading cause of divorce in the Canadian backwoods, and I want to be believed, which will be difficult.
It is socks.
* * *
Consider John, who is a real man and whose name is not John.
John married Mary somewhat late, as people do here, where a couple will often reach forty before producing a single child, on the theory that the world is full and there are only so many carrots to go round. They had the child. And then John, for no reason anybody could identify at the time, left Mary and went to live with Elizabeth, who was herself divorced and had children of her own, and who now had John’s evenings as well.
Mary did not waste a season. She found herself a new husband, Fred, who continues to pay support to his own children by an earlier marriage. So that everybody in the district is living with somebody else’s wife and raising somebody else’s children, and this arrangement is regarded not as a tragedy but as Tuesday.
I have to confess that when I first arrived I could not tell any of them apart, and I did not understand why John left Mary for Elizabeth, because Mary and Elizabeth appeared to me to be the same person wearing a different coat.
Eventually it was explained to me.
Mary had reproached John for leaving his dirty socks on the bedroom floor instead of carrying them to the wash.
That is the whole of it. That is the entire content of the file.
* * *
Now, Elizabeth had made exactly the same complaint to her own previous husband, on exactly the same grounds, and had watched that marriage go down with all hands. Having acquired this bitter education, she made a decision, and the decision was to say nothing about socks ever again.
And John, in his second marriage, is a changed man. He carries his socks to the wash personally. He has been known to do dishes. He arrived at this reform by a calculation that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with arithmetic: it is cheaper than losing another half of everything he owns, as he did when he lost Mary, whom, if you catch him after the fourth beer, he plainly still loves, and about whom he is unmistakably jealous of Fred.
Ask John why he got divorced and you will receive the truthful answer, delivered without irony, by a man who has thought about it a great deal:
“The socks.”
* * *
I raise all this not to be amusing at John’s expense, although I see that I have been, but because I believe the situation is soluble and that nobody is working on it.
We have been told for thirty years that the family is under pressure from vast historical forces. We are shown documentaries. Sociologists are interviewed. Meanwhile the actual mechanism sits in plain view on the bedroom floor, in a pair, one of them inside out.
I therefore propose the disposable sock.
I understand the environmental objection and I am prepared to hear it, but I want the objectors to be honest about what they are defending. On one side of the scale: a small quantity of additional textile waste. On the other: the emotional wreckage of two households, four children, a house sold at the wrong moment, and a man in his fifties who cannot hear the name Fred without leaving the room.
If the disposable sock is politically impossible, I will settle for a national programme of sock amnesty, in which one spouse per household is permitted, once a year, to say the thing they have been not saying, and the other is required by law to receive it without leaving.
I have raised this in conversation locally and got nowhere. There is a general feeling that I do not understand how these things work, and that a man who once ate borscht at his own table with a spoon carved out of a tree root is not well placed to advise anybody on domestic harmony.
Which is fair. But I notice that I am still married, and that I have never in my life been asked where my socks are, and I have a theory about why, and it is that my wife decided very early on that there were going to be larger problems.
Act of Revenge
Madeleine’s small rented apartment became completely empty when her seventeen-year-old daughter ran away.
The apartment, two rooms, had been taken for the two of them. Before that Madeleine had lived with her partner, but when the daughter came down from the small French-speaking town in the north, things between Madeleine and Sam deteriorated, and he put them both out.
Madeleine was well past forty-five. She had kept her figure and had not entirely lost the ability to be attractive to the less discriminating men of the district.
The daughter was called Nellie. She was modern in every respect, smoked a great deal, and frequently replaced the semi-legal cigarette with the entirely illegal one. She fell in with the wrong people, and when Madeleine confronted her about it, disappeared. Some time later she telephoned from Alberta, where oil had begun to be extracted from sand and where a great many people had gone in search of work that pays.
So Madeleine was alone in an apartment she could not afford, since she was also sending money to her eighty-year-old mother, who had stayed behind in the French town to finish out her life there, and helping her son, who was studying in Vancouver, which is as far from here as it is possible to go without leaving the country.
Madeleine had three jobs. At night she worked in the laundry of a hotel complex. In the evenings she sold cosmetics in a shop. In the mornings she taught French to the English-speaking population of Huntsville, of which there is no shortage.
When did she sleep? She did not, particularly. She did not eat much either. She had acquired the habit of an ascetic life over so many years that it seemed to her that this was how things were arranged, and that on the whole her life had more or less worked out.
The summit of Madeleine’s ambition was a post teaching French in a school. She did not have the qualification and so she was never hired.
Her face varied enormously. When she was tired or unhappy it became the mask of an old woman. When things were level, you could not deny that a certain amount of the old prettiness was still there.
* * *
The one creature that had stayed loyal to her was an elderly cat named Hilda, who could still remember the days when Madeleine was married.
It was with the cat that the whole business happened.
Madeleine, against her own judgement, let the second room to a man. She did not like him. He was visibly of the disreputable kind. But the arithmetic of the month required a lodger, and she took him.
On the first night he came home drunk and fell onto the mattress on the floor of his room without undressing and without troubling to shut the door.
Hilda, first, did not like men. Second, she did not like drunks. When Madeleine permitted herself a whisky or two, Hilda would register her disapproval by urinating directly on Madeleine’s blanket.
Madeleine did not become angry with the cat and did not scold her. She would seal the blanket in plastic and take it to the dry cleaner, which was not cheap and cost her a full day’s wages.
That night Hilda decided to deal with the lodger, and climbed onto his blanket, and performed her customary act of revenge.
In the morning the lodger got up with a serious headache and could not work out why his bedding smelled the way it did. The following night he caught her at it.
He seized the cat and shook her the way you shake a piggy bank you suspect of being empty. Madeleine came running and got the animal away from him.
But the man had taken it personally, and he waited. And when the cat was asleep in the evening on Madeleine’s bed, he came in and performed, upon the cat, an act of revenge of precisely the kind that the cat had been performing upon him.
Hilda, half asleep, did not at first understand what was happening. Then she understood, and shot out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen, where Madeleine was. The man, without doing up his trousers and without breaking off the act of revenge, hurried after her.
That is how Madeleine met them, arriving in her kitchen more or less together.
She became hysterical. She struck him several times with a frying pan that happened to be on the stove, and threw him out of the apartment, and then washed Hilda with soap in the kitchen sink, while the cat screamed without stopping, from fright and from insult, which in cats are not separate things.
The lodger did not go quietly. He hammered on the door until the neighbours called the police.
When the officer arrived and asked Madeleine what had happened, she said:
“This man urinated on my cat.”
He was arrested, and spent some time in jail on a charge of cruelty to animals.
* * *
Since then the thought of a man produces in Madeleine a nausea that clings like homesickness on a northern night.
Now, when she sees a man in the street or in a shop, she says under her breath,“Nobody is ever going to urinate on my cat again,” and turns away, and that is the end of it.
Night Fishing, Outcome Unknown
Some readers may have formed the impression that I do not like people, that I sneer continuously, and that I make listless attempts to be funny at the expense of the population of the Canadian backwoods.
This is not the case. I like people. Less than I used to, admittedly. I cannot say what that is connected with, but formerly I liked them almost to the point of nausea, of the kind that comes on at moments of particularly acute feeling.
It is no accident that I dream, practically every night, that I have appeared in public without my trousers. I am pained and ashamed by the inconvenience I am causing. Let people see. I have nothing to hide, and nothing to be proud of, and my compositions are boring and barely disturb the reader.
So let us proceed to the subject of this chapter, which is a woman named Jenny, and let it be understood that I am fond of her, and that I am not going to be able to prove it.
* * *
Jenny is about thirty. The tattoo on her leg is beginning to look coarse, but its bearer is still slim, and when she wishes to be attractive to men she looks foolish and, it must be said, rather charming. For most of her daily existence, however, she does not attempt to be attractive to men. She has three sons, every one of them the possessor of magnificent red hair. Being a worthy great-granddaughter of Scottish settlers, Jenny has carried the free gene of redness proudly through the generations and preserved it intact.
Jenny is not married. The father of all three sons is a large, restless man of difficult character with a tendency toward the company of the green serpent. He never quite got round to marrying her, and afterwards they sort of divorced, although they continue to live together.
This form of relations is encountered here at every step. I do not know when the fashion took hold, but it is now rare to meet anybody living in lawful matrimony. Possibly the cause lies in the small payment one must make at the town hall to obtain a licence to be wed, or possibly the town hall was simply closed for renovations too long, and people noticed that the ancient institution of marriage can be managed without.
Jenny is intelligent, and confirms by her own example the proverb about the shoemaker without shoes. She completed a first degree in English literature by correspondence, and writes with prodigious errors.
And that would be only half the trouble. A great many people have forgotten how to write since the arrival of computers. I myself, if obliged to write anything by hand longer than a cheque, begin to suffer pains in the authorial joint.
The problem is that Jenny declines, on principle, to use the spellcheck, and worse, consistently occupies positions whose duties include the editing of text. The other day she was unable to locate the capital of Canada on the internet and complained loudly about it, refusing to believe her eyes.
“It’s not such a small town that it wouldn’t be on the internet at all!” she wailed.
On inspection it turned out that she had spelled the name of the city with three mistakes in it.
* * *
The other day Jenny did not come to work.
It emerged that she had spent the entire night at the hospital with her husband who is not her husband. Let us say, with the father of her children.
The poor devil had decided to earn a little extra and had taken on the job of relaying somebody’s shingles. For courage he had taken something warming, and had declined to use the safety rope.
The consequences did not keep him waiting. Our roofer fell from the height of a third storey.
And even that was not enough. He fell precisely into a pit. And six boxes of shingles came down on top of him.
A sober man, after an event of that kind, generally proceeds to heaven, or to hell, depending on the outcome of his tax return, since in the modern world there are no sins other than the non-payment of taxes. Our hero got off with several broken bones in one foot.
Jenny reported this with an indeterminate smile, but when she reached the foot she announced almost triumphantly that the surgeons had spread their hands and said it would not knit.
“They may have to take the leg off,” she said cheerfully.
Despite the many years I have spent behind the Canadian lines, I have never grown used to the fact that speaking with a smile about the death of one’s relatives, about the price of funerals and about assorted injuries and mutilations is not a manifestation of a concealed sadism in the local population. Presumably it is their centuries-old puritanism expressing itself, a particular upbringing that forbids the display of feeling.
Although in Jenny’s case it seemed to me that she was recounting the event with an unhealthy relish. Certainly the man had worn her down thoroughly. But where is the logic? She will now be looking after him until the grave. Or perhaps she means to put him out on the street, now that he is lame. Off you go, my dear. Have a nice walk.
* * *
If you think there is something unusual about Jenny’s situation, you will no doubt be interested to learn that she has an identical twin.
Kristin also lived many years with a man who was not her husband, from whom she recently as it were divorced, although no such procedure was in fact required. After the divorce she moved into Jenny’s house, and they now live in three rooms with the lame husband who is not a husband and five red-haired boys, the twin sister having produced two children with her own not-husband, who also had the good fortune to acquire the ancient Scottish gene of redness.
And the other day something else occurred.
The lame husband mysteriously vanished. They searched all night. Toward morning he returned soaked to the skin.
“I did wonder whether he’d gone and drowned himself, the wretch,” Jenny reported cheerfully.
But the husband who is not a husband announced that he had been fishing; that he had brought no fish because the swine from Toronto had caught all the fish; that what he had managed to catch had been taken off him by the inspectors from the Ministry of Natural Resources; that he was drunk because he had needed to warm up after falling in the water; that he had fallen in the water because he is lame; that he is lame because Jenny is a swine; and that her sister is her exact copy.
Notwithstanding that the not-husband has lived with Jenny for no less than fifteen years, he cannot tell her apart from her twin, particularly when the twin puts on Jenny’s clothes. And here, naturally, there have been incidents, for which we cannot really blame him, since the presence in the house of two identical not-wives produces in a normal man a flickering before the eyes, and it becomes impossible to establish who may be slapped on the backside and who may not.
“It would have been better if he’d drowned,” Jenny says tenderly, and a slightly embarrassed smile appears on her face.“And how did he get out of the water, lame as he is?” she goes on, unable to leave it alone.
* * *
Jenny dreams of becoming a writer.
It seems to me that she could. She would simply describe her own life, and the laurels would be hers.
And people talk about the mysteries of the Russian soul. Go and read, by the light of a nervously burning candle, the mysteries of the souls that populate the Canadian backwoods. I assure you that all the letters will jump up and run together into a single tangled thread, and you will not make out in those souls any predicates, or adjectives, or adverbs.
There will be nothing left but interjections, and those with mistakes in them.
The Round Table
I want to write about the young men of this district, and I want to say in advance that I have tried to write this chapter twice before and thrown both attempts away, because both times it came out as the complaint of a man who has been here twenty-five years and still cannot forgive the place for not being what he ordered.
Here is the version I threw away.
The young men of the Canadian backwoods constitute a special tribe. While their contemporaries elsewhere are dodging armies that break teeth, running from the sharpened spoons of their comrades and competing for the attention of girls, our spirited horses of the backwoods lead the drowsy existence of the well-fed, the stoned and the self-satisfied. They loiter in school until eighteen. They loiter out of school for several years more. Some take a student loan and go off to acquire a degree in Sciences Nobody Requires, and return, and wash dishes seasonally to pay down the loan, which lends them a social over-excitement, a slightly bitter smile, and a condescending view of those who never obtained a degree at all. Then an endless chain of insignificant attachments, a marriage at thirty to somebody comparable, a second at forty, and a final and irrevocable one at sixty.
Every word of that is accurate and the whole of it is worthless, because it is written by a man standing outside a window looking in and awarding marks.
* * *
So let me try it the other way round, and begin with the napkins.
Start a serious conversation with any of these young men, after the fourth beer, and within twenty minutes you will be given his genealogy. Not vaguely. Not in the manner of the American who has heard that there is Irish somewhere. In detail, with dates, with the name of the ship, with the county in Scotland, with an account of which brother stayed and which came over and what happened to the one who stayed.
And then, if the evening has gone well, he will take a napkin and draw you the Round Table.
He will draw it accurately. He will place the seats. He will tell you where Lancelot sat and why. And then he will indicate a point somewhat behind and to the left of the table, and inform you, without a trace of irony, that this is where his own people were standing, carrying in the meat and the peas and the beer.
Not sitting at it. Standing behind it. Carrying things.
That is the claim, and I have never once heard it made boastfully. It is made the way a man tells you the name of the river he grew up on.
* * *
I did not have anything to put on the napkin.
I had arrived without ancestors. Not literally; I have as many as anybody, and I can name a few, and one or two of them were interesting. But I did not arrive with them. They did not come over on a ship into this landscape. Nothing here is named after any of them. There is no county in Scotland, no brother who stayed, no cemetery within four thousand kilometres containing anybody who belongs to me.
And this, I have slowly come to understand, is the actual difference between us, and everything I used to think was the difference was decoration on top of it.
A man who is broke, unemployable and thirty-four, and who is descended, in his own settled opinion, from the servants of the Round Table, is not in the same condition as a man who is broke, unemployable and thirty-four. He has somewhere to stand. He has a reason to be exactly where he is and nowhere else, which is a reason I have never had about anywhere, and it is not nothing, and it cannot be bought with a degree or a job or a house on a hill.
I have a house on a hill. I bought it in an afternoon because the weather was nice.
* * *
None of which is to say that I have gone soft on the drinking, or the loans, or the astonishing capacity of a young man here to remain motionless for eleven years while the seasons go past his window.
But I have noticed something about the way we talk when the subject comes up.
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They don’t want to work, we say, we newcomers, we of the hungry generation. They have no ambition. Look at the Indian kids, look at the Filipino kids, they’ll do anything, they’ll drive four hours, they’ll do the shift nobody wants.
Yes. And why do they do it?
Because they came, as I came, from somewhere they could not stay, and are trying to build a place to stand. That hunger is not a virtue. It is a symptom. It is what people look like when the ground is not underneath them yet.
The young man on the porch with the beer already has the ground. He inherited it, along with the napkin and the genealogy and the surname on the war memorial by the post office. He has nothing to prove to the district because the district is where his people have been since before the district existed.
We arrived hungry and we mistook our hunger for a moral quality. That is the whole of the misunderstanding, and I maintained it for two decades.
* * *
I will add one more thing, and then leave the young men alone.
Their grandfathers, on the evidence of the newspapers of 1879, drank far more heavily than they do, shot at each other in hotel corridors, and left the streets full of dead horses. Somebody at the time wrote them off as a wretched consumptive settlement of a hundred souls.
That settlement produced these people, who are polite, who wave at cars on empty roads, who will stop and pull you out of a snowbank at midnight without being asked and without accepting money, and who will not lift a finger for you after nine in the morning.
Give it another century and a half.
I am told that in my old country there are villages just now becoming places where city people go for the weekend.
The Blonde with the Axe
The universal victory of the internet has produced some unexpected mixtures of genetic material, improbable married couples, and romances conducted across borders and continents.
Where once the local lad’s choice of a companion for life was largely confined to the surrounding district, and the question of loves-me-loves-me-not swung between a cousin and the daughter of the man at the mill, those days are behind us. The bridegrooms of the Canadian backwoods, particularly those already well ripened, now prefer to order a wife over the internet. And the brides are there waiting, arranged in rows as in a shop, which is clean and convenient. The rest is a matter of taste.
I do not intend to explain here why the men of this district turn out in such numbers to be men who do not walk past. I intend to explain what they are walking toward, and it is not what they think.
* * *
The other day the local paper printed, on the front page, a group portrait of a party of women hunters.
Please do not imagine anything romantic. No amazons. No Diana. Nothing classical and nothing bare-shouldered. The photograph shows entirely normal women of a certain age.
The story, briefly, is that they had become tired of husbands who disappear into the bush for a week under the pretext of hunting, drink there, and return at the end of this inconvenient holiday with nothing whatever to show for it. And so our women, worn out by fruitless waiting, formed a small, close and exclusively female team and in one week accounted for seven moose, five wolves and a bear.
On the colour photograph the courageous faces of the huntresses are displayed, and at their womanly feet, shod in wading boots, lies the slain with a concentrated expression.
It would be difficult to devise a more erotic spectacle. Having seen that photograph, one wants to renounce sexual reproduction for good.
A coarse man is always drawn toward tenderness. And how is such a huntress to be tender? She splits wood competently. She can carry a two-door refrigerator on her back, dig holes, drive piles. Tenderness is not her department.
But where is one to find a sultry blonde who can also handle an axe? Why must she handle an axe? you will ask. Because the winter firewood has to be got in.
The men of this district are extremely stubborn in their determination to combine tender feeling with the recruitment of labour. Hence the pull toward foreign brides, who arrive on the wings of hope with their souls open, and discover that our men drink and are rude. After which: scandals, mutual violence, the division of property, and other unpleasantness. And having barely parted from the unsuccessful spouse, who is generally sensible enough not to display her true temperament until the citizenship has come through, our tireless grooms dart back onto the internet.
It is not for nothing that the Canadian government has placed a limit on the frequency of these collisions, permitting a citizen to sponsor a spouse from abroad once every two or three years. No more often. It is not allowed.
* * *
We have few foreigners in the backwoods, but occasionally a rare specimen appears from a distant country, since the ministries post their staff all over Canada. That is how we came to have among us a small, quick man from Cambodia named Vuthy.
Vuthy was in his fifties and had arrived in Canada not long before. He had lived through the years of the Khmer Rouge, and I am going to set down what that means without decoration, because he told it to me without decoration.
The regime that held Cambodia in the second half of the nineteen seventies destroyed something in the order of two million people, which by proportion of population places it among the most murderous in recorded history. Writing was abolished. Money was abolished. Foreign languages were abolished. The country was converted into agricultural communes with a twenty-hour working day. City people were removed from the cities under the pretext of evacuation and placed in labour barracks. Execution was available for the smallest infraction, including the birth of a child without the permission of the commune leadership, and including nostalgia for the period before the revolution. The vocabulary was reconstructed: citizens were designated instruments in the hands of the Organization, and literary words, down to mother and father, were replaced with dialect forms. The country was almost entirely sealed off. Even the name and the face of the leader were kept from the population.
Vuthy went through most of that. They damaged his kidneys, which is why he had to leave a room frequently, and which is a detail I would not include except that it belongs to him and he mentioned it himself, and cheerfully, in the manner of people from that part of the world, who smile at exactly the points where a smile is least expected.
And this man, with that behind him, fell for the local fashion.
He saw the neighbours ordering blondes, and he groaned aloud with envy. He went straight onto the internet and within a week had fallen in love with a young woman from a small village in Siberia.
Seven days after that he came round to say goodbye.
“I’m off to Russia,” he announced from the doorway, radiant, and produced a pair of leather gloves he had bought for the purpose.
“It’s very cold in Siberia. Colder than here. You need mittens.”
“Nonsense. We survived Pol Pot. We’ll survive this,” said Vuthy, and embraced me in farewell. He was short and reached to about my shoulder.
* * *
Some time later our bridegroom returned from distant and mysterious Siberia with frostbitten fingers and a beautiful wife.
Glasha mostly sat and shelled sunflower seeds and said little about herself. But the moment Vuthy left the room, she would remark, invariably: foreigner. This in a district where the Russians within a fifty-kilometre radius could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
In short, something did not come together with the Siberian beauty, and they parted.
Before long he brought back a new one, this time from Moscow. On that occasion he had prudently gone in summer.
He did not introduce her to me. He came round only to ask what a certain affectionate Russian word meant, the one she used for him.
“Which word?” I asked, with some interest.
“Suka,” he said mildly, and looked at me expectantly, and smiled. He smiled often, and laughed, at moments when there was nothing whatever to laugh about. That is the habit of people from that part of the world.
“Ah,” I said.“It’s, well. It’s an untranslatable word.”
“Is it affectionate?” he asked hopefully.
“Unquestionably,” I lied, having no wish to be the cause of the collapse of an unsteady marriage.
It collapsed shortly afterwards without my assistance.
* * *
I thought he would stop there. We were all extremely fond of him and it was painful to watch a man suffer at regular intervals from failed love. The most striking feature of the whole business was that every one of his brides stood a full head taller than me, whereas the applicant, as you will recall, barely reached my shoulder.
But he did not stop. He found a Russian love once again, this time in Sochi, and set off south in pursuit of happiness.
Not long ago I met him walking in the park. He was accompanied by a tall dark-haired woman who did not have the classical Russian appearance. She was, I think, from the Caucasus. Vuthy cheerfully introduced me to her and glanced slyly at her rounded stomach, indicating that an addition was expected.
It turned out that his present wife is Armenian.
Let us hope that this time everything will be in order, although I have no doubt at all that he will go on dreaming of the treacherous Russian blondes with which the internet is filled.
Perhaps I ought to buy his wife a white wig.
Though what would be the use. You cannot deceive nature, and you certainly cannot deceive a man who has survived Pol Pot and come out the other side determined, against all available evidence, to fall in love.
Part Three — Escape Attempts
Port Hope
However banal it may sound, sitting in the middle of nowhere is boring. Now and then one wants to get up and travel. To visit, for example, a different nowhere.
It is particularly interesting to drive wherever the eyes happen to look, to let the road decide, and to stop where stopping happens, without tedious planning and without any expectation of comfort or an abundance of sights.
One wants a mouthful of that kind of spatial freedom, especially when the usual dwelling has begun to press, and the familiar walls oppress you with their predictability. If you can find your way to your own bed in complete darkness without once barking a shin, that is a reliable sign that it is time to travel.
Being a confirmed specialist in the middle of nowhere, I spread my withered sails and set off on a charming if faintly painful wander. Canada is a dangerous country in this respect. You can wander for a very long time, the spaces being famously endless and barely occupied. Occupied with such thoughts I drove south and dropped anchor in an unremarkable town resting somewhere on the shore of Lake Ontario.
I think it was the name that drew me. Port Hope.
How often the word hope turns up in place names. They run from the obscure and forgotten all the way up to the epochal blocks, the Cape of Good Hope. An enchantingly naive construction, as though hope could be bad. Would you name a monolith sticking out of the ocean the Cape of Evil Hope? I would not.
And in all conscience, we have forgotten what travel used to mean. Leaving Europe, people said goodbye for ever. Some of them were tossed about for months in a stinking floating prison until they reached their destination, which was an empty patch of land that had to be nursed and made habitable for us, today’s arrivals. And we came to the finished article. We flew in on new aeroplanes out of whose windows Canada looks like a velvet carpet of forest. So one ought not to look down on the people who assembled this harsh country for us in considerable pain. Let us at least pay our taxes promptly and cross the road at the crossings, out of respect for men who laid the foundations of our future cities while suffering from scurvy and tomahawks.
* * *
The inconvenience of any journey is the sense of being unclaimed and homeless. That is the coin one pays for the promised variety of landscape.
Gripped by the fear of finding myself without a bed, I prayed to the Lord not to leave me to shiver under the open sky and to provide some minimal shelter. It is no accident that the tiny hotel I stumbled on in the dark stood directly opposite a church, since God evidently finds it more convenient to allocate accommodation close to his place of work. My dear Creator had seen to it in advance, in 1789, by founding this excellent little town, this port of hope. At times I believe it was done solely so that I should have somewhere to sleep on the peculiar evening when I abandoned my own hearth and unexpectedly began to travel. Descartes would have supported me fully in this subjectivism, but we have been obliged to manage without Descartes for several centuries now, and that, unfortunately, is an objective fact.
The hotel occupied an old house. A staircase with minute steps climbed steeply to the upper floor. Without noticing it, we have turned into heavy overgrown creatures, whereas our ancestors were miniature gnomes; they sat on tiny low chairs, ran on small feet up fragile steps, and with their small hands made history, unlike us, the long-limbed dolts of the twenty-first century. Imagine that in another two hundred years people begin growing to the size of moderately well-fed dinosaurs. That will be a business.
At any rate a priest had probably once lived in the house where I intended to spend the night, so there was no need to fear ghosts. Positive persons are admitted to heaven directly, without competition and without an examination, and their souls are therefore not obliged to frighten guests who have come unstuck in the middle of the night.
I climbed the steep stairs and entered a quiet room, quiet to the point of a certain strained silence.
However we move about in space, it seems that nothing changes. Seneca noted that you cannot escape yourself, and he was not the only one. It turns out oddly: you travel to the ends of the earth and everything there is the same. Motes waltzing in a beam of sun, a hard mattress, the unaltered ticking of a clock. The view in the window changes, certainly. Forests, then lakes, then seas. But immediately around you everything stays as it was, as though we carry with us an impermeable shell, a plastic aura of the self, and however far the passion for locomotion may take us, you cannot get away from yourself, at least not within the reliable framework of material existence.
I had barely made myself comfortable before the illusion crept in that I might live here for the rest of my life, in this very room with its catastrophically regular clock. That I would sit and look at this old street and do nothing, or perhaps write strange verses that nobody would understand, intended for myself alone, and possibly in a language known only to me.
This desire to settle for ever in the strangest and most accidental place available pursues me frequently. Several times I have obeyed it. Now I am tired and I drive the feeling off almost as soon as it appears. But here the magic of the name had done its work. Port Hope.
And what does a man want with hope in the first place? Hope is always attached to the future, and the future, as we know, is a short-lived commodity and therefore unreliable. Why can none of us live in the present moment, which is enchanting in its simplicity and simultaneously in its complexity? Is that moment not the single link between a man and eternity? And what does a man want with eternity? Are we so badly off in our brevity? A great many of us seem to have settled into it quite comfortably.
The night passed quietly. Clocks struck, first on one tower and then on another. Somewhere in the distance a trivial train went by.
* * *
By morning my plans to remain in Port Hope for life had evaporated. The hotel was full for the following night, which meant that I would be continuing my sudden journey.
Coming down to breakfast, I was formally introduced to an elderly couple. From the first word they gave away a slightly faded British accent. Looking absently out of the window, I obediently opened with the weather. My companions brightened and took up the conversation, which was enchanting in its emptiness. They informed me that they had lived in Canada since 1967 and had just returned from a tour of the south of England. I nodded that yes, yes, I had been there.
“Did you enjoy it?” the lady asked at once.
For some reason I said nothing. Her face clouded, since it expressed an unconditional readiness to hear an affirmative.
“You didn’t enjoy it?” she asked, with an astonished irritation. She now reminded me of a schoolmistress from my own tedious childhood. I came to at the stinging note in her suddenly sharpened voice.
“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” I said hurriedly, to relieve the pressure.“I was simply trying to remember the name of the place that made the strongest impression on me. Glastonbury, I think. That church with the ruined vault, where instead of a roof there is a bottomless blue sky.” It was Henry the Eighth who saw to it; he was going through a phase of demolishing Catholic buildings at the time.“And also,” I said, frowning, because a green mound had appeared in front of my eyes,“also the grave of King Arthur. They say he is buried there.”
I remembered clearly the impression the place had made. I had gone so far as to produce a poem about it:
The abbey at Glastonbury,
Its bones laid bare,
Looked at me sternly: *take it,
Take all, we’ve none to spare.*
No walls, only ribs, and the ribs
Without a roof to bear,
Standing up out of the grass: *well?
Have you nothing to declare?*
Arthur’s grave is green as anything,
The sky above so wide
There is no recovering from it.
And rightly. In a countryside
A church should be no more
Than a frame around the air,
Or else it hoists its heavy weight
And puts itself up there
In place of the sky it stands under,
And calls itself the prayer.
“We have at least five places where Arthur is said to be buried,” said my companion’s voice, sobering me.
On his faded but curiously smooth face there played a small smile, seasoned with a courteous mockery.
Well, there you are. For years that memory had sustained me, and now it turned out that it might not be Arthur’s grave at all. It came back to me that my accountant had remarked the other day that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men. These thoughts finally ruined the flavour of the toast and jam I had been trying to consume.
The English pair went on burbling for a while about their plans, about having come for some tournament involving lawn bowls. I listened in silence, nodding politely in time with their measured speech. Privately I was thinking that I too would like, at seventy, to be dragging myself about the earth playing at bowls.
Then a couple from Quebec joined the table. The wife was evidently uncomfortable, since she understood English poorly. I said a couple of pleasant words to her in the language of Molière, at which she unexpectedly responded with a torrent of Quebec dialect that leapt out of her mobile mouth with great agility. From this monologue I understood only that she felt uncomfortable because she understood English poorly. Sometimes I think I understand French badly not because I miss the words I know, but because I do not understand the underlying point of the speaker’s words.
Her husband, delighted that the conversation had gone over into French, put a question to me.
“Are you going to Quebec for a week?”
I froze and did not know what to answer. Why had he decided I was going to Quebec? And above all, why for a week?
The gentleman from Quebec took my confusion for incomprehension and repeated the question in English, which did not make it any less strange.
And there is the whole thing. I understand them badly because I am dealing with a different type of mind. They make a supposition and thereby ask a question. We would ask where are you headed, whereas these people decide something for themselves and get on with it.
“Je ne sais pas,” I muttered, and retreated hastily to my room to pack.
I really did not know where I was going. And which of us does?
A Critical Mass
It is interesting to observe a foreign person in a state of respectable intoxication.
On the one hand he resembles our own drunk entirely: the same physiological manifestations, the hiccup for example. Inwardly, however, he seems quite other, mysterious, unexplored. Our own man, when drunk, becomes comprehensible to us and even, in some way, close. The foreign man drunk withdraws further, becomes wholly alien, enigmatic, and therefore simultaneously attractive and repellent.
In the course of my travels through the Canadian nowheres I stopped in Kingston. It is a larger place than the classic backwoods, though it cannot be counted among the pockmarked faces of the great cities.
You are probably unaware, as I was, that the word kingston translates not only as royal town but also as the valved opening in the hull of a vessel below the waterline through which water is admitted or discharged. Sitting in the corner of Lake Ontario, Kingston is indeed a kind of valve, a turning point, after which the road no longer follows the endless lake surface but bends northeast toward Quebec, which never did manage to become free, either of the English or of itself.
We do not generally suspect that Quebec is a remarkable historical and philosophical phenomenon. The French who settled it never experienced the corruption of the French Revolution. They remained worthy of their musketeer ancestors, small d’Artagnans who no longer arrive in Paris on yellowish nags but drive to conquer Montreal in second-hand Subarus of the same doubtful colour.
Quebec was taken by the English before the virus of liberty, mixed with bloody rhetoric, could be introduced. Hence the white lilies on the blue field of the Quebec flag: nothing other than the emblem of a decapitated French monarchy. You will not find that anywhere else now. The spirit of royal France, of loyal nobility and heartfelt Catholicism, vanished at home and still hangs over the fields of Quebec, and there is something miraculous in it.
A people descended from perhaps ten thousand settlers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries speaks an old northern French dialect full of local words and expressions, with a habit of addressing strangers and half-strangers in the familiar form, a survival of peasant informality.
To taste the atmosphere of an old France not yet torn apart by its own great revolution, one should travel slowly along the waters of the St Lawrence, at whose head sits Kingston.
And this is not merely a river. At first a diffident current, it becomes a mighty flow that out-spits the Volga for breadth, then surpasses the Nile in that unshakeable talent for flooding, then flicks the Amazon on the nose, and finally pours into the Atlantic as an enormous gulf full of whales and other marine improbabilities.
* * *
In Kingston, a town famous for having Canada’s most celebrated prisons, I spent an unforgettable evening in a hotel where a noisy wedding was in progress, and was therefore able to observe a considerable number of foreign persons in a state of emotional unsteadiness.
I had put aside the latest of the delirious books I read exclusively in order not to suffer acute envy of other authors — this one argued that Gogol’s The Nose conceals a deep erotic meaning and constitutes an undoubted manifestation of the castration complex — and went downstairs to the people. How long can one go on trusting strained books? Time to plunge into the human sea of feeling and event. How long can one go on running to the ends of the earth without understanding that light, whatever its corpuscular-wave nature, has no edge and can have none, and is edgeless, however unwilling it may be to shine in the required direction.
In short, I was sufficiently intoxicated by my own boredom and idleness to compete on equal terms with the guests who had filled the hotel and whose cars had now dammed the entire car park.
Many of us, with the natural exception of the sentimental, feel a private revulsion for weddings. What could be uglier than such a ritual? As though the parties needed universal attention in order to bring themselves to kiss each other in public. The deathly pallor of the wedding dress, which is meant to inspire the joyful anticipation of love, has in our times become a compulsory ritual, a badly disguised farce set against a general impoverishment of morals. Particularly interesting is the modern interpretation of the wedding night, that trembling mystery, which now takes place between two people who have lived together for at least five years. They say that the grander the wedding the shorter the marriage. Statistically, the duration of a marriage does not correlate with the length of the acquaintance preceding it, so that long deliberation before the wedding in no way strengthens the future union.
Going outside with these seditious thoughts, I enjoyed the boundless smell of the neighbouring marshes and watched the couples spilling out of the hall, who held their footing poorly and uncertainly but adhered to one another strictly along the lines of sex. Middle-aged girls in evening dresses hung on middle-aged boys sealed into black suits that did not suit them. Both parties were talking the nonsense customary in such circumstances. If a disinterested naturalist wished to describe the relations in question, nobody would recognize in them any human charm. Bird colonies, cat weddings, whatever else there may be.
I wanted to go up and ask them what they thought of the institution of marriage. And in particular what would actually happen if human interest in the opposite sex woke only twice a year, as it does in many other mammals, or once a year, as in certain birds. What would that basically asexual world look like? What would our shop windows be, our television, our poetry? Would there be poetry at all? In the mating season there is no time for verse; one has to lock horns with rivals, and if for the rest of the year one remained indifferent, then apart from victory marches no music would be required. And poetry is nothing other than the secret music of the soul.
Flirtation, unobtrusive, sometimes unnoticed even by the flirt, the small contrivances, the smiles, the bold fantasies, the hints. Imagine all that occurring, as it does in dogs, twice a year, in spring and autumn, and for the remainder of the time a gloomy silence and a quarrel over the better bone.
It was, after all, only the day before yesterday that quarrelling was declared bad and war declared immoral. Battle was regarded as a noble occupation throughout the whole of history. The world was harmonious and contained no contradictions. Kings wore crowns, trumpeters blew trumpets, and only in our brief century has everything been turned upside down, and people have suddenly decided to believe that they are equal, that fighting is wrong, and that man is supposedly born free. Rousseau was not the first to have the thought, but he was unquestionably the last one out of the room and was therefore blamed for everything.
* * *
The truth, unfortunately, is that man is born an idiot, and the more advanced of these congenital idiots suddenly begin to suppose that they are not idiots and that everybody else is failing to keep up, and from this arise all the conflicts and discrepancies on earth.
There are people who hold that wars occur because there are too many idiots among the population of the world. This is where the absurdity creeps in. Examine the survivors and it turns out that they are no less idiotic than the brethren they have slandered. I propose abolishing the rank of idiot as obsolete.
Wars are not unleashed by idiots, nor by clever and capable grey cardinals, but by ordinary people. By you and me, although none of us, presumably, considers himself ordinary.
We unleash them by our unwillingness to think, by our inability to look into anything, by our stubborn intention to drag a tiresome burden through an entire life, leaving the thinking to the malicious and the competent, who turn out to be unable and unwilling to think either. So civilizations appear and go out. Somebody’s revolutions unfold unconsciously. Some set of foundations collapses. The entire universe, thoroughly concussed by the Big Bang that allegedly produced it, does its best not to notice itself and to live somehow inconspicuously, edging along, not interfering and not attending its own existence.
The whole problem with the struggle against idiots is that none of us has any natural right to consider another an idiot, and therefore we all remain unappreciated and misunderstood. Being right carries no force. There are as many schemes as there are faces, and as many truths as there are snouts. However carefully you measure them for logic, there is no basis for concluding that you yourself are not an idiot, and therefore no standing to measure the idiocy of anybody else.
The world needs a critical mass of idiots in order to remain pleased with itself, and self-satisfaction on a global scale is the basic condition of humanity’s untroubled existence. The question is not how much rice and flour a man has consumed, but whether he was pleased with himself and with the conditions of his fattening.
Canada, and particularly its splendid backwoods, is a quiet and prosperous place. One ought to keep quiet. There is no need to denounce or riot. God forbid that something should shift. Some nut works loose, some seacock admits water at the wrong moment, and the ship goes down. I know nothing about the sinking of vessels, so I ask to be forgiven the inaccuracy in advance. One must not force reflections on the meaning of life into every mug of beer. The meaning of life should be approached calmly and prosaically, like the character in Platonov who proposed to think up a meaning for his life and thereby raise his productivity.
It is possible that the critical mass of idiots keeps this world in a degree of balance.
So there is no need to worry. Idiots do not exist. There are only modest everyday atlases, holding up, in their trembling hands, a low and slightly drunken sky.
How to Stop Time
In Quebec City, or as the locals have it, Ville de Québec, it seems that the past never leaves. It wanders the narrow streets arm in arm with you and, as one would expect from a medieval tradition, tries to lift your wallet.
The sense of stopped time in that city is so strong that one wants to shut one’s eyes and ears, and the other apertures that perceive the surrounding world no less finely, and open them again only in order to see and hear the venerable Samuel de Champlain in person: the musketeer’s beard, the long waving hair, the sword held out in front of him, conquering the New World and inviting you, directly or by implication, to join him in this absorbing and long-forgotten occupation.
One could, for instance, come down the St Lawrence in the company of Monsieur Champlain and found Ville de Québec, the enchanting capital of New France, a city on a dizzying hill, the only fortified outpost north of Mexico whose considerable works, built to keep the English out, survive to this day.
The walls never did keep the English out, but they look magnificent, and there is the Château Frontenac, an enormous stone giant in the manner of the late Middle Ages, which is in fact a hotel from the end of the nineteenth century.
Everything, including the dim little basement windows, is sealed to the throat in the coats of stone pavement. Nothing remains of the Iroquois village of Stadacona, or of its chief Donnacona. So much has changed that Champlain himself would never believe this was the place.
Many people romanticize the Indigenous nations of Canada and assert that they were more spiritual than the present population. I have nothing whatever against wildness and barbarity; in our day only a madman would speak against such manifestations of national originality. But it does seem to me that being wild is somewhat boring. No book to read, no chance of a discussion on an abstract subject. Imagine yourself born among the pre-Columbian peoples. Hunting, women, the spirits of the ancestors. The spirits of the ancestors, women, hunting. Is that all? And is that what we came into this agitating world of high-browed skies and long-nosed cliffs, grey-eyed lakes and free-flowing rivers, to do?
They say the Indigenous nations looked differently not only at the world but at man, and at the relations between people. Their conceptions of time, of space, of the nature of a problem were different. Time mattered less to them than to us, because to a man who has spent his life in the forest a difference of a few hours is not a quantity. Day and night, light and dark, that is another matter. Technological civilization has placed modern man in a rigid dependence on a counter, on the clock, and in this too we differ from them.
Here is an example of the psychology. In the city you ask a taxi driver when you will arrive at your destination, and he replies that you will arrive when he stops driving. You will decide he is unwell, or that this is his idea of a joke. To someone from that older world it would be an entirely normal answer to a question that is, in his view, without content. Their relation to life cannot be called primitive. It was simply other than ours.
However hard I looked, though, I was unable to find inspiration in the legends themselves. Sit down at the fire and, I am afraid, you may be disappointed. The monotonous voice of the shaman begins, and he will chant his unending story:
We sit by the fire and eat meat. The meat is good, particularly when you thread it onto sticks and drive the sticks into the ground by the fire, for that is how it roasts best.
The narration is occasionally interrupted by the sudden appearance of some figure, the Bear Mother or a spirit of slippery character, but for the most part it is roasted meat and the eternal sitting by the fire.
I do not say that the inner world of the first French settler was much richer. But it was not for nothing that his great compatriot Blaise Pascal said that man is like a child who has woken on a desert island. Darkness surrounds him and he does not know who he is, or where he came from, or where he is to go, or what he is to do. And, strangely enough, that sensation is available to any person at all, the moment he attempts to occupy himself with a thought more spacious than today’s lunch.
* * *
It was Kurt Gödel who maintained that only in fairy tales does the world have sense and something resembling a meaningful direction. Reality is deprived of that rational property of the fairy tale.
Kurt knew what he was talking about. It was he who deprived us for ever of faith in any language whatever, by formulating and proving his celebrated incompleteness theorems, incompleteness in this case having nothing to do with diet or the general mania for slimming. One of the theorems states that any language sufficiently strong to define the natural numbers is incomplete. That is, it contains statements that can neither be proved nor disproved from the axioms of that language.
Having discovered a thing like that, one might well want to run out of a reality thoroughly befouled with doubts and unanswered questions, and into the deep provincial backwoods of human thought, into a crystalline and naive fairy tale, where the characters will at last put everything in its proper place.
Gödel, during his Princeton years, liked to watch the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, over and over.
I have often wondered which of the dwarfs he identified with. Certainly Sneezy, since he wrapped himself in an overcoat and turned the heating on even in summer. In which case Einstein was Happy, the perfectionist Wolfgang Pauli was Doc, Niels Bohr was Grumpy, and Erwin Schrödinger, with his cat that is neither alive nor dead, was at a minimum Bashful. Who ended up as Dopey and Sleepy is a matter for the future historians of science.
Snow White in this fairy tale was Mademoiselle Physics, white and fluffy at a distance, but when you look closely, the devil knows what, with a bow on the side, although following the Heisenberg principle it will never be possible to determine the position of the bow on the dress of Physics if we simultaneously attempt to satisfy ourselves as to the existence of the dress, or more precisely to measure the momentum of the bow in question.
You see what happens when we try to apply the principles of quantum physics in an ordinary wardrobe.
At any rate our Sneezy, Kurt Gödel, was a close friend of Albert Einstein and even produced a paper on general relativity, offering a solution to Einstein’s equations from which it follows that all the events of the world repeat.
Einstein was, as they say, a head. He explained to old Newton, concussed by an apple, what gravity actually is, and he explained to Kant what time actually is. It is a pity those excellent men did not live to hear such fine and intricate explanations.
How surprised Einstein would be if it turned out that his truth was not entirely right either. Will we live to see such an embarrassment? I do not know about you, but I like it when unshakeable scientific theories collapse with a crash. It makes scientists less arrogant, at least for a while.
Kurt Gödel was also a head, notwithstanding the tormenting hypochondria that eventually took him to his grave. He decided to abolish time altogether, while saying nothing about the fact that however the unearthly equations may be resolved out there among the stubbornly rotating galaxies, it makes no difference to us whatever. Just get through the days and try not to reach the cemetery ahead of schedule. Most modern physicists consider Gödel’s solution correct only mathematically and without physical meaning, though who knows. Perhaps we do live in a Gödel universe and have yet to eat yesterday’s lunch again.
Time, incidentally, was not always uniform. Pliny the Elder, who died prematurely at Pompeii under the ash of an over-excited Vesuvius, wrote in his day that an hour in antiquity was not a twenty-fourth part of the full astronomical day, as it is now, but a twelfth part of the actual time from sunrise to sunset, or from sunset to sunrise. The length of an hour therefore varied with the latitude and the season. Depending on the time of year an hour was three quarters or five quarters of our own. By day the hours were counted from sunrise, and by night from the onset of darkness.
It is absurd to say it, but all this otherworldly physics and ancient history has very little bearing on our daily life. Children’s stories about industrious dwarfs are probably more real than the scientific fantasies of brilliant men. We are not fated to pierce space and time, to dive into black holes and telepathically transfer ourselves into other dimensions. We are inseparable parts of the macro-world and its laws do not care to flirt with normal human flesh.
* * *
Such were the thoughts that visited me when I condescended to appear in the least provincial city of the Canadian provinces.
The French charm went to my head, and going into a themed shop called the Three Musketeers, I bought a sword that was almost real, though blunted at the point. I intended to please my son, who like most boys is not indifferent to objects that pierce and cut.
And so, sword in hand, I wandered the old streets, provoking uncertain smiles from passers-by.
Consider it: to walk around a modern city with a sword. There is romance in it. A sense of significance appears, and of protection, and when you enter a shop the assistants glance at you warily but with unconcealed respect, locking the till with a key.
In a fur shop I waved the sword about and correctly distinguished fox from rabbit, which allowed me to lie without consequence and claim to be a keen hunter, particularly since the word le chasseur was for some reason revolving on my tongue. The naive shop assistant, glancing nervously at the sword, believed me. Presumably they concluded that this was the implement with which I conduct my regular expeditions.
“Won’t global warming damage your business?” I asked, unexpectedly even to myself.
The girl smiled.
“It is so cold here in this bear’s corner in the winter that our coats will be in demand for a long time yet.”
In Quebec the girls are charming and are not deprived of a sense of humour, which is more than can be said for the inhabitants of other districts of our severe northern country.
In the next shop, by now in the craftsmen’s quarter of Petit Champlain, I bought a cap of the kind worn by French aviators, and a pair of flying goggles to go with it. The cap, in accordance with local fashion, was made of lambskin.
“No doubt Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry himself made this cap out of the Little Prince’s sheep,” I remarked to the proprietress.
“I have not heard that version of the story,” she muttered, to my surprise, catching my meaning immediately.
“But surely you know that his new novel has just been published. The Little Prince, Part Two.”
“That is unlikely,” sighed the shopkeeper.“Poor Antoine disappeared with his aeroplane in the forties.”
I was flattered and delighted by the quickness and the humour of the local commercial classes.
* * *
Out on the street, sitting down on a bench, I was immediately favoured with the attention of a passer-by of about fifty-five.
He sat down beside me and began speaking rapidly in the local, slightly rough dialect. His face recalled the features of Belmondo. He had an enchanting smile that invariably exposed a set of yellow teeth. He had a comfortable, smoke-cured voice. It was easy and cheerful to be with him, although I understood very little of what he said.
We are deprived of this warmth coming off strangers. The people of Ontario are cold and restrained, and the immigrants are bullied into silence and look out from under their brows like young wolves. The people of Quebec, the moment they notice you coping even slightly with French, treat you as though you had been their neighbour for the past ten years, whereas in Ontario your neighbours after ten years of living side by side are unlikely to recall your name.
“I have four daughters,” he said at last, by way of complaint.“The line of my family ends with me.”
“Yes, daughters are a problem,” I muttered, and then added my own favourite refrain:“Making children is the only thing in life genuinely worth doing.”
“Of course,” the man confirmed, as though he had thought so himself, and then suddenly added:
“Children are our envoys into the future. It is the only way to stop time.”
We parted almost friends, and I walked the streets for a long while afterwards, wondering what exactly he had meant.
Call Me a Glutton
Have you noticed that the more we think about moderation in food, the more we want to eat? Presumably an ancient terror of starving drives us toward the next dish.
A decent person experiences a low continuous guilt: first while searching for something to put in his mouth; then, over the course of chewing, the guilt intensifies; and at the moment of swallowing it reaches its highest pitch. That is the culmination of decency, since decent people are ashamed both that on the watery ball incautiously named Earth there are still so many going hungry, and that in raising food to our mouths we are as often as not harming both our own organism and the environment. And if, God forbid, the dish is of animal origin, shame floods the whole being. Why should somebody die in order to fill our stomachs? They are animals, they are lower than us. Are they? They were created for this, Aristotle mutters in our ear. But he also held that slaves were created for their masters. Animals may be less rational, but they too enjoy being alive, grazing quietly on a sunny day.
The world, however, is stubborn and coarse. It has no patience with philosophical inquiry. It only remains to hope that everything has its time, and that one day all these unbearable contradictions will disperse and resolve themselves somehow. It is our good fortune that decent people are becoming fewer, and that if, through some unheard-of malfunction in evolution, such feelings do arise in us, we have learned to suppress them at the root, deftly and without doubt. We chew somebody’s flesh in a low mood and do not rave about higher spheres while doing it.
So what remains to us? To relax and enjoy it.
* * *
However banal it sounds, the French, having laid the foundation of the most freedom-loving thought and the most free-thinking philosophy, distinguished themselves still further in the field of enlightened gluttony. The descendants of the insolent Gauls, who once boiled meat and fish in the same pot — the mere thought of the combination brings on a nausea of dangerous intensity — suddenly created a graceful cult of consuming various dishes in incompatible proportions and in nearly indigestible combinations.
Quebec kept up with its frivolous mother France until France put it in an orphanage, or more precisely left the cradle of a barely babbling infant on the doorstep of the stern British. The child grew up a stepson and lost almost all connection with France after that vexing seizure by conquerors of no culinary inventiveness whatever.
I will therefore say without fear that although Quebec cooking is somewhat coarser than the French, a journey along the waters of the proud Gulf of St Lawrence becomes a pilgrimage to the sources of our very soul, heart and other vital and therefore particularly delicate internal parts, the road to which, as everybody knows, runs through that cantankerous uncle, Monsieur the Stomach.
* * *
Arriving in the entirely unremarkable town of Drummondville and inspecting its wretched buildings, one begins to regret having turned off the main road to Quebec City. This provincial place appears incapable of either pleasing or surprising. But by good fortune I ventured to ask a local resident where a man might get a decent meal, and received the answer: at Charlemagne’s.
Do not ask me to repeat it. The absence of decency does not oblige us to be ignorant. Hearing the name of Charlemagne dropped casually, in passing, you ought, like me, to feel thoroughly intrigued. At any rate my digestive juices began to boil in response to that name, and my imagination obligingly produced deer roasting over fires and other livestock, and brought to mind brie, since the first recorded mention of brie was precisely an exclamation of delight from Charlemagne, who in 774 cried out that he had just tasted one of the most exquisite dishes in existence.
There is besides a legend that the Frankish emperor tasted brie in a monastery in the region of the same name and fell in love with it for ever. And most likely this is true, because history does not record the name of anyone who was not conquered by it, although I myself am decidedly ambivalent about the product. Everything depends on one’s mood, to say nothing of the cook, who out of any object whatever can produce either a dish that provokes rapture or an item of no consequence at all.
Brie has, incidentally, been fatal. A passion for it played a decisive part in the fate of Louis the Sixteenth, who, fleeing the revolutionaries, delayed at Varennes near the town of Meaux, where the best brie was made, in order to taste it, and was seized by the soldiers of the revolution and subsequently beheaded.
Thank God I am not obliged to flee bloodthirsty revolutionaries, or to utter exclamations intended for preservation in the historical record for the next thousand years. Who knows, perhaps eating will soon cease to be the principal hobby of the greater part of the population; perhaps people will be inoculated at birth against hunger, so that they consume nothing but an energetically valuable but essentially very boring substance along the lines of aviation fuel. While we are still here, in our not entirely lost present, we may still choose what to put in our mouths and what to refuse. Is that not the principal manifestation of the freedom of choice for which bakers and politicians, gods and devils, are all so solicitous? The very freedom of choice by which a man’s right to suffer is justified, his right to a base existence and to a death meaningless in its facelessness.
* * *
Seized by a genuine attack of philosophical starvation, I directed my steps to the address indicated and entered at last beneath the vaults of the temple of gluttony that this restaurant Charlemagne had been recommended to me as being. The room was packed to bursting with local people, which offered particular hope for the piety of the place. If the food is bad the locals will not spend their earnings on it, and the establishment will either close shortly or reorient itself toward omnivorous tourists.
The appetizer I ordered made no impression on me whatever. But the filet mignon produced a forgotten whirlpool of feeling, of memory, and also of indignation, that we are constantly being deceived. What the sullen surrounding world serves us is not what a genuinely pleasant dish can be. Where are the red wine sauces? Where are the divine soufflés? Where is the crème brûlée with the crust that cracks under the light taps of a teaspoon?
Life passes us by without this simple joy of being, this agreeable necessity of gratifying one’s own stomach, which has not yet refused the strenuous work.
* * *
How did French cooking climb to this peak of the passions of the belly, this loyal sense of the stomach’s superiority over our dreary willpower and our attachment to the so-called healthy way of life?
At the beginning nothing foretold a miracle. The first French cookery books imitated the kitchen of the Moors. Sugar, a luxury in those days, made dishes sweeter. Saffron coloured them, rose water perfumed them, and milk and almonds gave them body. The taste of tagines and couscous reminds us of the culinary traditions of the Middle Ages.
Modern great cities have no conception of what genuine, native cookery is. The restaurants on the central streets of Montreal and Quebec City are hollowed out, reliably adapted to the average and rather simple taste of the visitor. Nothing special, nothing that actually touches the soul or the taste-hillocks of the ubiquitous tongue.
And if after a real country dinner it lies heavy, and something aches somewhere in the side, then art demands sacrifices. Every religion is calculated for sacrifice, and devotion to good dishes is nothing other than the higher religion of the art of gluttony, or if you prefer, the most artificial religion of overeating.
The provinces are the true engine of cookery. Where, and how, was the celebrated French onion soup invented? Now it is considered refined: several varieties of onion boiled with white wine, and on top a piece of baguette flooded with melted cheese. Is that not the poor supper of a half-starved Frenchman? An onion, water, stale bread, and the drop of wine left in the bottom of the bottle. And out of such nothing the ingenuity of the people carves colossi of culinary art.
And the mould-covered cheeses, the roqueforts? Now they cost more than money; once, presumably, hungry people got the mouldy remains out of the cellar and ate them with relish. Truffles, those earth-mushrooms whose price exceeds the price of gold, were simply what the people of the backwoods noticed the master’s pigs digging up and eating when there was nothing else to be had. It is not for nothing that truffle hunting is still conducted with a specially trained pig.
Being a devotee of the children’s version of Gargantua, I had always dreamed of eating in the provinces, of running away into the French countryside and taking a meal in somebody’s kitchen, and it came about once at the beginning of this century, somewhere in the Jura, which runs from Lake Geneva to the Rhine. Those mountains became famous for the excavations that produced numerous remains of dinosaurs. The geological period was named after the limestone hills of the Jura. So the Jurassic period was not named in honour of a Soviet palaeontologist called Yura, nor of Yuri Gagarin, whatever the textbooks of the stagnation years may have implied. But it is not the dinosaurs that matter, although nobody will dispute that those monsters had an impressive appetite and were also drawn to this border district of France in order to eat their fill before turning to stone.
So I too was lured by an enormous sign on somebody’s private house and found myself in a kitchen with two tables, where a plain Frenchman fried me some homemade sausage.
That is the true test of a national cuisine. Not elaborate dishes offering no hope of genuine rest for the soul, but the real essence of a people’s talent, which shows itself in unpretentious cooking that makes a fine frame for a life lived in a free mountain wind. Today the home kitchen, tomorrow a restaurant, the day after tomorrow a shabby home kitchen again. There is an inventiveness worthy of admiration. The people of Quebec have adopted something of the same. Carve a spoon out of a branch, open an art gallery in the back yard, on the chance that the tourists this year are dim and may buy something. In this sudden and universal private enterprise lies, perhaps, the new Quebec renaissance.
* * *
Quebec was fortunate enough to catch and absorb the old French Renaissance, when the doubtful palette of Moorish tastes was at last discarded. French cooking parted for ever with the prospect of becoming merely one more member of the Mediterranean enclave of Italian, Greek and Turkish dishes known for their specificity. The new cooks of the Renaissance were inspired by the sharp, salty and viscous preferences of ancient Rome. Good wine, another Roman enthusiasm, played a supporting role, stimulating the appetite and assisting digestion.
It was then, they say, that the author of the immortal Essays, Michel de Montaigne, who turned out to be a hopeless glutton, was thrown into such agitation by the new fashion for wine in cookery that at dinner, in his excitement, he bit his own fingers.
There is an example of desperate and sincere self-consumption. A summit of sado-masochism at the kitchen level. Not every modern thinker would dare, these days, simply and without ceremony, to bite himself on the finger during dinner. The poor devils now have to invent trickier stunts in order to get into history.
And why, actually, does everybody strive so hard to get into it? What is wrong with passing like a shadow between the restaurant tables of the world, slipping through the mists of the aromas of the dishes of life, and vanishing without trace into the back rooms of human forgetfulness? What do people find in posthumous fame? It is as trifling as the smell of a dish recently eaten, as an emptied glass of wine spilled through carelessness. And contrary to expectation, almost never is any truth to be found at the bottom of it.
* * *
Quebec also caught the times of Henri the Fourth, when the court actively promoted French cooking. Henri was an inveterate socialist, having set himself the goal of putting a chicken in the pot of every poor man. But he got no further than lavish banquets in support of his own policy. Political maturity failed him.
The people of Quebec firmly resolved to preserve the traditions of their king and remain to this day in a socialist rapture, distributing a chicken into the pot of every unemployed person, for which they deserve every honour. The only question is whether they will manage it if Quebec becomes free by separating from the rest of Canada. Which is better, the chicken or the freedom? The eternal question.
The people of Quebec also witnessed the times of Louis the Thirteenth, who in his day had twenty-two varieties of fish on his table and twenty-eight kinds of fruit. Whereas in the intestine of his great descendant Louis the Fourteenth, the Sun King, legendary glutton and troublemaker, there lived, it turns out, a royal worm of unprecedented dimensions, with whom the unfortunate ruler of Europe was obliged to share his abundant dinners.
* * *
Thereafter Quebec’s ties with France began to fade, but even in recent times a good many new culinary ideas have reached these shores. Of this I was convinced by visiting the town of Montmagny, in the very centre of which sits a café called Au Coin du Monde, the corner of the world. And indeed the building forms a kind of triangle, and inside the entire décor is devoted to travel.
And the lavatory. It has been constructed inside the former vault of the bank that once occupied the building. By the exit hangs a notice which reads, roughly: God keep you, I haven’t the time.
From the history of that building, standing opposite the town’s proud cathedral, one may judge the changing interests of the townspeople. A hundred years ago the house held the offices of the local newspaper, then a bank, then a tobacconist, and now a café. Reading the papers went out of fashion, interest in banks and in the accumulation of money disappeared along with the final emptying of the pockets, and smoking turned out to be harmful. And so this free-thinking café came into the world. They serve there marvellous waffles with fruit, vegetables and even chicken baked into them, if that is what you order. The idea of baking such ingredients into a waffle had never entered my head, and I would unquestionably have taken off my hat to the local genius had one been available at the necessary moment.
In the same town I also sinned and acquired a second-hand rarity, a French edition of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue. Nietzsche once said that if suffering and even pain have any meaning, it must lie in the fact that they give somebody pleasure. What can one say. Nietzsche and de Sade were a well-matched pair of boots. The marquis, author of scandalously coarse erotic novels, a prisoner who spent more than a quarter of a century in the cells of every regime that changed during his lifetime, president of a revolutionary tribunal who signed not one death sentence, condemned to death for attempted poisoning and to the guillotine for modernism, a brilliant aristocrat and a pauper who nearly died in a hospital for the poor: all of these are aspects of the man christened in bohemian circles the Divine Marquis.
Reading the novel, however, sent me to sleep. There were too many words in it, and all of them in French.
* * *
The gastronomic journey then brought this eternally hungry wanderer to Rivière-du-Loup. The name presumably comes from the wolf, which in turn was so named either because there were many of them there, or because the local people considered themselves the sworn brothers of that toothed and restless nation of grey-tailed predators.
A magnificent sunset, melting away like a handful of frozen cranberries somewhere behind the shadows of the mountains on the north shore of the same but suddenly widened Gulf of St Lawrence, touched my heart but did not satisfy an insatiable stomach.
On the pier from which the ferry crosses to the other shore there had lodged itself a modest but exceptionally warm-hearted little restaurant with a variety of fish dishes. Having significantly thinned the local population of shrimp and other crooked-bodied mariners, and then walked at length along the quiet waters of the gulf, I set off once more to fortify myself, this time in the restaurant reckoned the best in town, which I liked considerably less.
As is usual in these coastal places, in the centre of the room stood a tank of condemned live lobsters, and I suddenly felt the full immorality of this sacrifice to our poor stomachs. A vision passed over my head in which enormous decapods sat at the tables with napkins tucked into their chests, stirring their claws in impatience, while in the tank human beings floundered about.
The Marquis de Sade would have rubbed his hands together with pleasure at such a fantasy. It made me feel unwell. And the restaurant turned out to be second-rate.
Why must somebody part with life for each of our meals? Very well. But how can that fact then be savoured?
* * *
I moved a little further along the shore of the great gulf and arrived in the town of Trois-Pistoles.
How many naive members of the travelling fraternity has that reckless, intriguing name lured? To me, as to many people with a shaky education, it seemed that the place was called Three Pistols. It turns out to be nothing of the kind. What the French once called a pistole was a type of coin. It was precisely such a coin, to the value of three pistoles, that was lost in the seventeenth century in a river near the spot where, in honour of this notable event, a town was erected.
The history of local names is in general not nearly as romantic as one might suppose, coming upon them in the style of Treasure Island, along the lines of Skeleton Lake. Ordinary trivial facts of forgotten daily life lie at the base of a great many of the present names of Canadian lakes, rivers and towns.
The final point of my wanderings in Quebec was the town of Mont-Joli, which means beautiful mountain. I did not find the mountain, but I did find a cheerful little restaurant attached to a hotel named in honour of the discoverer of Quebec, Jacques Cartier.
And so my gastronomic journey came to an end.
In Russian we have long used the French word gourmand, which our dictionaries define as a lover and connoisseur of refined dishes. The French have two words that characterize differently the people who love to eat well. A gourmand is a person who loves to stuff himself with good food. The other word, gourmet, is a person who understands the fine points of exquisite food, an expert in cookery.
It is agreeable to a Frenchman to be considered a gourmet.
I shall be quite satisfied to be considered a gourmand.
In the Provinces, Even Rain Is Entertainment
The enchanting simplicity of the Atlantic provinces looks at us with all its eyes through the portholes of heaven. They draw a man up into the spaces above the clouds. The quay at Saint John is blown through by squalls. I spread my arms out to the sides. For some reason I always do this on the shore of a sea or an ocean, and on this occasion too I failed to take off.
The festival of flight had to be postponed until the bridge across the strait.
The Confederation Bridge is not simply a wonder of the world. The sensation of soaring above the deep is given wings by the trivial thought that man really can do anything. Build bridges across oceans. Defeat death. And even, possibly, one fine day, defeat in himself an inveterate swinishness, which would be, on the whole, more important than defeating death. If we were offered the choice between the universal eradication of swinishness in people and a plain immortality, we would probably incline toward eradication, since eternal life spent in a camp of swine is not worth a great deal.
So the bridge arches over the strait, and you begin descending toward shores that have only just appeared beneath the feathered strokes of your fantasies.
A man can find himself only in the provinces, far from the hooting of mechanical accessories. Prince Edward Island is flat as a sheet of cheap cardboard and is an ideal ground for the recovery of a lost self, as well as for the acquisition of new potatoes at knockdown prices, this wise agricultural product being grown by the islanders everywhere.
We rarely account to ourselves for the fact that humanity, or at least Europe, owes to the potato the appearance of something close to half its sons. This long-familiar root crop, once brought from America, produced such a yield of biomass per unit of sown area that in many settlements hunger receded into the background and people set about the business of reproduction with enthusiasm. A most absorbing hobby, I must confess. Do try it at leisure.
On the island I stopped in a village called Victoria by the Sea. The keeper of the guest house spoke of the ocean in the feminine, as of his wife, his companion, his queen, his cow; you may extend the list yourself.
“She can get pretty ugly,” he objected hurriedly to my complaint that the surface of the strait resembled liquid glass rather than the face of oceanic waters.
He spoke of the bridge in the feminine too. He spoke, like all his fellow villagers, with a breathy, almost Norwegian accent, which the northern sea peoples presumably learn from the gulls. Perhaps he was some forgotten descendant of the Vikings who appeared on these shores long before the fussy Columbus discovered America.
And that is where this feminine gender came from, applied to distinctly masculine objects: ocean, bridge. Whereas I had always believed that by the rules of English the feminine is assigned to an inanimate object exclusively when that object is a ship. An exception the English made. Everything else inanimate is neuter.
Evidently I was wrong. Life dictates its own rules of grammar. And since the bridge had also turned out to be a woman, the islander did not trust the newly appeared structure and worried about how long it would stand in the middle of an ocean strait.
Though in all honesty it was precisely the existence of the bridge that had brought him a lodger, because without the bridge I should never have dragged myself to an island that is, in its existential foundation, an enormous potato field. The proprietor nonetheless complained in his soul that the ferry no longer comes to their village from the mainland, and that business leaves much to be desired. Such conversations may be heard in any Canadian backwoods, which withers quietly, giving away its best to the insatiable cities. His own daughter lives in Toronto and sees the old man rarely. He announced proudly that his daughter investigates complaints against doctors, and I confirmed weightily, to his satisfaction, that this is interesting work with many facets. After that I became bored and went outside.
* * *
The oily waters of the bay, stupefied by an absolute calm, reflected without moving the skeletons of the fishing schooners. On the pier a bar was making a noise. Drunken shouts and singing came from the open doors. The moon was present in the picture and, sinking its claws into my memory with an absurd glint of foil, threw out in front of itself a path across the water of perfect geometry.
The moon’s inaudible presence in the sky seems to us a matter of small importance, a throwaway. But it was not for nothing that somebody said that in the provinces even rain is entertainment. And the moon? What of the moon. One more lamp, a pale spot, a silver coin, an absurd celestial body of interest only to the mentally unsteady and to failed astronauts.
A great many natural events proceed without our noticing, and the majority of the plots of creation are enacted without witnesses. How many times have we missed an irreproducible sunset? And again, without us, some inexpressible blue flowers came out beyond the edge of the village. And is it only a question of flowers? Our children were born, as it were, independently of us, and somehow in parallel with us they grew up. Somewhere beyond the borders of the field of vision there remained friends, books, cities, prophets out of a dusty Bible, the fuss around insignificant unpleasantnesses, the evenings lived out and the wakings that darted past under half-closed lids.
We cannot take in the whole of our own existence without remainder, and concentrating on one thing we constantly feel an indistinct sense of having been robbed and short-changed, of there being too little of that life which appears to flow in all directions and which on inspection turns out to be flat and one-dimensional.
And so this flat one-dimensional moon, insignificant, peaceably breathing its outer mists, has nothing to do with us. But then we ourselves sometimes have nothing to do with ourselves, and so it is not surprising that in the cities the moon has no significance at all.
In the deep forests, however, that unremarkable light can become a symbol of life and death. A moonlit night, and you find your way home. A moonless one, and you disappear without trace.
So there is no need to laugh at the Canadian backwoods. In the cities there are wild automobiles; here there are unkind hungry animals. In the cities there are bandits; here there are deep ravines and the endless expanses of uninhabited bog. In the cities there are dark alleys; here there are moonless nights, multiplied by prejudices no less dark.
Listen to the trembling sounds of the Moonlight Sonata. Does it not reason, gravely and evenly, about precisely this? Is there not enclosed in it the same mournful sigh of a latent despair, the eternal regret for the canvases of sublunary existence passing us by and dissolving in the pale rays of a brassy light?
Deliver Solomon, who married many,
From the grim admission of a dead end.
The world is a very unsteady bottom
To a vessel that has not yet been broken.
The world is a very unbashful performance
Of everything that is managed from outside.
Leave the sorcerers their sorcery
As a small vent in an aired room.
And for those who are sick with this world
And have forgotten themselves in the deafness of it,
I will knock out the Moonlight Sonata, like Beethoven,
Silently, on the bricks.
And how unforgettably Turgenev lulls us with a mention of that music: he describes a melody that takes hold of the heart from the first note, that shines and languishes at once, that grows and melts away, touching everything on earth that is dear and holy, and that finally goes off to die in the sky. I paraphrase, and badly.
In fact Beethoven wrote it without any particular thoughts about the moon. He called it a sonata in the manner of a fantasy, and the name Moonlight was given to it after his death by a friend, the poet Ludwig Rellstab.
There is nothing clear and final in this world. The Moonlight Sonata turns out on inspection to be unlunar. And the silvery moon turns out to be a dusty desert covered in the pox of craters.
That is where a real backwoods ought to have been established, a genuinely remote province. I would in fact propose that the government of Canada annex the surface of the moon. I do not believe anybody would notice. The uninhabitedness of the northern reaches of this great country very much resembles the talentless dusty expanse of that ruinous celestial body.
Although American presidents, it must be said, are not indifferent to our younger celestial sister. They are usually not satisfied until they have landed some fellow in coarse space boots upon her surface. How can they trample a tender astral body with their feet? Do they not understand that the moon is immaterial and has no need of our bourgeois attentions?
* * *
But there are places on earth where the moon really does have a tangible significance.
In the Bay of Fundy, which cuts deep into the land, that insignificant celestial trinket displays the whole of its formidable well-fed essence. For we are now told that the tides in the seas and oceans are caused precisely by the force of her attraction, and to a far smaller degree by that of the sun.
Has the moon never pulled at you? Try standing on tiptoe on a moonlit night. Nothing? Then you have not believed in yourself sufficiently, and have not fully absorbed the juices of the gravitation of a magnificent modern doctrine. Which means you are ignorant and are thereby signing a confession of your incapacity to accept the existing order of things.
I am joking. You are not supposed to feel anything. That is all we would need. The moon’s attraction is far too small to move the earth, and quite large enough to move the water on its surface.
It is a heavy thing, the ocean. I used to be very frightened of boundless water. I often dreamed of enormous tsunamis, but afterwards I talked my mind round by explaining that seawater is heavy as a stratum of rock. A genuinely exceptional force is required to stir up that stubborn world ocean. And our little moon manages it tenderly, and single-handed.
* * *
The Mi’kmaq of the coast of the former Acadia explained the giant tides differently.
They were convinced that one of their gods, whose ornate name I have unfortunately forgotten, and who did not present me with his passport, decided to bathe in the bay and instructed the Great Beaver to dam it. The Great Whale took offence at this and began beating the boiling water with his tail for all he was worth. The dam was carried away in an instant, and the waves have gone on swinging ever since, now throwing themselves at the eaten-away rocks, now retreating whence they came.
It would in general be a great convenience if gods carried passports. And better still if they were registered at a fixed address. How much easier it would be to pray to them, to render praise and reproach, so to speak, at the place of residence. The god of the Mi’kmaq was undocumented and therefore escaped responsibility for creating an unstable situation along the shoreline of the Bay of Fundy. Besides, if you pressed him against a wall today he would also blame the moon.
And the situation on that coast is no joke. The tidal wave advances faster than a man can run, and therefore constitutes a mortal danger, since a wanderer who has been careless may find himself visiting the sea king if he does not leave in good time the treacherous ocean floor that the tides lay bare. The water in those places rises ten metres, and sometimes twelve. It is an eerie thing to watch. An eternal reminder of the plot of the universal Flood.
Which version, then, should the mild traveller adopt? The obvious, scientific one, or the fabulous and apparently foolish one?
You would think there was nothing to discuss. And yet. Today the scientific explanation of the tides is in fashion; tomorrow the conjuncture of general thinking may demand different explanations, or may even return to the version of the Great Beaver and the Great Whale. The order of the world has no difficulty founding modern conflicts on decrepit legends. Provinces still pass from hand to hand not by the rational right of reason but by the force of centuries-old custom and an unshakeable faith in the right of the strong.
Somebody once said that in the provinces thoughts are born well but distributed badly. That is not true. Bad thoughts travel at the speed of light regardless of their geographical origin. Einstein proved it, and thank God he limited the propagation of stupidity to the speed of light and no faster. Consider: whatever piece of ignorant nonsense we dispatch into the heavens, they will not learn of it at the other end of the Milky Way for another hundred thousand years.
* * *
You will say: and what is so special about these tides and ebbs, about the lunar reflections on the water, and still more about the loss of time involved in reading my pieces? And what connection is there, exactly, between these poor components of a lopsided world?
None.
I only wanted to say that if we do not pay attention to the paths the moon lays across water that has gone still in a calm, then very soon the world will stop paying attention to us, since it is jealous and suffers from a shortage of love and of thoughtful looking-at.
Part Four — Staying
Boredom Is Not Illegal
Sooner or later there comes a moment in the life of every man when he is bored.
You may deny this, but I would ask you to consider that attempting to combat boredom by assuring yourself that you are not bored is an activity substantially more boring than the boredom you started with. Residents of the Canadian backwoods are particularly susceptible. I have not been spared.
Travel helped a little. It pushed the boredom into the middle distance of a frayed consciousness. But the surrounding world turned out to be the same world: grass green, sky blue, faces unwelcoming, thoughts below the belt. Returning from distant wanderings I came nose to nose with my own home-grown boredom, which is always the most malignant kind.
Some people will tell you that an intelligent man is never bored in his own company. This statement is itself boring, and in any case Joseph Brodsky observed that boredom is the commonest feature of existence, and if a great poet was bored, what hope is there for prose personnel like myself. With the great, everything must be great, and so they are issued with Great Boredom. Mine is a small unremarkable thing, more of a house mouse.
And it is not that I have nothing to do. On the contrary. There is a great deal to do. It is simply that all of it is somehow boring.
* * *
Place and surroundings exert an enormous influence on a man.
Put a man in a desert and sooner or later boredom will drive him to take a professional interest in the extraction of venom from snakes. Set an educated man down above the Arctic Circle and it will occur to him to go into snow removal in a serious way. And if it should fall to you to live in a forest, then directly or indirectly you will conceive the ambition to become a woodcutter.
I did not escape this. After seven years in the bush, and as the proud owner of six and a half acres of entirely useless woodland consisting for the most part of impassable deadfall, it came to me that I ought to thin the forest, take down all my remaining maples that had not yet fallen over of their own accord in a light breeze, and turn them into firewood, which I would then, naturally, sell at an excellent profit to myself and my dependants.
In my case boredom was fortunately compounded by natural laziness and a durable allergy to physical work, and so these dashing plans came to nothing.
My neighbour was another matter.
He was, unlike me, a man of refinement, who had withdrawn here in later life in order to devote himself exclusively to intellectual labour, and specifically to write a difficult book on the usefulness of various things.
The magic of the place took him.
He never began the book. He began instead to cut down his forest without mercy, and to attempt to sell the firewood at a price nobody in this district would pay, since the desire to profit from the timber wealth of the region occurs to every single person who moves here, and you may imagine the intensity of the competition. Nobody bought his wood. It began to rot. He became low.
At that time he had a daughter of marriageable age, and the poor man declared, and I believe swore on the periodic table, since scientists do not swear on Bibles, that under no circumstances would he give her to a woodcutter. Marriage to a local young man was therefore out of the question, and he enterprisingly found her a groom himself, from elsewhere: an intelligent man, with ambitions, and I believe two degrees. The fiancé spoke several dead languages fluently and showed enormous promise. My neighbour was beside himself with happiness.
The young couple became engaged and moved out here to live in the forest, whereupon the fiancé, in place of any elevated activity, formed the ambition of becoming a professional woodcutter and selling firewood to a local population that is drowning in firewood.
You should have heard my neighbour on the subject of fate. Above all he worried that his brilliant son-in-law might be crushed by a log.
That is what provincial boredom does to a man. The provinces are not the capital. Spit into a piano here and it will not be understood.
* * *
Being determined to rid myself of this rural malady, I resolved to invent something.
Have you never had the feeling that you desperately want to invent something, and simply do not know what? Since time began, invention has been the finest cure for boredom, and rural isolation ought in theory to be ideal for it. Most brilliant inventors came out of the backwoods.
And so, in order not to invent something that had already been invented, I turned to the archives of the Ig Nobel Prize, there being no better source of information on the achievements that first make you laugh and then make you think.
The prizes are handed out at Harvard shortly before the Nobels. They have no connection whatever with Harvard; the organizers simply rent a hall from the university and have not yet been thrown out, which continues to astonish me. The awards themselves are presented by actual Nobel laureates.
Over the years the honours have included the demonstration that the presence of human beings is sexually arousing to oysters; the finding that black holes have the parameters required to house hell; and the study of whether food that has been on the floor for less than five seconds is safe to eat, which established, among other things, that seventy per cent of women and fifty-six per cent of men believe that it is.
Reading this material brought on a state of unhealthy excitement, and I began work.
I first took up the finding, by Spanish researchers, that the speed of sound in cheddar depends on its temperature. I attempted to measure the speed of sound in processed cheese, but was unable to complete the investigation because I unexpectedly ate the apparatus.
Then, being drawn to forestry and having long wondered why the woodpecker does not get a headache, I read that the woodpecker is equipped with a highly developed shock buffer that protects it from headaches. This is the kind of sentence that ends a line of inquiry.
I envied the researchers at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie who determined why dry spaghetti, in the majority of cases, breaks into more than two pieces. I experimented with wet noodles and obtained no results that would survive review.
My attention was then caught by the American team who conducted a long series of experiments to discover why the sound of fingernails on a blackboard is unbearable to human beings. I scraped a fork across a plate for experimental purposes and achieved nothing except the threat of violence from the other people at the table.
For some time I was absorbed by the work of the Kuwaiti scientists who proved that dung beetles are fastidious gourmets. It emerges that adult dung beetles consume the liquid fraction and bury the remainder whole as provision for their larvae. Offered the product of three herbivores, the beetles preferred the horse, on grounds of moisture. Sheep outranked camel. The output of two carnivores, dog and fox, was accepted, but without enthusiasm. We country people are not squeamish about any of this. We merely call it manure, in a refined voice, with the accent placed as far from the subject as possible.
Since our district provides approximately one thousand mosquitoes per resident, I decided to continue the work of Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong, who established that the female malaria mosquito is equally attracted by the smell of cheese and the smell of human feet, and that an effective trap can be built on this principle. I obtained no result beyond a substantial increase in the number of times I was bitten. I did attempt, in retaliation, to learn to bite mosquitoes, which is harder than it sounds.
I could not pass over the discovery by Israeli colleagues that hiccups may be cured by rectal massage, but I did not feel able to proceed to self-experimentation.
I was, on the other hand, able to confirm on myself the finding of Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton, that the least readable prose is produced by the least intelligent authors.
In the absence of locusts I was obliged to forgo any replication of the study of locust neuronal activity during the screening of scenes from Star Wars.
Given the abundance of frogs falling into my swimming pool, I attempted to continue the cataloguing of the odours emitted by different species of frog under stress, but was informed by the frogs that this was not a good time.
I was interested by the work in fluid dynamics in which Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and József Gál applied basic physics to calculate the pressures generated by penguins in the course of defecation. The complete absence of a penguin community in Canada forced me to abandon the project.
Having attempted, in practice, to verify the proverb that you should acquire a goat and then get rid of it and you will feel better, and having accordingly acquired two goats with three kids and then, with some difficulty, offloaded them onto a farm, I could not fail to take an interest in the Australian analysis of the forces required to drag a sheep across various surfaces.
As a committed keeper of poultry, I read with attention the Stockholm University finding that chickens prefer attractive human beings. Being perpetually in need of a haircut, and therefore some distance from the standard, I was unable to confirm the theory, since the chickens remained indifferent to me. It did occur to me that one might establish the same result from the other direction.
Somewhat tired by all this scientific activity, I decided to relax with a glass of beer, and attempted to confirm the work of the Munich researcher demonstrating that beer foam decays exponentially. The foam in my glass did in fact diminish rapidly at first and more slowly thereafter, and I repeated the experiment several times to be certain.
Before taking a shower I noted the interdisciplinary study from the University of Sydney into the material that accumulates in the human navel.
I concluded my excursion into the unknown with the mathematical work of C. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan of the Kerala Agricultural University, entitled Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants.
* * *
By the end I had become so involved with the work of the Ig Nobel committee that I began to consider proposing a further study which has so far escaped their attention.
It turns out that, according to Brazilian researchers, small doses of Viagra can accelerate the resynchronization of circadian rhythms after long flights. Investigators at the National University of Buenos Aires report that microscopic doses of the well-known impotence drug increase the speed at which hamsters adapt to abrupt changes in the day, by roughly thirty per cent.
Scientists today have a good life. They feed Viagra to hamsters and fly them around the world on public and private grants. But the deepest respect must go to those selfless heroes of science who test the innovation on themselves. That is: take the drug, board the aircraft, and see what happens. An agonizing obscurity.
What hope have we woodcutters against such brilliance? But as they say, to each his own. We chose to live in the deep forest, and life demonstrates that boredom, unfortunately, is not illegal.
Winter Entertainments
There are practically no entertainments in the small towns of the Canadian backwoods. And boredom, as old Voltaire observed, is one of the three great evils.
It was Voltaire, that unsurpassed craftsman of the French sentence, who liked to add, sprawling comfortably after a substantial dinner, that work delivers us from these three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Voltaire, of course, never worked at anything in his life, except as Voltaire, full time.
Had he been assigned to a cement works, or to a textile mill, or to washing floors in other people’s houses, or to tidying buses at night, or to shivering on a petrol forecourt, or, let us say, to washing the lower halves of patients in a home for the elderly, François-Marie Arouet might have revised his opinion of work and preferred boredom, vice, and even, God help us, need, to any of the occupations listed above, none of which, as it turns out, delivers anybody from boredom, or from vice, or in any way whatever from need.
But fate was kind to the old man, appointed him the principal lamp of the Enlightenment, and we go on dully repeating after the first Voltairean by definition that work is good. Work is splendid. Idleness is a sin.
Meanwhile the folk wisdom of my own country holds that work kills horses, deafens ears, swells feet, dries out hands, and puts a film across the eyes. Every man must therefore feel for the fine balance between boredom on the one hand and dead horses with filmed eyes on the other.
* * *
In summer, out of doors, there is room enough. Fishing. Swimming in the lakes, provided the mosquitoes do not finish you. In winter there is the snowmobile, a motorized sledge on which it is unusually convenient to break your arms and legs. Skis and skates are also out, since most of us have never, since our schooldays, drawn a firm distinction between the ski boot and the Spanish boot, a popular instrument of interrogation in the Middle Ages.
Entertainment, however, is necessary. And so the simplest and cheapest measure available to a resident of the Canadian backwoods on a Sunday, assuming he has not for some strange reason started drinking in the morning, is to go to church.
Old-fashioned? Certainly. But it has taste. And it is good for the soul into the bargain.
A provincial town of this size will run to ten or a dozen churches of various persuasions, and since the difference between them was mislaid some time ago in the annals of local history, you may walk into any of them, if only to sit in the warm for half an hour and listen to the significantly thinned ranks of local parishioners performing the festival hymns, an occasion that somewhat resembles a concert at a kindergarten.
Where are the formidable temples of Jerusalem? The dark vaults of the monasteries of Russia? In Canada there are churches that look impressive from outside, but inside they are all so cheerfully appointed, so light and so uncomplicated.
To those of us raised as Pioneers and Komsomol members, and taught that the church is the source of all anti-popular heresy, it is always agreeable to be convinced of the opposite. There it is: a cleanly dressed and almost sober population singing devoutly on a Sunday morning. Note that it is not drinking immoderately, not fighting, and not asleep under a fence, but is raising a prayer set to a melody with a light jazz treatment. What more does anybody want?
And above all, admission is free. Where in our day can a man enjoy warmth and a light interior without having a couple of coins shaken out of him, when even a free lavatory has become an enviable rarity? In small towns the population is thrifty, and so in many churches they long ago stopped collecting with any insistence, knowing in advance that nothing will be given. They put a jar in the corner and drop a few of their own coins into it, by way of a hint.
* * *
The main thing, however, is that in the provinces the churches turn into genuine centres of local culture and charity.
Before the New Year, for example, they receive parcels for children in Africa.
And this is an exceptional pleasure: to take a shoebox and fill it with childhood treasures from the dollar shop, having first thought hard about whether this toy might put an eye out, and whether this eraser might be mistaken for chewing gum, and whether this toy pistol is suitable, given that it will probably be confiscated by adults who have not finished playing at war themselves.
Such direct and touching charity is a refined and essentially very agreeable way to pass an evening. You return, as it were, into your own grey and impoverished childhood and look with your own child’s eyes at the whole captivating tinsel of a one-dollar shop.
When you buy for yourself, there is always, at the back of the soul, a nagging sense of guilt. When you buy for others, for unfortunate small children with protruding lips and tear-stained eyes, the soul is wrapped in a nagging sense of happiness, clean and unspoiled, which does not often occur at other moments of our lives, shuffled as they are like a pack of cards from which the trumps have been entirely removed.
* * *
Having handed in the box, one may turn to art. The same meeting houses regularly invite performers.
Recently a duo came from Montreal. Good musicians, a cellist and a pianist. Both sawed and hammered away persistently. The public listened. The Debussy got through with some grinding, and on the Shostakovich, of whom honest critics once wrote that it was muddle instead of music, plenty of noise and little sense, the local population simply fell out altogether.
What do these academic musicians imagine? You arrive on tour in some Flyspeckville, so play the people something agreeable, a tra-la-la and so forth. There is Mozart for that, and Vivaldi is available. And instead: crash, bang. Without preparation the people take fright, flinch, glance at the door, and begin to regard classical music with suspicion and mistrust.
Such enlighteners ought to be flogged with a bow, and there is nobody to do it. Corporal punishment has been prohibited in Canada, and musicians nowadays have become warlike, particularly percussionists. It is better not to get involved with them, or you will take a drumstick to the forehead and spend the rest of your life queuing for doctors, and our health service in Canada is not to be relied on, though the funeral establishments, it must be admitted, work with complete regularity.
* * *
But the tour of the Russian church quartet from Moscow was an agreeable surprise.
Notwithstanding the evident modesty of the fee, the gentlemen did not disdain to visit small towns forgotten by God and by art, where they performed to an ovation Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us, and we, probably the only people in that church who understood the Russian, wanted to weep, because the distances and the deep oceans had vanished that separate us from a homeland faded in the memory, our own mother, who always treated us as a stepmother, and from a Canada become a stepmother of our own, who received us not exactly as a mother would, but who received us.
Then there was the bass. A very young talent, and what a voice: deep and velvet.
At home, over the supper to which we had invited the whole quartet, the young man admitted that he actually works at a crematorium. We were surprised, and he explained:“So what if it’s the furnace, the dead still have to be sung over. Otherwise it isn’t done properly. We aren’t pagans.”
The bass crossed himself hurriedly and somewhat smudgily, and we glanced at each other, and finding nothing especially pagan in ourselves, said nothing and drank some wine.
Then the bass sighed and asked whether we might have anything, so to speak, restorative in the house.
I obediently brought out a bottle of vodka that had been standing untouched in our cupboard for half a decade. The bass brightened.
“Don’t think it’s bad for us. For singers working in the low octaves it is actually recommended. It makes the low notes easier.”
Having dealt with the restorative substance, the bass sat down modestly at the piano and began fluently playing something entirely marvellous. Only after several minutes did I realize that he was reading at sight, glancing at some music that happened to have been left on the stand.
That music had been in our house for no less than thirty years, and the greater part of it had never been played, still less played like that, and still less at sight. That is what a conservatory education means.
Having finished the Beethoven, the bass sighed and asked whether we had anything else to play, in exactly the tone in which one asks whether there is anything else to read.
And I went and got the Chopin.
* * *
You will say that none of this constitutes entertainment, and that it is all a lot of nonsense.
Very well. It is possible. On the whole, everything we consider the achievements of higher culture and morality is the most authentic nonsense. People gathered in a stone building, sang, scraped at some bows, and so on.
But what is the alternative?
The night club, where women demonstrate one does not quite know what for one does not quite know what purpose? The cinema, with its plastic popcorn and its hall as long as a railway carriage and its uncomfortable seats, in which, as in a railway carriage, one continually wants finally to arrive somewhere, and out of which one invariably steps onto the same street one entered from, only thoroughly stupefied by the latest masterpiece of the dream factory?
Ah yes. Of course. How could I forget. One of the most successful methods of passing the Canadian winter is bowling.
Bowling. What could be more absorbing? You put on ridiculous shoes belonging to somebody else’s foot, you walk up, you roll a ball, and it knocks down all the pins. Hurrah. A genuine aesthetic satisfaction.
One can, naturally, escape the wilderness for the glittering city of Toronto. In winter it looks particularly welcoming. Bare slippery avenues, occasional frozen men in turbans, a sea of Chinese characters, and here and there a restaurant of Russian cuisine, a temple of a former paradise with an unobtrusive foretaste of heartburn.
What else. Ah yes: the endless shopping, which has become the one vice still available to us. Pillowcases, lamps, duvet covers, sofas, televisions, bananas, skirts, jeans, coats, shoes, pies, boots, beds, houses, cars, books, pens, coffee makers, private schools, cemetery plots against future need, children’s ballet classes, cigarettes, cutlets, wigs, parquet, underwear and overwear, and finally a trip to Honduras for the next exotic diarrhoea.
How much longer? Like maddened squirrels we have long since turned into the Plyushkins of the twenty-first century, and our dwellings overflow with newly acquired rubbish, and still we drag more of it in.
One can, of course, sit out the whole winter at home with one’s face in the television. In the naive Soviet years we used to call that instrument the box for idiots. And into what has it evolved in our own super-duper times? It has become the box for super-duper idiots. That is the whole difference.
The internet turns the man attempting to entertain himself into a peripheral device, and it seems that next time we switch on the computer it will greet us cheerfully with the announcement that a new device has been identified, and by this new device it will mean us.
And reading the dusty classics that turned up somehow in the luggage we brought with us, the ones with the titles What Is To Be Done? and Who Is To Blame?, is unlikely to provide a relaxing pleasure either.
So: is it really only work that can tear us out of boredom, vice and need?
Although they do say that poverty is not a vice, and that boredom is far from the worst calamity that can befall a man out of work.
The Provincial Cat
City cats believe firmly in their own exceptionality. They hold that urban life is full of refined entertainments to suit every taste. Provincial cats, oddly enough, believe exactly the same thing about themselves, and both are able to sustain the position because both spend the greater part of their existence unconscious. These fortunate members of the domestic fauna pass their days in careful, thoroughgoing sleep, and the address makes no difference whatever.
The cat I am going to describe had the classic character of a Canadian provincial.
He never doubted for a moment that the state stood behind his interests. Unlike certain anti-feline jurisdictions, where animals subsist on a semi-legal footing, Canada is a just country and extremely serviceable to cats. Strays are courteously invited into special rest homes known as shelters, where they are fed, treated, washed, and released to attentive owners against a signature attesting to good intentions. A Canadian cat has nothing to worry about. He will always find a roof and a bowl of high-quality, finely balanced cat food.
This is precisely why Canadian cats have advanced to the most perfect mode of terrestrial existence available, which is uninterrupted sleep. Where the statistical cat sleeps sixteen hours a day, the Canadian representative of the family manages twenty, and on occasion twenty-four, sometimes neglecting to wake even for the purpose of eating.
Zoologists should attend to this. Under close study, certain feline tactics may prove suitable for recommendation to human beings. A sleeping citizen is enormously useful to society. His requirements are minimal, his criminal activity never reaches a dangerous level, and above all his electricity consumption declines sharply, since sleeping with the light on is already a perversion.
The study of feline sleep methodology could therefore resolve the global energy crisis, reduce purchases in the Persian Gulf, and materially ease international tension. That is how much good may come of paying attention to Canadian cats.
Cats in the backwoods sleep more than city cats. At times it appears that they succeed in dropping into an additional dimension and sleeping there for twenty-five or even thirty hours a day. It is a known fact that the rotation of the earth is slowing, and that in the age of the dinosaurs the day lasted twenty-three hours, so it is not impossible that in the distant future there will be enough hours in the day to satisfy even the exacting requirements of the Canadian provincial cat. There is no danger that the cats will have evolved into something else by then, since they are almost universally neutered and have had the claws removed from their front feet. In that condition a cat has nothing whatever left to do in life, because without claws there is no possibility of pursuing the central feline vocation, which is the destruction of wallpaper and upholstery. Sleep remains the only refuge of an untroubled feline soul.
* * *
The cat who lived in my house possessed every characteristic of the type, but there was also something in him of a distinct inherited nobility.
It is possible that in the disorderly traffic of transmigrating souls I had been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of some English philosopher, or of an eighteenth-century Scottish economist. Who can say. Our cat never expressed a view on any philosophical question and refrained almost entirely from pronouncements on economics, with the single exception of a strained mrrow on the occasion when we attempted to introduce a cheaper brand of food. Apart from that incident I never heard a word from him, and I am therefore prepared to swear that this philosopher had taken a vow of silence.
In the rare hours when he was awake he liked to fall asleep on open books or on the computer keyboard, as a result of which messages of the following kind would appear on the screen:
kyvolafydvakiroiklaitsyuoikayu
Some members of the household considered this a random collection of letters. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that it might well be a vocalized transcription of some ancient Aztec dialect. Nobody knows what secrets our domestic animals carry, or what creature our own souls will occupy next. One thing is clear: in the form of a cat, particularly a cat resident in Canada, existence will not prove unduly burdensome, since it will pass in an endless nirvana of feline dreams, whose decipherment I warmly recommend to the scholars of the future.
* * *
Our provincial cat did not care for other animals and held the black dog of the household in particular contempt. He considered us weak-minded idiots for having admitted this ridiculous creature to our home.
One evening he got out and set off into the forest, in the naive belief that he would be treated there with the respect customary in Canadian cat-keeping.
I had tried to explain to him that the absence of domestic animals on our roads is not solely a tribute to the excellent work of the local animal protection organizations, but also a consequence of the policies of the Ministry of Natural Resources, which has permitted the wild population to increase to the point where it eats any domestic animal careless enough to go out for a walk, and where the bears have begun knocking at the doors. One young bear spent a long period drumming on our back door before finding a more amusing occupation, namely the destruction of our vegetable garden, which he excavated with such thoroughness that it came to resemble a tank engagement.
The cat did not accept my analysis, and went out at dusk once again. Despite his natural somnolence, he was capable of astonishing bursts of speed and was almost impossible to catch.
Some time later there came from the darkness of the trees an appalling noise. It was our cat. The sound was overcast and menacing, and it was entirely a bluff, since he had no claws on his front feet, and could neither scratch nor climb, and his surrender was purely a matter of timing.
We opened the door and shouted and shone a torch into the forest in the hope of frightening whatever it was.
And then the dog went past us, barking, and into the trees.
Well, I thought, if that’s a bear, we lose both animals in one evening.
Fortunately, into the beam of the torch there came something considerably smaller than a bear. A fox. She was retreating from the dog, or rather she had deceived him entirely and was leaving across our yard while he barked at a promising area of forest some distance away. A moment later the cat came out of the trees at full speed and went into the house. He was extremely ruffled. He was not injured anywhere.
Shortly afterwards the dog returned, pleased with himself.
Do you suppose the cat began to respect the dog who had saved his life?
He did not. Like a true Canadian cat, he concluded that the government had issued a regulation prohibiting foxes from eating cats, and that he could return to sleeping twenty-four hours a day, interrupted only by the occasional recreational stroll through an entirely safe forest.
What saved the cat was his appalling character and his wholly unfounded confidence in his own invulnerability. Instead of running from an animal that would have caught and killed him within seconds, our cat took up a position and screamed at her, which puzzled the fox sufficiently to buy the time required for the arrival of the dog.
The history of the provincial cat is instructive. A great many of the inhabitants of the country in which I have settled possess similar qualities. They are somnolent to the point of absurdity, inactive to the point of fanaticism, and entirely, groundlessly certain that nothing can touch them.
I have lived among them for a quarter of a century. I have to report that so far the evidence is on their side.
A Man with a Piano
There is a marker on the road below my house.
It is a rough wooden cross, and it has been standing there, in one form or another, for something over a century. A man is buried beneath it. I know almost nothing about him except that he was Indigenous, and that he was put into that ground long before this road was a road, and that whoever raised the cross wanted somebody, one day, to notice.
I notice. I have driven past him several thousand times.
He is the only neighbour I have in this district with whom I have never once quarrelled, and I want that to be understood as a statement about me rather than about him.
* * *
Because I have quarrelled with all the others.
The neighbour to the right, for instance, opened our acquaintance by asking to borrow twenty thousand dollars. We had not finished moving in. I refused, sinner that I am. There are banks for this, and in any case where was I to find such a sum in cash immediately after buying a house? The poor man has not spoken to me for six years. Fortunately our houses stand a long way apart and one can go for months without recalling that neighbours exist at all.
I once visited acquaintances in Toronto, and as I came to their door there was an unfamiliar man sitting beside it. I asked them afterwards who he was. They said: what do you mean, who? The neighbour.
And what is he doing sitting on your step, I asked, and they said: he is sitting on his own step.
The entrances were side by side and I had failed to orient myself, having grown accustomed to our own spaciousness, to lots of six acres of virgin forest, and to graves that have been there for a hundred years.
* * *
Our forests, it must be said, are not of the first quality.
Two or three billion years ago the whole place was flooded with lava, which set and formed substantial rock, and soil does not hold on rock, and so the trees fall over of their own accord at the slightest breath of wind.
Which is one theory of what may have happened to the man under the cross, and it is a theory I have declined to develop, having noticed in myself a tendency to turn other people’s deaths into material.
* * *
Now. Vladimir Vysotsky, in what turned out to be his last poem, said that he had something to sing when he stood before the Almighty. It is a companion piece, I have always thought, to Pushkin’s farewell, the one about it being time, my friend, it is time, the heart asks for peace.
And have we anything to sing before the Almighty?
Have we done anything in our lives worth recalling when the last hour, said to be as inevitable as taxes, lays its dark cloak of parting over us?
What shall we produce for our conscience then? A handsome house with the mortgage nearly discharged? Two cars? A motorboat bought on instalments that never did meet the water, because all the free time went on the extra work required to pay for the boat?
No? That is not all? There was something else, something unquestionably more valuable. I know what you will say. Our chief achievement is our children. Children who have almost bought a handsome house, on a mortgage, who already drive two cars, and who are wondering whether to buy their own motorboat or be patient and inherit yours.
The people in our backwoods are plain and severe. They need nothing at all. They have not only something to sing before the Almighty, should the necessity arise, but something to crow and something to dance as well.
Though what, in general, will our plain man show the Almighty? A heap of illegally acquired antlers? A plantation of a crop which by every law, divine and terrestrial, ought not to grow in our severe climate, but which nonetheless grew, and gladdened the stern knights of the forest economy?
* * *
Having got tangled in these speculations about who will sing what, I gave in to a long-standing inclination and decided to acquire a piano.
It will be considerably easier to sing with an accompaniment. I understood, naturally, that we came naked into this world and shall go out of it naked. But I wanted a piano even so, even if it should prove necessary to play it exclusively in the nude.
Buying a new instrument for a minimum of ten thousand seemed to me savage, and so I placed an advertisement in the local paper stating that I required a piano.
After several calls from people asserting that they were of royal blood and hereditary royalists, of whom our forests are naturally full, I was at last telephoned by two elderly sisters who deal in pianos, and with great satisfaction I gratified my passion and acquired an instrument of Canadian manufacture and advanced years. The piano was about seventy-five years old and had belonged to some local musician. When I opened the lid and tried to play something, the lid suddenly slammed and caught my fingers painfully.
In short, the instrument had a temper.
Since I was frankly afraid of it, I sat down at it rarely. In the main it served as a bed for cats.
* * *
But one day it became necessary to move the piano into another room, since we had permitted ourselves a larger dining table, not so much in expectation of numerous guests as with a view to a significant enlargement of the space available for food, so that on holidays the bread would not have to stand on the sideboard for lack of room.
Naturally it was not possible to put the piano under one’s arm and carry it into another room. In the first place it is heavy as a cliff, and in the second it would not have gone through the doorway at any angle whatever; the legs would have to come off.
I telephoned a firm specializing in the transport of pianos.
“Three hundred dollars,” said an unfriendly voice.
“But it is on the same floor. From one room to another.”
“Three hundred dollars,” repeated the voice, and hung up.
Very well, I thought. I would sooner perish beneath this piano and appear before the Almighty ahead of schedule than pay these parasites three hundred dollars for five minutes of work. It is not that I am mean. It is simply that occasionally I find myself unable to permit an unjust payment for labour.
So I waited until three men appeared in my yard to install a chicken coop converted from an old dog kennel that had belonged to the prematurely departed St Bernard, Zhuzha, and tempted them with eighty dollars, and brought them into the house.
* * *
For a long time we ran around the piano and none of us could bring himself to touch it.
Sensing that I was losing the initiative, I gave a brisk command:
“Let’s take the legs off, because it won’t go through the doorway with them on, not even stood on end and pushed sideways.”
The chicken coop specialists reluctantly began undoing bolts. I waited for the piano to fall like a felled tree and go through the floor into the basement. Feverishly calculating what precisely was located on the doomed floor below at the point where we were attempting to amputate the legs, I proposed instead that we lay it on its side and continue the operation from there.
“Bring a blanket,” I said, in the voice of a captain.
And I thought with regret of the man under the cross, from whom, in a neighbourly way, a blanket might have been borrowed. There, at last, the friendship would have proved useful, since he turned out to be the only neighbour in the district with whom I had not by that point succeeded in falling out.
I felt like the leader of a band of prehistoric hunters who do not know what to do with the carcass of the mammoth they have just brought down.
We laid the piano on the blanket and began dragging it across the floor. One leg, for some reason, absolutely refused to separate from the belly of the instrument, notwithstanding that every bolt had been removed. Evidently in seventy-odd years the leg had put down roots and had grown into the body of the piano for good.
By some miracle we squeezed it through the doorway, and for a moment it seemed to me that we might get away with it and that everything would end well.
It was not to be. It turned out that turning the piano back over and setting it on its feet is considerably harder than tipping it onto its side. It kept threatening to fall, and at a certain moment the five of us — three men, my wife and your obedient servant — found ourselves in an impossible position, holding the piano literally in the air. To lower it to the floor without killing somebody appeared unlikely.
At that moment Marnie, who helps us with the house, came into the room. The small slight woman attempted to slip past unnoticed, but I called out to her and asked for help. Her darting frightened eyes reflected a mortal despair.
“Marnie, push the sofa over!” I shouted, with what strength was left.
At the risk of putting a substantial hole in the upholstery, I lowered one of the piano’s legs onto the yielding cushion of the sofa, which sagged almost to the floor. This allowed the men to get a fresh grip, and just as salvation was at hand, the one leg that had refused to come off, and that was now without any bolts at all, fell to the floor.
Beside ourselves, and unable to release the piano for a second, we called for our twelve-year-old son Jacob, who came in and attached the leg to an instrument that was being held in the air by five adults, and the piano at last settled securely into its new position.
The men had to be paid substantially more than agreed, so that my saving was small.
The expression on the faces of the chicken coop specialists was such that I understood that if I did not offer the increase myself, then beside the old marker on the road below the house there would shortly appear a fresh one, reading: A man with a piano.
* * *
Twenty years later the piano is in the same room and I still play it badly. The lid has never bitten anybody else, which I take personally.
The cross by the road is still there. Somebody replaces it. I have never established who, and I have deliberately not asked, on the grounds that some things in a district are better left as the only thing about which nobody has ever had an argument.
How I Became a Canadian Dissident
In a small town it is difficult to go unnoticed. Little happens, and there are not many people who differ in any respect from the rest, and so over the years our family surfaced in the local paper with a regularity out of all proportion to our importance. My son won a writing competition. My daughter distinguished herself at school. The paper reported both at length. When my son, in grade five, wrote a letter supporting a ban on pit bulls on the grounds that they bite very hard, they printed that too.
At one point my wife received a summons to serve as a juror, accompanied by hints of imprisonment should she decline. Fortunately we did not yet hold Canadian citizenship and the cup passed from us. Judge not, that ye be not judged, and we firmly prefer to remain unjudged, even at the cost of forfeiting the enchanting opportunity to judge others.
Shortly before Christmas the ladies’ hairdresser asked my wife whether she would mind if a client of hers, a reporter from the local paper, came round to ask how we celebrate New Year.
We agreed. Let her ask. We are a rarity here, in a district where a Russian accent is still routinely identified as Polish or Spanish, our people having settled thickly in the large cities and left the backwoods largely untouched by the whole immigration project.
The reporter arrived at the appointed hour and had prepared like a straight-A student, having printed out material from the internet about Orthodox Christmas.
That was where it began.
* * *
It is difficult to explain to a woman from this town why, on the one hand, we are not Christians, and on the other, we put up a tree.
I turned out to be Jewish. She therefore switched to Hanukkah, and I duly produced the miracle of the jug of oil in the temple, defiled by the Greeks and then liberated, oil sufficient for one day that burned for eight. For reasons I have never established, this made no impression on her whatsoever.
So we returned to the tree. And I invite you to judge for yourself whether it is possible to get out of the following conversation alive.
“If you’re Jewish, why do you put up a tree?”
“Habit. In the Soviet Union it was a bright, happy holiday.”
“They celebrated Christmas in the Soviet Union?”
“No.”
“Then why the tree?”
“It was put up for New Year.”
“And in Israel?”
“In Israel we also put one up.”
“Jews in Israel celebrate Christmas?”
“No. But we put one up. We just didn’t advertise it.”
“So Christmas is banned in Israel.”
“No. Why? Israel is a free country. That is at any rate how it describes itself.”
“Then why did you put your tree up in secret?”
You try holding that line. It is like talking to an intelligent visitor from another planet who has been supplied with only two colours.
Seeing me evade a direct answer, the reporter privately gave up on me, wrote me off, I imagine, as constitutionally slippery, and started on my wife.
“Are you Russian Orthodox?”
“No.”
“So you’re not Russian?”
“What? No, I’m Russian.”
“But in Russia the official religion of Russians is Orthodoxy.”
“Well, yes.”
“So you celebrate Christmas by the Orthodox calendar?”
“No. By the local one. In any case we celebrate New Year, not Christmas.”
“And Christmas?”
“Christmas too. If it’s a holiday, why not celebrate it?”
“And what do you cook from your national cuisine at Christmas?”
“Olivier salad.”
* * *
There it is. The local people, who are direct, cannot be expected to follow the corridors and back staircases of a vagrant soul. Everything has to be sorted onto shelves and packed into serviceable standard containers. If you are Jewish, then sit down with your menorah; if you are Orthodox, then kindly bake the appropriate pastry. Simple, convenient, and completely watertight. No individuality anywhere. Even individuality is a herd phenomenon here, and an individualist must under no circumstances break away from the collective of other individualists.
The questions continued.
“How did you end up in Muskoka?”
“It was a nice day and we were driving north. When we got tired we stopped, and where we stopped, we settled.”
“So you never lived in Toronto at all?”
“Of course we did.”
“For how long?”
“Three days.”
“That was quick, deciding the big city wasn’t for you. And why did you leave Israel?”
“A number of reasons. Safety. Dreadful schools. The heat.”
“What’s wrong with a hot climate?”
“At first it is wonderful, like a holiday. But without a change of seasons you begin to lose your grip on reality, and you start to feel like a polar bear in a desert.”
“Still, what was the main reason?”
“I worked in a hospital in Jerusalem. You drive to work on a Saturday, and first the Arabs throw stones at you for being a Jew, and then the religious Jews throw stones at you for not being enough of a Jew, since you are driving on a Saturday. People there have gone genuinely mad on the subject of religious disputes, some of which are more than two thousand years old, and although it is the Holy Land, and although everything described in the Bible and the Torah happened on one corner or another, one does not wish to be part of a daily insanity. One wants a free and reasonably happy life, including a New Year tree that does not have to be hidden from the neighbours.”
“Yes. Those problems are hard to grasp in Canada.”
* * *
Despite all these difficulties, the article appeared.
Practically at the top it was reported that I am Jewish and that my wife is Russian Orthodox. There followed a long, detailed and somewhat confused account of our marriage, which had been conducted through intermediaries in Paraguay, a country neither of us has ever visited, this being at the time the only way for a mixed couple to register a marriage in Israel.
The piece as a whole presented the difficult road of one couple who had spent their lives trying to decorate a New Year tree in freedom, and had been prevented, first by the Communists and then by the religious authorities. And now, at last, having arrived in Canada, they had been able to taste the true aroma of liberty.
In short: it’s a fine life in the Canadian countryside.
The article went on to explain that we belong to no religion but nevertheless believe in God, and quoted my view that official religions, like blockbuster films, do not necessarily suit everybody. It concluded with my admission that I still believe in Santa Claus.
Canadians, the paper summed up, sometimes fail to appreciate how fortunate they are to live in a genuinely free country that welcomes newcomers from other cultures without oppression and without imposition.
* * *
They also printed a large colour photograph of the entire family decorating the tree, and although we badly wanted to see ourselves in the paper, on the morning it came out none of us could quite bring ourselves to drive into town.
The computer repairman turned up early and announced cheerfully that he had already seen our photograph, though he had not yet read the article. He had left some component in town and I asked him to bring back copies of the paper.
When he returned I told him what it said about official religions and blockbuster films. He spent a long time marvelling that such a thing had been printed in our puritan little town, and then observed, with pleasure, that he now understood why I had sent him to buy the papers.
“Afraid to show your face in town, then?” he asked, with real sympathy.
I sighed and nodded.
“Well,” he said, entirely seriously,“you sit tight at home for a while. It’s better for your health.”
The Oedipus Complex of an Immigrant
One forms the impression that in Canada the politicians live and work by themselves and the people live by themselves. They meet occasionally at elections, look past one another with detachment, and then disperse for long periods to their separate corners.
On one hand this is good. Countries where the politicians determine what we shall eat tomorrow, or whether we shall be alive at all, are impossible to live in. On the other hand, in Canada the gap between the politicians and the people reaches an alarming width. It seems that if the government went on indefinite leave tomorrow, nobody would notice, and everything would go on working, and the country would suffer no harm whatever.
This is very good, because in such a state a stupid politician has difficulty spoiling anything. It is also, unfortunately, why a clever one can change nothing.
Perhaps this is only how it appears to me, a resident of the Canadian wilderness. Perhaps in the large cities, among the sea of shop windows and police cars, it is otherwise. But in our backwoods it is exactly so. A great many citizens have no idea which party is currently running the country, and everything proceeds in its usual order regardless of the results of federal, provincial or even municipal elections.
And this is good. It is one of the reasons so many people like Canada: that politics does not play the ruinous role in it that it plays in, for example, Russia, or Israel, or Iraq.
I must therefore admit that Canada is a thoroughly decent country. And not merely in the sense of the old joke about our boots being the finest, if you have never seen any others. Having visited more than twenty countries in my life, I have not seen a better one.
Our government even operates in accordance with the precepts of Rousseau. It does not so much rule as attempt to serve its citizens, insofar as it is permitted to do so by those notorious supra-human state interests which Bakunin identified as the greatest misfortune of every citizen. Bakunin held that in a normal state everything should be subordinated to the satisfaction of the needs and interests of the individual, and it must be conceded that in Canada these once utopian dreams have found at least a partial embodiment. In principle the state does not claim a directing role, and I would go so far as to say that the large Canadian corporations constitute far more odious and totalitarian structures, terrorizing the citizen considerably more than any Canadian ministry.
State bodies here seem faintly afraid of their own gloomy population, which cannot be said of the United States, where on the contrary the population is in a state of panic about its own government, demonizing it in an imagination that has not, it must be said, travelled far from the truth.
The civil servants of Canada are generally positive people with sincere ideals and clean intentions, unlike their colleagues in other geographical districts of our well-travelled planet. I have had the honour of dealing with former ministry employees and can confirm that there is nothing malicious or repellent about them. They represent the finest type of the naive bureaucrat, who does not attempt to throttle you, as happens in Russia, simply because he enjoys it, or, as happens in the United States, for some material advantage, or, as happens in Israel, on ideological and national grounds.
Canada conducts a sound foreign policy, and I note with astonishment that for the first time in my life I am almost in agreement with the foreign policy of the country I live in, which is a rare form of happiness.
* * *
There is, however, one genuine byword in this country, and that is the Ministry of Immigration.
All of us who arrived here by its lofty and paternal permission experience toward this adversary a set of ambivalent feelings that amount to a chronic Oedipus complex, so named after the hero of the tragedy of Sophocles. According to Freud the complex consists of infantile experience combining attraction to the mother with jealousy and ill will toward the father.
The Oedipus complex of an immigrant is the corresponding psycho-political condition, describing the emotional relations of an immigrant, aged between one and five years of residence, toward his parents: the father, being the Ministry of Immigration, and the mother, being Canada.
What is interesting is that the Ministry of Immigration is not, in spirit, a fully Canadian institution, because it deals for the most part not with Canadians but with us, foreigners, in whom, owing to a difficult childhood spent in harsh countries where the state is understood to be the principal thief and murderer, no healthy sense of one’s own rights has ever formed. We torment ourselves with the old question of whether we are trembling creatures or whether we have rights.
This is what corrupts the officials of the Ministry of Immigration. If they had to deal with full Canadians, they would very quickly be shown.
Wait, though. I am a full Canadian. I went through all of it as required. I passed through every circle. I learned the name of my Member of Parliament. I sat the examination. I received the citizenship.
So why am I keeping quiet?
* * *
I did not keep quiet. I sat down and wrote to my representative in Parliament.
I wrote that my parents and my wife’s parents remain in Israel, and that although we submitted an application to sponsor them more than a year ago, there has been from the Ministry neither answer nor greeting. When we telephoned, the staff told us that they have an enormous quantity of such requests and that it is therefore entirely unknown how long the process will take.
And at that stage we were speaking only of the financial assessment of our capacity to sponsor our own parents, which under normal conditions ought to take no longer than two or three months.
This is a complete disregard of every limit, my fellow citizens. It is not enough that all manner of absurd conditions are imposed before it becomes possible to bring in one’s own mother. It is not enough that we must produce documents proving that we earn a sufficient amount. It is not enough that we sign an undertaking to maintain our parents for no less than ten years, formally releasing the state from financial obligation toward these people. It is not enough that we must furnish evidence that our elderly parents are as healthy as oxen and will not fall as a heavy weight upon our agonizing health service. On top of all this they have taken it into their heads to consider our petitions for two years instead of a couple of months.
The trick lies here. Canada simply does not wish to admit the old into its comfortably fed bosom. It wants young, energetic immigrants with ambitions and aspirations. It does not want the old.
Confessing this honestly is not permitted by the international agreements on family reunification, and so our Ministry has resorted to a small cunning that grows into a large baseness: it has begun to consider these files for an indefinite period, converting them into a genuinely Kafkaesque process.
And it works out beautifully. While the case drags on, the ranks of our unfortunate old people thin out, or their health deteriorates to the point where they will not be admitted to any Canada whatever.
Evidently the Ministry of Immigration has spent so much time in the company of arrivals from the East that it has absorbed some Eastern wisdom from Hodja Nasreddin, who promised the shah that within twenty years he would teach a donkey to talk, and required a substantial payment in advance. When asked how he proposed to achieve this, he replied: either the donkey will die, or the shah will die, or I will.
In even the softest state the habits of the petty tyrant are ineradicable. How exactly can our old people be a nuisance to it? We undertake to support them for a minimum of ten years. No benefit need be paid to them.
But out of spite, or out of natural sadism, our state requires one last opportunity to mock us. It is generally capable of far worse, particularly in the notorious interests of the state, and it does not care in the least about the personal tragedies unfolding in front of eyes that have no wish to see anything at all.
Just under a decade ago, in January 1999, the Minister of Immigration, a Liberal, proclaimed in a public address, practically in verse, that family reunification would remain the cornerstone of Canadian immigration policy; that Canada has a long tradition of supporting the reunification of Canadians and permanent residents with their close family members from abroad; that this tradition has on the one hand enriched the lives of those families and helped them toward self-reliance, and on the other has enriched our society by ensuring social integration and the building of stronger communities.
Words, words, words.
The Liberals, who held power for fifteen years, were replaced last year by the Conservatives, and the cart has not moved.
Meanwhile three thousand rockets came down on my wife’s parents, who live in the north of Israel, and rockets from Gaza continue to fall on my parents, who live in the south of the same remarkable Land of Wonders. My father-in-law has had a heart attack. My mother-in-law has developed an arrhythmia. My mother has been put on dialysis and, on top of that, has broken her hip.
And we sit in Canada and wave sweetly at our parents into the camera mounted on the computer.
By now, presumably, they will not be admitted here on grounds of health. Well done, dear Ministry of Immigration. You stand firm in defending us from our own parents, evidently supposing that we are big now and can manage without a mother and a father.
We may manage. Will they?
* * *
Meanwhile the Ministry has devised a new trick. Since the applications for financial assessment were submitted goodness knows when, they have solemnly informed us that all the documents must be submitted again.
Which means, incidentally, that we must once again produce evidence that our family has an annual income of not less than sixty thousand dollars, that being roughly the sum required for permission to admit parents from both sides.
So it emerges that we must ransom our own parents, in the manner in which hostages were once ransomed from pirates. Except that in this case the pirate is our own state.
Possibly Canadians have considerably cooler relations with their parents and do not understand that we cannot simply pick up the telephone and announce, like swine, that my wife’s parents can wait, and this year we shall be submitting documents only for mine, and next year the other way round. It is not the purchase of a television.
It is disgusting, in all honesty, even to talk about this. It is dirty, and nauseating, and frightening, and there blows off the whole business a certain sepulchral meanness.
* * *
In short, letter in hand, my wife and I went to see the Member of Parliament.
He did not receive us personally, since it emerged that he holds a ministerial post and therefore spends the greater part of his daily existence in the capital.
We were received by his assistant, who announced from the threshold that he is in fact of Indigenous descent, that is, of the First Nations, either in order to demonstrate how democratic his patron is, or in order to hint that all of us here are immigrants and that he is the only genuine Canadian in the room.
Undismayed, I observed that so far as historical science has informed us, his ancestors also turned up in North America some fifteen thousand years ago by way of the Bering land bridge, which has since gone under water, destroying all the evidence, and that in any case it is by no means established who was living here before them, or what was done to those inhabitants.
“So you too are the descendant of immigrants,” I concluded, and our relations somehow failed to develop from there.
I was then given a long explanation of the objective difficulties, and a reading of the Ministry’s reply to their enquiry, in which it was reported that some eight hundred thousand such files are outstanding.
I objected that we have unemployment in this country, and asked why they do not hire additional staff.
“Well, it is not that simple,” mumbled the assistant.“They need a particular qualification.”
“What particular qualification?” I said, sitting up.“We submit our tax return and then, on the form, we calculate for ourselves whether our sum is sufficient. In your view, a special qualification is needed to check a single figure? The qualification of a child in the first grade? How is it possible that work which ought to take three minutes takes two years?”
“So what is it you want?” the fellow said, and the enormous gold eagle swinging on the gold chain around his hairy chest glinted in an unfriendly manner.
“I want my representative in Parliament to put that question to the Minister of Immigration.”
“Oh, come. That is not done. They are both from the same party.”
“So we are to go to the opposition for help? With this attitude to eight hundred thousand immigrants who cannot bring their parents into the country, you will shortly find yourselves back in opposition.”
“Immigrants don’t generally vote for us anyway,” the assistant replied, without interest.
After a turn of that kind I was naturally shown out, under the elbows, with a promise that they would communicate their answer in due course.
It was some time ago. I am still without an answer. And there will be elections again before long, and God willing I shall go and wear out the doorstep of a new parliamentarian.
Except that all of this is empty talk, because in Canada the politicians live and work by themselves and the state lives by itself, and there is no redress to be had against our state, neither from the representatives of the people nor from the organs of judicial power. What am I to do now, sue the Ministry of Immigration?
You have arranged things well, gentlemen. You established precisely that we are all trembling creatures and that we have no rights to anything at all.
* * *
Not Guilty of the Deer
The certificate is a single sheet, and it has faded in the way that paper fades when it has spent a quarter of a century opposite a window.
It states, in the flat language available to a provincial official, that in the opinion of the Ministry of Natural Resources the animal removed from this property on that February afternoon was killed by wolves, and that the owner of the property is not held responsible.
Nobody had ever suggested otherwise. There was no complaint. There was no charge. There was no injured party in a position to give a statement, the injured party having been eaten. The document exists because a man driving past on his way to somewhere else saw two bearded strangers loading something heavy into a truck and could not let it go, and because before he could close the file he had to look inside a poodle who had epilepsy and had spent the entire day asleep on a sofa.
I have been asked why I keep it.
I used to say that I keep it because it is funny, and that is true, and it is not the reason.
* * *
I keep it because it is the only document I possess that was issued by this country about me personally, on the country’s own initiative, for no reason, at some inconvenience to the country, and free of charge.
Everything else I have from Canada I applied for. The permanent residence, the citizenship, the health card, the licences. Each of them took forms, and fees, and evidence, and in one case, as recorded elsewhere in this book, a period of years long enough for the people it concerned to become too ill to use it.
The certificate is the exception. Nobody asked for it. It was produced by a man who was mildly annoyed with me, on a cold day, in pursuit of a procedure whose purpose neither of us could identify, and handed over with visible reluctance.
That is the country. That is the whole of it, in one piece of paper. It will not do the thing you are begging it to do, and it will do, unprompted and at its own expense, a thing you did not know could be done, and there is no way to predict in advance which is coming.
* * *
I have been here twenty-five years.
I no longer believe the things I believed when I wrote most of this book. I no longer think these people are slow. I think they are unhurried in a way that has costs, and that some of the costs are borne by them and some by me, and that the arithmetic has never been as clearly in my favour as I assumed in 2008 when I was still keeping notes.
The tradesman who told me the trees were in the way was right about the trees. There are two satellite dishes bolted to the wall of my house because the trees are in the way, and the trees have been in the way since about 1890, and they will be in the way after I am not.
Mrs Mann was right about the clapping. I have watched, for twenty-five years, a population that stays in time with one another and does not invade anybody, and I have watched, from a distance, the alternative, and I no longer find the curriculum funny in the way I once did.
Jim was right that you have to move the deer or by evening you will have every carnivore in the district in your yard. He was right about most things and it made him no money at all.
* * *
The people who appear in this book have gone in various directions, and I have said, in the italic passages, what I know and am able to say.
Some of them are dead. The district buries its people quickly and well and does not make a performance of it, and I have come to prefer that to the alternative.
The school is still there. It has more pupils than it had. I am told the times tables now arrive somewhat earlier.
The forest is unchanged, because a forest of this kind does not measure anything in a quarter of a century. The lava underneath is the same lava. The soil is still too thin to hold a maple in a strong wind, and every spring I lose one or two, and every autumn somebody comes and cuts them up and offers to sell me my own firewood.
* * *
There is one more thing I have to report, and it is the thing this whole book has been circling.
Some time in the last decade, without a date I can point to, I became the neighbour.
I am now the man at the top of the hill who does not come out. I am the one you will meet twice in a lifetime: once when you move in, because that is the custom and I do observe it, and once at a funeral. I have a beard that frightens children in the grocery store. I have opinions about the ministry. I have been known, at a party, to say something that produced a silence.
And last summer a young couple bought the property below the road, and came up to introduce themselves, as one does, and stood in my driveway asking the questions that new people ask.
And one of them asked, pointing at a stand of maples, whether anybody around here makes their own syrup.
And I heard myself tell them, at length, with complete authority and no evidence whatsoever, why nobody around here distils it.
They listened politely. They will not ask again. In about ten years, if they stay, they will tell somebody else.
I went back inside afterwards and stood for a while in front of a framed piece of paper certifying that I did not kill a deer, and I want to record that I was not thinking anything in particular, and that I was entirely content, and that this was the first time in my life I have been able to write that sentence about anywhere at all.
* * *
Sources and Debts
The rules of the Albion Hotel, and the newspaper reports of 1877, 1879 and the fire of 1894, are drawn from Larry D. Cotton, Whiskey and Wickedness, volume three, Muskoka and Parry Sound Districts, Ontario, 1850 to 1900. Anyone who doubts the rules should go and read them there.
The prize-winning research described in“Boredom Is Not Illegal” is a matter of public record and may be found in the archives of the Ig Nobel Prize, to whose organizers this book owes one of its happier chapters.
The account of the Bay of Fundy tides given by the Mi’kmaq is retold, as accurately as a borrowed story can be, from published collections of their oral tradition; any clumsiness in the retelling is mine.
The passage on the White Silence is a paraphrase, in my own words, of Jack London.
The history of the Khmer Rouge period is summarised from the standard published accounts, and confirmed, in the parts that concern one man, by that man.
My thanks to the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Province of Ontario, which is the only body ever to have certified me innocent of anything.
