“Good-bye, Breavman.”
“Don’t hang up, Krantz. I swear it was really her. I won’t say she was smiling. It was an open, blonde face with no family lines, so you could make anything you want of it.”
“You go follow the bus, Breavman.”
“Oh, no, she saw me. I’ll just wait here till it comes round again. She moved her lips.”
“Good-bye, Breavman.”
“Krantz, this is a most pleasant telephone booth I’m living in today. Sherbrooke Street is a parade of everyone I ever knew. I’m going to loiter immoderately. They’ll all be delivered to me today, Bertha, Lisa. Nobody, not one name, not one limb will be taken away in the dustload.”
“Where did you dig up those old names?”
“I’m the keeper. I’m the sentimental dirty old man in front of a classroom of children.”
“Good-bye, Breavman, for real.”
It was a beautiful telephone box. It smelled of new spring paint and fresh nails. You could feel the sun through the wire-embedded glass. He was the guard, he was the sentry.
Bertha, who had fallen out of a tree for his sake! Bertha, who played “Greensleeves” sweeter than he ever could! Bertha, who fell with apples and twisted her limbs!
He dropped in another nickel and waited for the music.
“Krantz, she just came round again….”
6
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Everything took so long.
The mountain released the moon like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain.
That summer Breavman had a queer sense of time slowing down.
He was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.
Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything, because he didn’t want Shell to think that he saw her in the same way he saw the girl he was telling about, as if she were a moon-lit body in a slow Swedish movie, and from far away.
What was her name? he demanded of himself.
I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest.
How dare you forget?
Norma.
What did she look like?
It doesn’t matter what she looked like every day. It only matters what she looked like for that important second. That I remember and will tell you.
What did she look like every day?
As a matter of fact, her face was squashed, her nose spread too wide. One of her grandmothers must have been carried away by the Tartars. She always seemed to be astride something, a railing or a diving-board, waving her brown arms, eyes lost in her laugh, galloping to a feast or a massacre. Her flesh was loose.
Why was she a Communist?
Because she played the guitar. Because the copper bosses shot Joe Hill. Because notenemos ni aviones ni cañones, and all her friends had died at Jarama. Because General MacArthur was a criminal and ruled Japan as a personal kingdom. Because the Wobblies sang into tear gas. Because Sacco loved Vanzetti. Because Hiroshima hurt her eyes and she was collecting names on a Ban the Bomb petition and was often told to go back to Russia.
Did she limp?
When she was very tired you noticed it. She usually wore a long Mexican skirt.
And the Mexican ring?
Yes, she was engaged to a chartered accountant. She assured me that he was progressive. But how could someone who was waiting for a revolution be a chartered accountant? I wanted to know. And how could she, with her ideas of freedom, commit herself to conventional marriage?
“We have to be effective in society. Communists aren’t bohemians. That’s a luxury of Westmount.”
Did you love her?
I loved to kiss her breasts, the few times she let me.
How many times, how many times?
Twice. And I was allowed to touch. Arms, stomach, pubic hair, I almost made the jewel of my list but her jeans were too tight. She was four years older than me.
She was engaged?
But I was young. She kept telling me I was a baby. So nothing we did was really important. She phoned him long distance every night. I stood beside her as she spoke. They talked about apartments and wedding plans. It was the prosaic adult world, the museum of failure, and I had nothing to do with it.
What about her face when she talked to him?
I believe I could read guilt on it.
Liar.
We both felt terribly guilty, I guess. So we worked hard to collect more signatures. But we loved to lie together beside the fire. Our tiny circle of light seemed so far from everything. I told her stories. She made up a blues called “My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me.” No, that’s a lie.
What did you do during the day?
We hitch-hiked all over the Laurentians. We’d go down to a beach crowded with sun-bathers and we’d start singing. We were brown, we had good harmonies, people liked to listen to us even if they didn’t open their eyes. Then I’d talk.
“I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m not even talking about politics. I’m talking about your bodies, the ones stretched out on this beach, the ones you’ve just smeared with sun-tan oil. Some of you are over-weight and some of you are too thin, and some of you are very proud. You all know your bodies. You’ve looked at them in mirrors, you’ve waited to hear them complimented, or touched with love. Do you want what you kiss to turn to cancer? Do you want to take handfuls of hair from your child’s scalp? You see, I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m talking about bodies, which are all we have, and no government can restore one finger, one tooth, one inch of normal skin that is lost because of the poison in the air….”
Did they listen?
They listened and most of them signed. I knew I could be Prime Minister because of the way their eyes listened. It didn’t matter what was said as long as the old words were used and the old chanting rhythm, I could have led them into a drowning ritual….
Stop this fantasy right now. What were the bodies like
