Requiem

there. First at the door, and then beside me. As vivid and real as she was in my early-morning dream.

Music blasts from the car radio and I’m on my way. What I hear is a burst of chaos. The middle of something I can’t immediately identify.

A violent clash of sounds. Notes brought together against their will. Dissonance. And then, I recognize Eroica, first movement. The chaotic climax is reached, followed by pulsing, shrugging, withering steps. I know the symphony in its entirety thanks to Okuma-san, who, for so many years, tried to teach me about grand themes.

I turn the corner at the end of the street, relieved that Miss Carrie’s house and my own can no longer be seen in the rear-view. Leave it behind. Leave it all behind. Lena’s voice in my head. I’ve read that soon after a loved one dies, the person’s voice will no longer be remembered. But this hasn’t happened to me, not at all. Not even after five months have passed.

As Eroica continues, I think of Beethoven, who must have known a great deal about chaos and suffering and grand themes. He died in his fifty-seventh year, younger than I am now. What did he know of the human condition to be able to write the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? What did he believe— believe in—when he chose the poetry of Schiller, whose work he so much admired? He declared Schiller to be an “immortal” and worth the trouble of setting his words to music. Oh, you millions! … above the canopy of stars … a loving Father surely must dwell.

It’s all so bloody complicated. The persistent attempts to put something meaningful on canvas—or into music, or on the page.

“Sex and death,” Otto said during one of our early meetings to discuss the river project. “Eros, Thanatos. Think of it, Bin. Every book I publish is ultimately about sex and death.”

But he hasn’t said that since Lena’s funeral. And he’s never mentioned the word love.

I stop at a light, do my best to shove everything sideways out of mind: my sister’s phone call, First Father asking to see me, the last of the river drawings—due and overdue.

At my most recent meeting with Otto and Nathan, Otto said, “Could we settle on the middle of June at the latest, Bin? For a final deadline? For the sake of the catalogue? It’ll be stretching things with the show in November, but we can do it—if we all agree. Of course, the last bits and pieces have to be tidied up.”

Otto, Nathan, myself nodding silently. The solid handshakes that followed. The perpetual need to tidy up.

Again, I try to clear my head, to focus on the drive ahead, to imagine a destination. But the thought of destination, the word, the sound of it, makes me wonder what my real destination is: The camp? First Father? Final drawings for the show?

Why am I leaving?

You’re trying to force things to matter.

I want to work.

Which means? A hope that your life will change?

I have the distinct sensation that despite the wheels of the car rotating as they should, I’m suspended in a kind of punishing no man’s land. I narrow a slit in my mind, try to block everything but the continuing music of Eroica. Grand themes. I’ve lived enough for a lifetime and I’m not an old man yet. But because I’m making an effort not to, I think of Lena again. It’s the Beethoven. One of my favourite pieces is his Leonore Overture III, which reminds me of Lena and not only because of the name. It’s the opening. The extended note. The descending scale that levels in a thickening of darkness. And then, a flute entering from far away, leading up into the light as if announcing its arrival through a long tunnel. Joy rising from an underground spring, that’s the way I hear it. Far and near, far and near. Whatever it was that Beethoven intended, he understood about life setting up patterns. Even so, Leonore transcends pattern, so woven is it with rivers and peaks. Always something hidden and receding. Always the flute, beckoning and bringing a glimmer of light. After that, turmoil, frenzied and exuberant. The breaking of pattern. And then, the notes ascend again. That would be Lena, all of those things. I am the receding part.

I think of Okuma-san, who shared his knowledge of Beethoven with me. It was his singular passion. Okuma-san, whom I once believed to be old. But anyone over thirty would have appeared old to a child. How could I have known, when I first met him, that he was only in his mid-forties? Numbers meant nothing. Hiroshi and Keiko and I referred to him as the old man who arrived in camp without a family. The man who’d been hiding out in Vancouver, looking after a sick wife. When she died, he came out of hiding and was promptly arrested a block from Powell Street in Japtown, as it was then called. Now, more kindly, more politely known—historically, for the tourists at least—as Japantown. Childless, Okuma-san arrived at our place of internment above the banks of the Fraser two years after everyone else. I could not have understood this at the time, but he must have appeared older than he was because of sadness and grief.

I shift gears, nose the car up an incline and down again. Realize, with no surprise, that I’ve pointed the car towards the Ottawa River. A detour across the bridge and into nearby Quebec, to an oasis both quiet and turbulent, a place I discovered years ago and to which I often return alone. Not always alone; Lena came with me on several occasions.

“You always bring me to water,” she once said. “No matter what else you invite me to do or where we do it, we end up walking trails beside a river. Or crossing a bridge and staring down at one.”

“Maybe,” I replied. I was weighing this as a new idea, wondering if it was true.

“Remember the Enz?” she said. “When we took Greg to the Black Forest?”

“I do,” I said. “The tiny river with the large roar.” I was remembering ice formations, horseshoe shapes that clung upside down to branches along the banks. In my mind I saw frosted white against the steel-hard blue of rushing water.

“And what about wading the length of a river? Being knee-deep in the Nerepis, surrounded by eels?” She shuddered as she brought the memory forward.

I hadn’t thought about the eels for a long time, thick brown bodies of spawning eels that had come in from the sea and camouflaged the bottom of the shallow Nerepis. When we disturbed them, not knowing they were there—but they were, by the thousands—they reared their heads in rapid, wide-fanned splashes. There was something monstrous, something truly horrifying about the scene. But we had already waded some distance and couldn’t get out of the water for another quarter mile because of the tangle of scrub that had grown to the edges of the riverbank. There was no trail to climb to and no turning back. How could either of us ever forget?

“There were better places,” said Lena. “The Adirondacks.”

“The upside-down mountains in the Au Sable. Morning air like polished silver.”

“Or brooding across a dark surface in the evening,” she said.

And I thought of shadow. Of shadow and light.

Now, the sight of the Ottawa River up close brings a surge of old energy. It will be easy to recross and join the main road again before I head for the Trans-Canada Highway. I might do a quick sketch before I officially depart for the West. Make an attempt to capture the spring rage of gathering waters.

First day out and, already, I want to draw. But this is not about sex and death. Or do I deceive myself? If Otto were present, he would look away, sagely, cautiously. Otto, who has found Miki and who is searching for answers in things Japanese.

Basil has settled down, knowing we’re safely past the road that leads to the kennels. I glance in the mirror and an exchange takes place—his cheerful, shaggy face greeting my own. The hound’s permanent expression is one of enthusiasm, of being pleased with himself, though he can alter this at will. I’m convinced that he hears sadness, smells detachment, knows grief. Reading my mind again, he sniffs and lowers himself out of sight behind my seat.

Basil has always preferred Lena’s company to mine—I was born in the year of the dog, she used to say. That has to count for something. Right, Basil? But Basil loves a trip, and he won’t complain about my company. I’ve arranged to drop him off at Kay’s, in any case, once we reach Edmonton, five or six days from now. From there, I’ll travel alone and pick him up on the way back. Kay has a snappy little dog, Diva, who will keep him in line. Diva is half his size, but wicked.

I turn off the radio. Eroica is over but I don’t know when I stopped paying