Bobcat and Other Stories (6 page)

After he introduced me, I stood in front of the crowd, my larynx rising quite against my will, and delivered my paper. I tried to speak each word as a discrete item, in order to persuade the audience not to synthesize the sentences into meaning. But when I lifted my head to look out at my listeners, I could see they were doing just that. When I got to the part where I said the individual did not exist—citizens were “merely shafts of light lost, redemptively, in the greater light of the state”—I saw Hans bow his head and rake his otherworldly hand through his hair.

“And if force is required to forge a singular and mutual grammar, then it is our sacred duty to hasten the birth pangs.” Even from this distance I could hear Stasselova’s breathing, and the sound of blood running through him like a quiet but rushing stream.

And then my parents. As the speech wore on—“harmony,” “force,” “flowering,” “blood”—I could see that the very elegant parental machinery they had designed over the years, which sought always to translate my deeds into something lovely, light-bearing, full of promise, was spinning a little on its wheels. Only Solveig, that apparatchik of friendship, maintained her confidence in me. Even when she was hung over, her posture suggested a perfect alignment between heaven and earth. She kept nodding, encouraging me.

I waited the entire speech for Stasselova to leap forward and confront me, to reassert his innocence in opposition to me, but he did not, even when I reached the end. He stood and watched as everybody clapped in bewilderment, and a flushed floral insignia rose on his cheeks. I had come to love his wide, excited face, the old circus man. He smiled at me. He was my teacher, and he had wrapped himself, his elaborate historical self, into this package, and stood in front of the high windows, to teach me my little lesson, which turned out to
be not about Poland or fascism or war, borderlines or passion or loyalty, but just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of. And I did long for it, to say one true sentence of my own, to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity—the light of which, incidentally, was streaming in on us just then through the high windows. Above Stasselova’s head the storm clouds were dispersing, as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they’re told to do from deep within.

Slatland

I went to Professor Pine for help twice in my life, once as a child and once as an adult. The first time, I was eleven and had fallen into an inexplicable depression. This happened in the spring of 1967, seemingly overnight, and for no reason. Any happiness in me just flew away, like birds up and out of a tree.

Until then I had been a normal, healthy child. My parents had never damaged me in any way. They had given me a dusty, simple childhood on the flatlands of Saskatchewan. I had two best friends—large, unselfish girls who were already gearing up for adolescence, sometimes laughing until they collapsed. I had a dog named Chest, who late at night brought me half-alive things in his teeth—bats with human faces, fluttering birds, speckled, choking mice.

My parents couldn’t help noticing my sadness. They looked at me as if they were afraid of me. Sometimes at the dinner table the silence would be so deep that I felt compelled to reassure them. But when I tried to say that I was all right, my voice would crack and I would feel my face distorting, caving in. I would close my eyes then, and cry.

One night my parents came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed. “Honey,” my father said, “your mother and I have been thinking about you a lot lately. We were thinking that maybe you would consider talking to somebody—you know, a therapist—about what is the matter.” My father was an earnest, cheerful man, a geologist with a brush cut and a big heart. I couldn’t imagine that a therapist would solve my problems, but my father looked hopeful, his large hand tracing a ruffle around my bedspread.

Three days later we were standing outside an office on the fourth floor of the Humanities Building. My appointment was not with a true therapist but rather with a professor of child psychology at the university where my father taught.

We knocked, and a voice called from behind the door in a bit of a singsong, “Come in you, come in you.” Of course he was expecting us, but this still seemed odd, as if he knew us very well or as if my father and I were both little children—or elves. The man sitting behind the desk when we entered was wearing a denim shirt, his blond hair slicked back like a rodent’s. He looked surprised—a look that turned out to be permanent. He didn’t stand up, just waved at us. From a cage in the corner three birds squawked. My father approached the desk and stuck out his hand. “Peter Bergen,” my father said.

“Professor Roland Boland Pine,” the man said, and then looked at me. “Hello, girlie.”

Despite this, my father left me alone with him. Perhaps he just thought, as I did, that Professor Pine talked like this, in occasional baby words, because he wanted children to respond as if to other children. I sat in a black leather chair. The professor and I just stared at each other for a while. I didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t speaking either. It was easy to stare at him. As if I were staring at an animal, I felt no embarrassment.

“Well,” he said at last, “your name is Margit?”

I nodded.

“How are you today, Margit?”

“I’m okay.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“Yes. I feel okay.”

“Do you go to school, Margit?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your teacher?”

“Not really.”

“Do you hate him?”

“It’s a her.”

“Do you hate her?”

“No.”

“Why are you here, Margit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is everything okay at home?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love your father?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love your mother?” A long tic broke on his face, from the outer corner of his left eye all the way down to his neck.

“Yes.”

“Is she a lumpy mother?”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon me, Margit. I meant does your mother love you?”

“Yes.”

“Does she love your father?”

I paused. “Yes.”

“And does he love her?”

“I guess so.”

“Margit, what is the matter?”

“Nothing. I just don’t see why we’re talking about my parents so much.”

“Why don’t they love each other?”

“They do—I said they do.”

“Why can’t you talk about this?”

“Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

“You can tell me the truth. Do they hurt each other? Lots of girls’ parents hurt each other.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Is one of them having an affair, maybe?”

I didn’t say anything. “Maybe?” he repeated.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Which one, Margit? Which one of the babyfaces?”

I stared at him. Another tic passed over his face. “Pardon me, Margit. I meant which one of your parents is having the affair?”

“My dad. But I don’t think he’s actually having it. I just heard him tell my mom a few months ago that he was considering it.”

“And do you think he is?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks ago I picked up the phone and a woman was talking to my dad. She told him that she had to have her breasts removed and asked if that would make a difference.”

“How difficult for you. How sad for the girlie-whirl.” Another tic, like a fault line shifting. “Margit, may I tell you something from my own childhood?”

This worried me, but I said yes.

“When I was young, I loved my mother. She was a real lumper. Then one day, kerpow, she was dead.” He held his forefinger to his head as if it were the barrel of a gun and stared at me for a few seconds without speaking. “It wasn’t actually her, you see, but a woman of about her age who happened to be walking toward me on the sidewalk. A man came running and shot her. I was so devastated that I fell right on top of her. I didn’t care if he shot me, too. I was only ten at the time, and my mother’s death could have scarred me for life. But it didn’t. And do you know how I got from that moment to this one—how I got from there to here, to sitting behind this desk now, talking to you?”

I shook my head. “How?”

“I rose above the situation. Literally I did. I felt my mind lift out of my body, and I stared down at myself leaning over the bleeding woman. I said to myself, very calmly, there is little Roland from New Orleans, the little erky-terk, realizing that someday his mother will die.”

He was looking at me so intently, and his birds were flapping in their cage with such fervor, that I felt I had to say something. “Wow,” I said.

“I suggest you try it, Margit. For every situation there is a proper distance. Growing up is just a matter of gaining perspective. Sometimes you just need to jump up for a moment, a foot above the earth. And sometimes you need to jump very far. It is as if there are thin slats, footholds, from here to the sun, Margit, for the baby faces to step on. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Slatland, flatland, mapland.”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon me, Margit. I know so many languages that sometimes I say words out of place.”

At the end of the session I asked him when I should return. He told me that another visit wouldn’t be necessary, that usually his therapy worked the first time.

I didn’t in fact understand what he had said to me, but his theory seemed to help anyway, as if it were a medication that worked whether you understood it or not. That very evening I was having dinner with my parents. It started as the usual dinner—me staring at my plate, my parents staring at me as if I were about to break in two. But about halfway through the meal I started feeling light-headed. Nothing frightening happened, but I did manage to lift slightly out of myself. I looked down at our tiny family. I saw my father from above, the deep map of his face. I understood in an instant that of course he was having an affair, and that he was torn between my mother and this other, distant woman. I saw my beautiful mother from above, and I could see how she must hate this other woman, yet sympathize as well, because this other woman was very ill. I understood how complicated it was to be an adult, and how haunting, and how lovely. I longed to be back in my body then, to be breathing and eating, straining toward maturity. And when I returned, one split second later, I hugged my parents, one after the other, with a spontaneity that a depressed person could never muster.

IN THE TWENTY YEARS
that passed between my first visit to Professor Pine and my second, from 1967 to 1987, I remained in the same city. I graduated from Massey and then from LeBoldus High and then from the University of Saskatchewan, with a degree in biology. As an adult, I worked as a soil consultant, traveling around the province to small satellite towns in a flatbed truck that I could sleep in, if necessary, on warm nights.

Bouts of the depression did return, but they never overwhelmed me. Perhaps my life was not the most rigorous testing ground for Professor Pine’s technique, because my life was relatively free of tragedy. Most of my depression erupted out of nowhere. I’d be in the fields in the midst of a bright day, and a dreariness would mysteriously descend. I’d sink into it for a few minutes, but the lift would always come. I would take a step up, or two or three, and recognize how good life in fact was. From above, my job appeared to me excellent and strange. There I was, under a blazing sun, kneeling in a yellow expanse, weighing samples of earth. And later, with instruments as tiny and beautiful as jewelry, testing the dirt for traces of nitrogen and phosphorus, the gleam of potash.

ONE NIGHT, IN THE
middle of the year 1985, I made the mistake of describing this technique to my fiancé, Rezvan Balescu, the Romanian liar. We had known each other for only two months at this point, but we were already engaged. We were standing on a small balcony outside our apartment. He was smoking, wearing pajamas under a down-filled jacket, and he was in the midst of one of his tirades on North America, which he loved and hated. “This place is so strange to me, so childish. You have so many problems that are not real, and you are so careful and serious about them. People discuss their feelings as if they were great works of art or literature that need to be analyzed and examined and passed on and on. In my country people love or they hate. They know that a human being is mysterious, and they live with that. The problems they have are real problems. If you do not eat, that’s a problem. If you have no leg, that’s a problem. If you are unhappy, that is not a problem to talk about.”

“I think it is,” I said.

“Exactly. That is because you are an American. For you, big things are small, and small things are big.” Rezvan was always making these large declarations about North Americans in a loud voice from our balcony.

“I bet you one million in money,” Rezvan said as he blew out smoke, “that the number of hours Americans spend per week in these—what do you call them?—therapy offices is exactly the same number of hours Romanians spend in line for bread. And for what? Nothing. To make their problems bigger. They talk about them all day so at night they are even bigger.”

“I don’t agree. The reason why people talk about their problems is to get over them, get rid of them. I went to a therapist once and he was very helpful.”

“You?” He lifted an eyebrow, took a drag.

“Yes, when I was eleven.”

“Eleven? What could be the problem at eleven?”

“I was just sad. My parents were getting divorced, and I guess I could tell that my dad was about to leave.”

“But isn’t that the correct emotion—sadness—when a father leaves? Can a therapist do anything to bring your father home?”

“No, but he gave me a way to deal with it.”

“And what is that way? I would like to know.”

“Well, just a way to separate from the situation.”

“How do you separate from your own life?”

“Well, you rise above it. You gain some objectivity and perspective.”

“But is this proper? If you have a real problem, should you rise above it? When a father leaves a child, the child feels sad. This seems right to me. This rising above, that is the problem. In fact, that is the problem of America. I cannot tell my family back home that if they are hungry or cold, they should just rise above it. I cannot say, ‘Don’t worry, go to the movies, go shop, here is ten dollars in money, go buy some candy. Rise above your situation.’ ”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean you literally rise above it. Your mind hovers over your body, and you understand the situation from a higher perspective.” I knew that if he pushed me far enough, this would end up sounding insane.

“So this is what your man, your eleven-year-old therapist, teaches you: to separate your mind from your body, to become unhinged. This does not teach you to solve the problem; this teaches you to be a crazy person.”

But already I was drifting up until I was watching us from the level of the roof. There she is, I thought, Margit Bergen, twenty-nine years old, in love with Rezvan of Romania, a defector who escaped political hardship to arrive in a refugee camp in Austria and a year later in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he now stands on a balcony in the moonlight, hassling her about America, as if she contained all of it inside her.

I HAD MET REZVAN
in my father’s lab at the university. Rezvan was a geologist, like my father. Technically, for grant reasons, he was a graduate student, but my father considered him a peer, because Rezvan had already worked for years as a geologist for the Romanian government.