In the Skin of a Lion (16 page)

He watches each of her friends and he gazes at the small memory painting of Europe on the wall – the spare landscape, the village imposed on it. He is immensely comfortable in this room. He remembers his father once passing the foreign loggers on First Lake Road and saying,
“They don’t know where they are.”
And now, in this neighbourhood intricate with history and ceremony, Patrick smiles to himself at the irony of reversals. Before the meal, Kosta’s wife had come up to him, pointed to one of the pictures and named her village, then she had pressed the side of her stomach with both hands sensually to make clear to Patrick that she would be serving liver.

If only it were possible that in the instance something was written down – idea or emotion or musical phrase – it became known to others of the era. The rejected
Carmen
of 1875 turning so many into lovers of opera. And Verdi in the pouring rain believing he was being turned into a frog – even this emotion realized by his contemporaries.

Patrick listens now as Alice reads to him from the letters of
Joseph Conrad – an extract which she has copied. She has already asked him who he likes to read and he has mentioned Conrad. “Yes, but,” she says rising as the child cries, “have you read his
letters?”
In the other room she comforts the girl Hana out of a nightmare.

“Wait,” she continues, “I’ve got something to show you.” Very excited now, as if she fears he will get up and leave before she can present this gift. She too likes Conrad. She likes his theatrical style. There are some novelists whose work actors love but who could not write a simple scene for the stage. They write the scenes actors dream, and Conrad was that for Alice.

It was a letter Conrad had written to a newspaper. So Patrick listened to his contemporary.

In the darkness he can see just the faint aura of her hair.

On Saturday afternoons the dye washers and cutters, men from the killing beds, the sausage makers, the electrocuters – all of them from this abattoir and tannery on Cypress Street – were free. After bathing under the pipes they walked up Bathurst Street to Queen, the thirty or so of them knowing little more than each other’s false names or true countries.
Hey Italy!
They were in pairs or trios, each in their own language as the dyers had been in their own colours. After a beer they would continue up Bathurst to the Oak Leaf Steam Baths. Paying their quarters they were each handed a towel, a sheet, a padlock, and a canvas bag. They stripped, packed their clothes and salaries into the bag, locked it, and strung the keys around their necks. There was a sense of relaxation among all of them.
Hey Canada!
A wave to Patrick. It was Saturday.

In the whitewashed rooms they sat naked within the steam, brushing a scab, considering a scar on the shoulder. Someone he had never spoken to caught his eye and both of them were so
tired they could not turn away their gaze, just watched the other bluntly. He knew nothing about the men around him except how they moved and laughed – on this side of language. He himself had kept his true name and voice from the bosses at the leather yard, never spoke to them or answered them. A chain was pulled that forced wet steam into the room so that their bodies were separated by whiteness coming up through the gridded floors, tattoos and hard muscles fading into unborn photographs. They shifted, stood up, someone began to sing.

The wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. For the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the Saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station.

He lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall onto him. Soon this arm would become the arm Alice kissed. They were all being released from the week’s work and began to allow themselves ease, the clarified world of passion. The music of
La Bohème
, the death of Mimi, hovering over their unprotected bodies, the keys hanging from the cords around their necks.

Then it was her hand in the doorway touching his heart, against his ribs, aware through her fingers of his weariness. In the small room where he could take three steps and touch the window. There was Patrick and Alice and Hana. If it was warm they would eat on the fire escape. Or if Alice was working he and Hana walked over to the Balkan Café where they sat on wire chairs and were served by long-aproned waiters. They ordered
bop
and
manja
, Hana telling him in her clear, exact voice what the names meant.
Bop
was beans.
Manja
was stew. As he watched Hana, her face drifted into Alice’s and back again as if two glass negatives merged, then moved apart. It was not so much the features as the mannerisms of Alice that he witnessed in her daughter.

He was at ease with the precise Hana and the way she seriously articulated herself among strangers. That voice knew what it wanted and knew what it was allowed. He wanted to pick Hana up and embrace her on the street but felt shy, though in games or in a crowded streetcar her arm lay across him as if needing his warmth and closeness. As he did hers.

But his relationship with Alice had a horizon. She refused to speak of the past. Even her stories about Hana’s father, though intricate, gave nothing away of herself. She was never self-centred in her mythologies. She would turn any compliment away. Her habit of sitting pale and naked at the breakfast table, cutting up whatever fruit they had into three portions, or sitting down with fried eggs made him once whisper to her that she was beautiful. “I’m terrific over eggs,” she shot back, her mouth full. She did not get dressed. She planned to go back to bed as soon as Patrick left for the tannery and Hana left for school. Alice worked in the evenings.

His relationship with Hana was clearer. There would always be something careful about her. As if she had been badly scalded and so would approach all water tentatively for fear it was boiling. With her there would be brief conflicts, a discussion, and then everything was settled. She would not be bossed and she was self-sufficient. She didn’t expect forgiveness.

They sat at the round tables at the Balkan Café eating a large meal and with ice creams strolled over at ten to the Parrot Theatre to pick up Alice. They had all the time in the world,
Hana translating the information she received on the street, speaking to a butcher who walked beside them for a hundred yards carrying a pig’s head. Patrick watched the gestures towards him. They knew who he was now. A hat raised off a head in slow motion, a woman’s nod to his left shoulder.

He lived – in his job and during these evening walks – in a silence, with noise and conversation all around him. To be understood, his reactions had to exaggerate themselves. The family idiot. A stroke victim. “Paderick,” the shopkeepers would call him as he handed them money and a list of foods Hana had written out in Macedonian, accepting whatever they gave him. He felt himself expand into an innocent. Every true thing he learned about character he learned at this time in his life. Once, when they were at the Teck Cinema watching a Chaplin film he found himself laughing out loud, joining the others in their laughter. And he caught someone’s eye, the body bending forward to look at him, who had the same realization – that this mutual laughter was conversation.

He was always comfortable in someone else’s landscape, enjoyed being taught the customs of a place. Patrick wanted the city Hana had constructed for herself – the places she brought together and held as if on the delicate thread of her curiosity: Hoo’s Trading Company where Alice bought herbs for fever, gaslit diners whose aquarium windows leaned against the street. They watched the water-nymph follies at Sunnyside Park, watched the Italian gymnasts at the Elm Street gym, heard the chanting of English lessons to large groups at Central Neighbourhood House – one pure English voice claiming
My name is Ernest
, and then a barrage of male voices claiming their names were Ernest.

But Hana’s favourite place of spells was the Geranium Bakery, and one Saturday afternoon she took him there to meet her
friend Nicholas. She guided Patrick among the other workers and sacks of flour and rollers towards Nicholas Temelcoff, who turned towards her and stretched his arms out wide. It was a joke, he was covered in flour and did not really expect to be embraced. He shook Patrick’s hand and began to show them around the bakery, Hana scooping bits of raw dough with her finger and eating them. Temelcoff was meticulously dressed in jacket and tie but wore no apron so that the flour dust continued to settle on him as he moved through the bakery. He pulled chains that hung from the ceiling to start rollers moving on the upper level. He brought a small doll out of his pocket and handed it to Hana – and this time she embraced him, her head on his chest. The two men had said no more than four polite sentences to each other by the time Patrick left with the girl.

One night Hana pulled out a valise from under the bed and showed him some mementoes. There was a photograph of her as a baby – with her first nickname, Piko, scrawled in pencil on it. Three other photographs: a group of men working on the Bloor Street Viaduct, a photograph of Alice in a play at the Finnish Labour Temple, three men standing in snow in a lumber camp. A sumac bracelet. A rosary. These objects spread out on the bed replaced her father’s absence.

So he discovered Cato through the daughter. The girl had been told everything about him, told of his charm, his cruelty, his selfishness, his heroism, the way he had met and seduced Alice. “You didn’t know Cato, did you?” “No.” “Well he was supposed to be very passionate, very cruel.” “Don’t talk like that, Hana, you’re ten years old, and he’s your father.” “Oh, I love him, even if I never met him. That’s just the truth.”

She was totally unlike Patrick, always practical. When he returned from the steambaths on the first Saturday she had
inquired about the price and he saw her trying to work out if it was worth it. “I would have paid anything,” he muttered, and he saw she could not understand or accept such extravagance in him. She thought him foolish. In the same way, her portrait of her father lacked any sentimentality.