Requiem

1997

The sensory memories, expressions fixed to the faces of my parents, a trill of notes drifting through a slammed kitchen door, a litany of conversations, that is what I have patched together. Along with random historical facts—some of which are in the manila folder, travelling on the seat beside me.

Apart from Okuma-san, Lena was the only person I ever told about the looting. How we were removed from our village. How, by nightfall of the same day, we were sleeping in cattle stalls and animal pens at Hastings Park in Vancouver. How our belongings were stolen while we watched from the mail boat as it pulled away from the wharf on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

She was silent, then angry, then silent again. “You know,” she said, “it’s like Zorba. That’s what it sounds like, anyway, the ugly scene where the women run upstairs to grab the belongings of Lila Kedrova—well, Lila in the role of Madame Hortense. The looting happened after she died in her upstairs room. Everything was grabbed and fought over and torn apart while her body lay on the mattress.”

I had not read the book. Nor had I seen the film, which came out in the mid-sixties, a few years before I’d met Lena in Montreal.

We watched the film with Miss Carrie, as it turned out. Lena wanted me to see it, and noticed in the newspaper that it was going to be shown on TV on a Saturday night. This was in the mid-seventies, not long after we’d moved from an apartment in Montreal to our house in Ottawa. Lena had finished her doctoral studies and had a job teaching history at the university, the reason for the move. I was trying to prepare for a solo show and was supplementing my income with freelance magazine work, doing illustrations and design. Miss Carrie had begun to stuff notes into the bottom of our mailbox at the front door; it didn’t matter that our houses were twenty shuffling steps apart. She was delighted to have us as neighbours, and she liked to write notes. She did not use stamps. Stamps were for real mail—condolences sent to descendants of a shrinking group of aging friends she referred to as “the antiquarians.” As she had no living relatives, Lena and I were adopted, the fact of this being undeclared. And if Miss Carrie had adopted us, we, in turn, had adopted her. The Saturday we invited her to watch the film, Lena hauled a note out of our mailbox and read aloud:

It’s one of my tired days, and everything is an effort. Improved, however, over yesterday, when I had an aching back and took my own advice. I offer it to you now because someday it might be of use. Whenever possible, LIE ON THE FLOOR. Five minutes on the floor is worth a great deal. Because I am so stiffly rounded, it takes part of the five minutes to make my head lie down. But once my body accustoms itself to the position, my head lies back more easily.

P.S. The only mat I care to lie on is the small pink one.

“I’m going next door to get her,” Lena said. “Even if she is having one of her tired days. She can share a pizza with us. She’ll probably consider it a treat.”

She found Miss Carrie in her front hall, tilted over her rickety willow walker while surveying a heap of goods in the hellhole, the floor space at the bottom of the curved staircase in her two-storey stone house. Because Miss Carrie had to grip the banister, hand over hand, to get down, she was not able to carry anything. So she stood on the floor above and dropped what was needed: towels for the wash, an ancient jacket shortened in the left sleeve because one arm was shrinking, a muskrat stole with hard eyes and snout that had once belonged to Mommy and was tossed below in the event that she might be invited out. Whatever was dropped landed in the hellhole with a satisfying thump. A stern portrait of Daddy in uniform looked on from the wall above the staircase; Miss Carrie had told Lena that she lowered her eyes at night when she passed it while climbing the stairs to get to the blue room, where she slept.

Lena picked up the walker with one hand and held Miss Carrie’s arm with the other, supporting her until she got her up onto our veranda. Miss Carrie’s bones were brittle even then. She had already suffered a broken hip and had had surgery after a fall. The items in the hellhole stayed where they were for the time being.

“I’m not giving up, I’m giving out,” Miss Carrie announced as she and Lena came through our front door. “In fact, I’ve come to believe that my time really might be running out. A good thing, too.” She lowered her chin, scrunched her forehead and peered up. “I’ve always thought a sudden death would make a happy corpse,” she said and she laughed abruptly, a conspiratorial sort of laugh.

But that evening, she was anything but a corpse, and the three of us sat in the living room and watched Zorba. Lena ushered her to an armchair and propped cushions to support her hip and back. We served pizza and, later, popcorn, and Miss Carrie settled in with satisfaction.

At the end of the film, there was a long silence before our friend launched into a story of her own childhood. Perhaps she was thinking of the looting scene in the film. Her Daddy, the General, had fought in the Great War. He’d sailed to England in September 1914 along with the Originals, and was in theatre at the Western Front by December of the same year. He also moved his wife and daughter to the south coast of England, and there they stayed—in the tradition of camp followers—for the duration of the war. Miss Carrie had been a young schoolgirl at the time.

“We were on the coast, facing France,” she said, and Lena and I settled back to listen. Of the many eras Miss Carrie had lived through, she had countless stories to tell, but never in any particular order. She criss-crossed time, described periods of innovation, buffoonery, tragedy and relief. Her stories were told with the expectation that the two of us would keep up, that we would enter the scene illuminated at the moment of its telling. We had already learned to leap from the beginning of the century and to land on our feet at its opposite end or somewhere in between, all in the same conversation.

“Daddy had to return to France that day,” she continued, “because his leave was over. Mommy kept me home from school. I loved school and hated to miss a day, but I had to be present for the farewells, which were slightly formal, in the manner of the times.

“I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of a Zeppelin immediately overhead. This was followed by a large bang. A bomb had been dropped at the end of our street, directly over the baker’s house. Poof! The baker was gone! Clouds of flour rose to the sky. People raced to the scene to attempt rescue, but the baker could not be saved. Instead, they rummaged in the ruins for salvage. The rummaging continued the next day, and the day after that. The looters kept what they found.”

The three of us considered. Each, perhaps, visualizing a different scene. I wondered if Lena was thinking of Madame Hortense in Zorba. Or if she was thinking, as I was, of my mother’s sewing machine, or even of Missisu’s piano, which had been hoisted with much effort on the part of the looting men.

Later, after I’d escorted Miss Carrie and her rickety walker home, Lena remarked, “Don’t you sense Daddy in her house somewhere? It’s as if he’s still lurking. His wines are stored in the basement; his humidor adorns the walnut buffet, cigars inside. His stale tobacco is tucked into the leather pouch. And the hellhole—well, maybe that’s the way she exerts defiance, now that both parents are dead. She can finally do what she wants to do. It’s obvious that she managed the household after Mommy died. Probably the reason she never married—that and the fact that the young men of her generation were killed off. Has she shown you her early photos? She was petite, blonde, beautiful. There’s mischief and humour in every photo. The same humour she hasn’t lost, thank heavens. And—wait for this—she loves Benny Goodman! She told me that during the thirties, she danced to his band at Billy Rose’s in New York. Her Benny records are stacked in a box in her basement. Along with the jazz greats. Can you believe it? Unfortunately, her record player doesn’t work.”

But I still hadn’t caught up. I was thinking of the looting scene in the film. I was thinking of my parents, of my sister and brother. Where did the anger go? Did it find its own swallowed place to reside and brood within us, along with the shock and helplessness we felt at the time? Why weren’t the parents—and the children, too—why weren’t we all shouting and yelling from the railings of the Princess Maquinna?

We did not protest. We stood, soundless, as if we were also invisible, while the boat took us away.

I suppose it is somewhat strange that ever since that winter morning, it is the image of Missisu’s piano I most easily call to mind. I have always imagined that heavy piece of furniture being pushed and pulled through time. Shoved around restlessly, continuously, within some faceless person’s house. Or perhaps at a final standstill after all, collecting dust in a living room in which I will never be welcome.