Requiem

CHAPTER 7

The day after we watched Zorba together, Miss Carrie placed a bottle of wine between our front doors. It must have taken considerable effort to transport it from her house to ours. Perhaps she let it roll around the seat of her walker. Or perhaps she shuffled to our place with the aid of her cane. A note was tied to the neck of the bottle.

There has been a rise in the price of single malt. The man who came to cut overhanging branches from the sorry old oak in my backyard frequents the liquor store and has so informed me. The wine is from Daddy’s wine cellar and is meant to thank you for the film. I know it’s not Scotch, which Bin prefers, but he might enjoy an ancient red. Do come and have sherry with me some evening next week, perhaps Sunday. I serve it the old way, with a fistful of croutons. I toast the croutons myself, in the oven.

A bottle of Laphroaig is with me now, so far unopened. I shove in a Beethoven tape, the Fifth Symphony, exactly right for a landscape where rock is a force, the dominant force. No escaping the fact of this since first approaching the northern part of the province. I’ve been travelling for hours over marsh and crag, over road blasted through solid walls of rock, in a landscape where only stunted growth survives. This is how I would depict the old, old earth in its pared-back state. Patches and furrows of salmon pink, feldspar in granite. Roots and pods, struggling to survive.

Basil raises his head at the click of the tape and Beethoven’s four-note motif. What does Basil hear—apart from my thoughts? What does any dog hear? Wah-wah-wah-wah. He sniffs the air and settles again. I hear him gnawing at his Kong. He’s content while we’re moving and lets me know that he’s immune to the music. Not that there’s anything wrong with his hearing. At home, he hears the mail before it hits the slot and then tries to scare off the postman. Or he bounds to the kitchen from any room of the house at the sound of a yogurt top being torn off, hoping to lick its foil underside.

The music continues, three plus one, same pitch for three, the fourth pitch down a third: Da Da Da Dum. The theme repeats itself in insistent ways. Fate knocking at the door. Where did that come from? From the great man himself, who created an entire symphony around four notes. He unified themes; that was his genius. The power in the music builds and builds, never releasing the listener. Beethoven had energy and beauty inside him, and determination. Enough that he could pluck the first note from his mind and plant it to a staff, the lines of which he had drawn in one of his copious notebooks. If he’d contained the symphony unexpressed, within him, it could have destroyed him. And life wasn’t easy before he wrote the Fifth. To which I could listen for days—and have. With Okuma-san when I was a boy, years after the war, when he purchased a second-hand record player. On a lumpy mattress in a long-ago student apartment on rue Bishop in Montreal. In a concert hall in Berlin. In a bedsit in London, teetering on a lopsided stool that had a splintered leg.

Beethoven once wrote to his friend Wegeler that it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives. But if given a second life, or a third, would his ears be able to hear? He was closed to the outer sound of his own music, but his inner life, his adversity, must have pushed his genius. Listen, Okuma-san told me. Listen to the tapping on wood. Listen to it rhythmically. It is the music of Beethoven. His greatest works were written after he was totally deaf.

Light is dropping from the sky. The sun has overtaken the car and I’m driving directly into afternoon glare. I’ve been on the road for two days and I’m still in Ontario, forced to acknowledge the immensity of one province. If I were in northern Europe, I’d have passed through half a dozen countries by late afternoon. But here I am, and I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen a motel sign. Still, the drive over the Canadian Shield is one of my favourites, and used to be one of Lena’s, too. We never hurried when approaching the north shore of Lake Superior, travelling west towards the Lakehead. Lena loved hiking in the provincial parks and scrambling over bald pates of granite. To her, physical landscape was one more dimension of history. She had a deep desire to understand the makeup of the earth beneath her feet. Every time we travelled—before and after Greg was born— cobbles, pebbles, smooth stones, stones that sparkled and were studded with quartz, mica, feldspar, rattled around the floor of the car. The more sparkle, the more striations, the more pleased Lena would be.

“This is igneous,” she explained to Greg when he was a tiny boy and stood beside her in his green overalls. “This is sedimentary—do you see the difference? And this one is metamorphic.”

Three tiny samples in a plastic case fitted his palm perfectly. He snapped the lid shut and opened it again. Snap. Click.

We both enjoyed teaching Greg, and he was quick to learn. It was Lena who suggested his name the day after he was born. She was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, her legs dangling, and she was leafing through name books while our new son hiccuped in a bassinet that had been wheeled to the room. “Vigilant,” she said. “That’s what Gregory means. I would like a child of ours to be vigilant.”

The stones that she, and then the two of them, brought home and washed and dried and arranged on a shelf were called their wondrous stones. Greg moved on to volcanoes and dinosaurs before he got to whales, dolphins and other sea mammals—and remained there—but Lena continued to collect rocks and fossils, many of which are still in the spare room. Those were her smalls. Still undisturbed, because I’ve been in the room only a few times since November. It doubled as Lena’s home office— and is one more area waiting to be sorted out. Maybe, maybe I’ll do this when I get home.

The sun has lowered itself close to the curve of Earth, and less than an hour’s light remains in the sky. I didn’t hear Basil stand up behind me but a glance in the mirror shows that he’s watching me, his long purple tongue hanging out.

“Okay, okay,” I tell him. “I don’t want to sleep in the car any more than you do.”

At which he begins to turn circles in the back. A sure sign of dismay.

Last night, our first night out, we stayed in a derelict, half-empty motel that permitted dogs. I was too tired to drive any farther, and Basil slept by the door facing out, as if expecting an intruder, and then he ground his teeth for hours.

Just as I’m wondering if I should have paid more attention to the map, I see a sign at the side of the highway: OVERNIGHT CABINS. I swerve, too rapidly, and Basil lurches in the back and barks his complaint. I find myself on a lumpy gravel road and make my way up a wooded hill, following a series of dusky arrows painted on boards that have been nailed to tree trunks. A plethora of signs that makes me think of Hansel and Gretel, greedy or desperate for a place to break bread and lay their heads. Basil is making noises that I take to mean he mistrusts my judgment. From his repertoire of sounds he calls up one of his favourites, and coughs like a choking horse.

After a few minutes, the gravel narrows to become a dirt track that leads through more woods and then into a clearing at the top of the hill. I stop the car before an open space that appears to be—in this unlikely place—an old lodge, clearly on the edge of ruin. Steps of flaking concrete, a fence that leans inwards, the tips of the pointed boards teetering against a mound of dirt in the yard. At the right, a path leads to two side-by-side cabins. A rusting half-ton pickup has been abandoned beside the toppled fence. A small van is parked in front of one of the cabins.

I stop the Beethoven tape reluctantly, because it is in its third movement, which seems to be asking a series of spirited questions. Each, in turn, met with forceful response. The delicacy of the back-and-forth sequence that follows is a part I love because it moves towards strength. The theme never lets go. I have a sudden yearning for Okuma-san and wish he were beside me now to listen to this recording. If he were alive, he’d be ninety-eight years old. Older than Miss Carrie, who admits only to being born after the turn of the century, while Okuma-san was born one year before. Sometimes, I imagine the two of them meeting and I create conversations they might have had. Would Miss Carrie have made Okuma-san laugh? Sometimes, perhaps. My memory calls up his face but what I see is intensity, not laughter. Intensity and, yes, wisdom and caring.

I stretch my way out of the car and open the back for Basil, who immediately relieves himself against the fence and heads for the front steps like some hirsute cousin who is returning for a reunion after a long absence. It might be my imagination, but he looks shaggier than usual. Dirtier and smellier, too. I rap at the door, lean down and give warning: “Make an impression, will you? A good one. This is our one hope for a bed tonight.”

Basil is accepted, odour and all, not only in the cabin but in the tea room, too. For that’s what it is, as