Life in the Court of Matane (13 page)

One day, disaster struck. Madame Nordet was very, very ill for a whole month. A woman from Matane came to fill in for her. Unlike Madame Nordet, the substitute loved teaching math and followed the new provincial programs to the letter. As ill luck would have it, she also had to test our math skills for a school report card. She gave me seventy-five percent, a score of apocalyptic proportions and a far cry from my usual average. And the bad news didn't stop there. My sister's grade 6 teacher also decided to put the screws to her students, meaning that she ended up with a score comparable to my own. We smelled a conspiracy. And there probably was one. In the 1970s, the Quebec government realized that younger Quebecers were hopeless at math. Which is what happens when you leave a people's education in the hands of the Church. And so Quebec's pen-pushers put dozens of math whizzes in charge of coming up with a program designed to turn us all into little Descartes. Textbooks were printed, teachers trained. Well, most teachers. School timetables were filled up with math classes. In less than fifteen years, Quebec school- children became math champions. Even today, when you compare the math skills of students around the world, Quebecers rank third behind the Chinese of Hong Kong and the Koreans. That's really something.

My sister and I got our report cards on the same day. We had to get them signed. I remember us sitting in the bus like two condemned prisoners on a tumbril, on our way to the gallows. The bus slowly climbed the country roads, across the snowy fields. Stomach cramps. Sobbing from my sister. We were bringing irrefutable proof of our insignificance and stupidity back to the castle, stamped with the seal of the Matane school board. Certified morons. In ten minutes, the king and queen would know the pathetic condition our brains were in. We were unworthy of the court, and no Rubik's cube was going to change their minds. The queen's wrath was terrible. The king's was even worse. Echoes of their conversation reached me in my chambers. They were deliberating the sentence. We were called in. They were both sitting on their thrones, sceptre and shield in hand. The image did not bode well. The verdict was returned.

In the case of the unsatisfactory mathematics grade, the Crown has decided the accused shall be found guilty of apathy and stupidity, crimes that in this court shall never be tolerated. The Crown has decided the sentence must set an example for such an unspeakable misdemeanour. The accused shall therefore be condemned to spend one half-hour every evening before an open mathematics textbook and shall solve algebraic equations until such time as their little heads finally agree to let in the light. You must understand that the Kingdom will soon no longer be in a position to support you, that you must fly with your own wings. The only means of achieving this is to be the best, and that includes in mathematics. Yes, you shall go far, very far, but for that you will have to be strong in mathematics. Otherwise a life of poverty and destitution awaits. Do I make myself clear? After doing the dishes, you will go downstairs to your chambers and throw yourselves into said equations. The sentence begins at this very instant. The King has spoken. Now disappear before we change our minds.

We would go far. So they had seen right through my plan. The plan to go very far from Saint-Ulric, Matane, and the king and queen. They might have guessed the goal, but I think they misunderstood how I was going to go about it. In my mind, math would be useful only in helping me figure out how many kilometres I could put between me and them. My sister was given a heavier sentence than mine. For some reason, the king decided, in concert with the queen, that she was to cease all experiments with makeup, effective immediately. Such vulgar paintwork was setting her on a downward path; her future did not look bright. The findings were conclusive: the application of cosmetics to skin abruptly halted all powers of mathematical reasoning. I was to set my translations and Rubik's cube to one side to concentrate on factors and percentages.

It is worth mentioning, with regard to this story, that the king and queen occupied different functions. The king was outraged, there was no doubt, but it was the queen who took corrective action. The order was given by one throne and executed by the other. And it didn't take us long to realize that the king was hopeless at math. He couldn't figure out the answers, grew impatient, and began to swear. It was all the nuns' fault. They hadn't taught him a thing. The queen, on the other hand, performed each step of every equation clearly and rationally. It was all thanks to the nuns. They had taught her everything she knew. Her talent was prodigious. Give her what looked to be an impossible problem and, after a few seconds of hard thinking, she would show us how to solve it with disarming ease. The exercises plunged her into a state of ecstasy that we seldom associated with her. I think it was the queen who taught me you could get neurons drunk. With Anne Boleyn, math suddenly became clear. It had no truck with sentimentality. It never made a maple tree out of a sycamore, any more than it turned water into wine. Math reassured me and patched up the multiple cracks that had fractured my relationship with the queen.

My sentence paid off. I got 100% in math on my next report card. My sister continued to put on makeup in secret.

If the little dog's early revelations haven't saddened you to the point of losing heart in the story, you'll want to stay close to her because you'll sense she's in the mood for a chat. And it isn't every day that you meet a Russian-accented dog in the port of Matane, or even in the port of Amsterdam, for that matter. Her story will have intrigued you. But whoever is this Oleg character? “Oleg? He was my owner. Oleg Gazenko. A real good-looking gentleman. He lured me over with some leftover stew. When he put me in his car, there were already two other little dogs in there. Albina and Muchka. Poor Oleg! He took us to a very strange and very well-heated place. He fed us often, but we had to earn our meals. He had us sit, lie down, get back up, and run around. Albina and Muchka were slower on the uptake. It wasn't that they weren't capable of learning; they just didn't want to, that's all. They might have been only too happy to accept Oleg's meatballs, but they didn't trust him at all. Things took a turn for the worse when the real training began. Oleg put us in narrow metal boxes. No longer than we were. Then he banged against the sides, making as much noise as he could with a hammer. The game was to not fly into a panic. To learn how to stay calm. I wriggled every which way at the start. You see, I was used to walking wherever I pleased through the streets of the capital, as free as could be. And now, dear old Oleg was shutting me away in a metal box. Then one day, I understood that I had as much influence on Oleg as he had on me. All I had to do was give in to his whims and he would feed me. We dogs, you know, we'll do just about anything for food. We'd walk for miles and miles. Not only did he feed me, he began to be very nice to me. He would stroke me. Well done,
Kudryavka
, he'd say. And he looked so happy. He wore an ecstatic expression that I didn't understand. Was that really all he wanted? Albina and Muchka still hadn't understood. They kept on panicking, barking their heads off, biting, scratching. Oleg kept us in the little boxes for days. Then one day he spun us around very quickly in a machine. I couldn't move. I was stuck to the side of the box. We turned round and round like that for hours. I got sick. Oleg looked so worried when he picked me up. I think he thought I was dead.
Limonchik
, are you OK? he asked softly. He also called me
Limonchik
. Little lemon. Poor Oleg. Albina and Muchka were close to death. Muchka was sick for days. I think they didn't like being shut away like that. Have you ever been shut away? Has someone ever put you in a box no longer than your body for days and days?” You won't answer the question. Even if you have been shut away in a tight space for days and days, you won't speak. Not so much out of respect for Kudryavka's tragic story, but because, let's be honest, it's not so easy bringing that kind of thing to the surface. And it was all such a long time ago… Why bring such ugliness to mind when the world has so much beauty to rejoice in? Perhaps you'll want to adopt the little dog. For her to be yours forever. She'll say no. “I can't follow you,” she'll say, in her lovely Russian accent. “You're perfectly nice, and pleasant company, too, but I am condemned to wander this dreary non-place in the dark and cold. But I do know that one day one of the huge cargo ships from my country will come back for me. Maybe the
Pavel Ponomarev
or the
Nina Kukoverova
. It doesn't matter which. They'll come back for me. They've forgotten me, that's all. I can't leave here. They'll pick me up, you'll see, and take me to Murmansk. From there, I'll hop on a truck heading to Moscow and be reunited with my mom and sisters. Ah! Just wait till they hear my story! Do you have another meatball for the trip?”

You will have thought of everything.

Meat. In the house in Saint-Ulric, supper was often masticated in poisonous silence. To relieve the tension, the king would tell us all about his day in the service of the state. What stories he had! Little does the tourist travelling the Gaspé Peninsula in his camper van suspect that the region is a hive of little tragedies and family dramas, that in these sleepy parts, crimes of passion echo louder than in cities. Sometimes, while I slowly sipped my soup, plotting my escape from the kingdom, he would tell his stories. A boy my sister's age had killed himself one village over in Baie-des-Sables. That was the best thing about having a police officer for a father: you would hear some piece of news at school and that night at supper, you would get the full eyewitness account. Because we already knew all about it. Sister Monique of the Passion, a math teacher at École Monseigneur-Belzile, had already told us, urging us to pray for the poor child's soul. It was, it seemed, an affair of the heart. A girl had made fun of him. That seemed weak to me. That same evening, the king came home from work sad. He had been called to the parents' house to go through the usual formalities. I've never understood why people call the police at times like that. Between the soup and the mashed potatoes, he told us the boy had used a 12-gauge shotgun, which seemed to be a very bad thing indeed. According to Henry VIII, this particular type of weapon hurls bullets in every direction to annihilate its target. A weapon like that doesn't leave a neat little red dot in the centre of the forehead like you see in the movies. When placed in the mouth, it rips off half your head and leaves chunks of it lying everywhere. And that's what the king found that day. A thirteen-year-old brain plastered across the ceiling and over the walls. The sound of people struggling to swallow could be heard around the table. The queen gave the king a reproachful look. Not in front of the little brother. On other nights, we would hear about a hairdresser in Sainte-Félicité who hanged herself after breaking up with her boyfriend. A spate of suicides. Not the kind of things you read about on postcards of pretty sunsets. A life lesson usually followed. “Come see me before you do anything so stupid.” I didn't get it. The king and queen would have been the last people I would ever have turned to. Fortunately, I didn't feel much like hanging myself yet. That would come. I hadn't yet discovered the reassuring efficacy of sleeping pills.

Some days, I think that if the Sûreté du Québec were to take a photo of every suicide victim on the Gaspé Peninsula and send it to a member of the House of Commons in Ottawa, then things might change. Maybe then would come the change Pierre Elliott Trudeau had promised when he raised his voice to convince Quebecers to remain Canadian.

But we don't bother MPs with that type of thing. Instead, we send them invitations to go salmon fishing, climb Mont Albert, go heli-skiing, or take a photo of Percé Rock, even if that often involves waiting for the fishermen to take down the body of the man who's just hanged himself in the hole in the rock. We usually get them to come see us in the summer; the roads are better then.

Then, there was also the gloomy procession of accident victims whose limbs, after flying off at all angles across the badly kept roads of the Gaspé Peninsula, would land with a thud on our dinner table. A head with its skull split open was still rolling around in a corner somewhere. It belonged—irony of ironies—to the head of the Matane police force, who had been run over by a truck on his way to work one day. Other nights, it was a liquored-up husband who had beaten his wife so hard with I don't know what that the neighbours had called the police to put a stop to the racket. When he arrived on the scene, my father would find a woman covered in bruises defending her husband from the police. The raving lunatic would be hauled away under the children's reproachful gaze. “Where are you taking our dad? Who's going to rape us every evening now?” In a ramshackle village in the backcountry, an old pervert was trading smokes for blowjobs from twelve-year-olds. There were also stories of drug trafficking by biker gangs, break-ins, and countless violations of the Highway Code. The king's days were nothing but a depressing succession of fines, dead bodies, crime, violence, calls for help, and hard times. When he returned to his castle, he must have thought our family frustrations more than a little pointless.

Supper in Saint-Ulric invariably ended with an order from the king or queen. “The dishes.” Staring out at the forest from the kitchen window, my hands in warm soapy water, I wondered who would help my sister do the dishes if I blasted my brains out all over the ceiling. I wasn't cruel enough to leave my chores to her. “You can dry, Sis! And make sure you wipe off all the sauce stains. Otherwise Anne Boleyn will shout at us again.” Just behind us we could hear the wet sounds of the sovereigns kissing. Their bellies full, they rubbed their moist snouts together. It turned my stomach in the most indescribable way. Nausea.

Should you return for a third evening to the wharf in Matane, this time you'll have thought to bring double meatball rations. The little dog will have suddenly stopped talking the previous night. Impossible to get another word out of her. She'll have fallen silent right after her heart-rending story about the centrifuge. She'll have thrown up a few meatballs and disappeared back into the thick fog down by the wharf in Matane. You'll be curious, eager to hear how the story ends. You'll whistle to her. “Kudryavka! Kudryavka! Are you there?” She might not come. You'll try to call her Limonchik. Her name will reverberate three times around the deserted port. Because there's not a lot going on there nowadays. The heyday of Russian cargo ships has been and gone. They're rusting away somewhere on a beach in Cuba or Angola. You might find the whole thing most disturbing. Perhaps you'll want to call the Humane Society. You'll be just about to head back when, against all odds, you'll hear Limonchik barking. She'll run over to you. You'll go misty-eyed you'll be so happy to see her. She'll give you a real warm welcome, run around you three times, jumping up and barking. Because, whenever she's not talking, the little stray barks. She's a little barker. Or
Laika
, as they say in Russian. She'll wolf down the meatballs you brought and even the dog biscuit. For an instant, you'll feel as though you've found a friend. Man's best friend, ready to lay down her life for him. “So, Limonchik? Still talking? Would you like to tell me more about your lovely trip to Russia? Did you go to Saint Petersburg? Vladivostok? Did you take the train with Oleg Gazenko?” At the sound of Oleg Gazenko's name, the little dog will stop jumping about. She'll look you straight in the eye. “Oleg? Oleg only wanted what was best for me, you know. He had a job to do. He was under orders—and I know this because he whispered it into my ear more than once—to find three stray dogs and train them for the mission. Only one would be chosen. The best. The most courageous. The most stoical. His superiors were very intelligent people who did wonders for Russia. They were highly skilled mathematicians and told him that even he could be of use to Russia. I'm telling you, I have fond memories of Oleg Gazenko. Sure, he could be hard on the three of us, but did he have a choice? We had to move forward, always higher, always further. One day, some people in white smocks came into the laboratory. I was in my little box. Albina and Muchka, too. They were misbehaving. The people in lab coats were giving us dirty looks. Oleg was uncomfortable. He spoke to them for a long time. One of the men lost his temper. He pointed at a calendar on the wall and began to shout in his Moscow accent. He stomped his foot on the floor. There was a picture of people riding a tractor on the calendar. It said, “Comrade! Respect the five-year plan!” Then Oleg became very nervous. I could sense—because I can sense things like that—that he needed me right at that very moment. Up until then, I had depended on him for everything. I was at his mercy. I sensed that I at last had the chance to give him back a little of all that he had given me. Oleg and his superiors walked over to our boxes. Albina and Muchka continued to wriggle around. I stayed calm, just like Oleg had taught me. He pointed at me and everyone smiled. Oleg lifted me out of the box. He introduced me to the people in the lab coats, saying, “It will be her. It will be our little Kudryavka!” I had been chosen for something. I didn't know what. Then one of the men said that my name was too complicated, that foreigners wouldn't be able to remember it because they sometimes found Russian names too long and easy to forget. I think that I barked when I heard Oleg say my name. “Laika,” someone suggested. “Everyone will remember that. It's easy to pronounce.” They all nodded in agreement.