Life in the Court of Matane (14 page)

And that's how I became Laika.

The Laika stamp. Anne Boleyn collected postage stamps, too. She had collected them for years. On winter nights, she would sit down at the dining table and open her album. The project to educate us continued. Homework. My sister racked her brains trying to solve the math questions Sister Monique had set. The queen had understood that she had only a few years to transform us into model citizens. Neatly turned-out, upstanding people. Cartesian beings who knew how to factor an equation. Followers of cold, implacable logic far removed from the folly of Micheline Raymond, professional cook. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Anne Boleyn was my Abbé Faria, the prisoner in the Château d'If who taught Edmond Dantès everything that would make a presentable man of him in the salons of Paris. When his humour permitted, when the shouting died down in the home of the king, we spent our time learning. With the exception of catechism, school projects and home education blended into a single program. The queen would also sometimes immure herself in glacial silence, looking ahead to the end of this exhausting reign and her departure for the southern seas.

I was fascinated by Anne Boleyn's stamp collection. Each little perforated frame brought a tiny slice of the world home to me. One day, we were standing beside her. She had just opened an envelope of Polish stamps. One of the stamps had a stark-naked woman on it, unthinkable for the Canadian postal service. My sister and I giggled nervously, which was enough to outrage the queen. We must have been eight and nine, and the thought of receiving a letter with a pornographic stamp on it amused us no end. The queen sighed and summoned her reproachful tone. “My God, you are immature. I hope your brother's generation will be more intelligent. It's only a body. There's nothing more natural.” Laughing at this body, on the other hand, wasn't natural at all. I imagined my grandmother licking the back of the rude stamp to stick it on an envelope she was mailing to me. “Happy tenth birthday!” Luckily, my grandma didn't live in Warsaw.

Anne Boleyn might have been right. My half-brother was born after the Quiet Revolution. He belonged to an enlightened, free generation. My sister and I still belonged to the old world, polluted by the gospels and the retrograde ideas of a country that was behind the times. Back then, talk of the body, particularly the body in its most intimate moments, was all the rage. The queen followed the trend very closely. The king also seemed to think that describing—sometimes over dinner—the most personal of acts was all part of a child's education. We knew a lot about their lovemaking and their bodies in general. But very little about our own bodies or what we were going to do with them. It was, I think, a generational thing. Upon release from their convents and churches, Quebec's men and women began to go on and on about nipples and menstruation. For a long time, we were told, such talk had been severely punished, and now it was time to talk about such things as often as possible in order to “take back” their bodies and all their functions. Any man or woman who persisted in shrouding their flesh in mystery was considered backward or out of tune with the times. Living under such censure must have been dreadful. The whole thing made me feel so sick that even today I never say “make love.” It conjures up, with far too much detail, images of the king and queen's sticky snouts. One day over supper, the king and queen had a bit of a shouting match. If memory serves, they couldn't agree over the man's role in a woman's pleasure. The queen lost her temper. “Women don't need men: we have hands!” I hadn't really understood back then what hands had to do with anything.

Still, I didn't lose any of my enthusiasm for stamp collecting. Noting my interest, Anne Boleyn found me a smaller album and taught me the basics. Mint stamps had to be handled with a little pair of tongs. During these moments of relative calm at home, I felt as though I were travelling alone with the queen. We were the only ones with any interest in the activity. She explained each stamp. Countries used these small paper squares to show off what they considered to best represent their culture. I learned that small, cylindrical red hats were very important to Indonesians. The English and the Swedes had sovereigns of every colour. A green queen. A purple king. In the middle of the table, there was a small pile of stamps from all over, sent to us by an American distributor. Canadian stamps were easier to get our hands on. The queen worked in an office that received letters by the ton. She came home every week with piles of torn, empty envelopes. She soaked the paper in water to remove the stamps, then dried them and flattened them under a heavy book. Sometimes the postmark had spared a stamp or two. They were reused to mail the kingdom's letters. The stamps she recovered had lost their glue, so she had come up with an ingenious solution. She would put a drop of corn syrup on the end of her finger, dab it against the back of the stamp and the corner of the envelope, and stick on the stamp. Canada Post never suspected a thing. The whole time the queen was around, the king never had to buy a single stamp.

On stamp-collecting nights, Anne Boleyn took up the west side of the table, and I, the east. She went about her work meticulously, and I, haphazardly. She had an abundance of stamps, and I, a dearth of them. Her album said
Ambassador
on it. Mine said
Traveller
. Regularity and inconsistency around the same cherrywood table. A rolling stone gathers no moss. The stamps flew between these two political opposites. Our task involved determining which country the stamps came from, asking our adversary a general question about that particular country, answering any questions asked, and attaching the stamp to the corresponding black and white image inside the album, using a little hinge. The prevailing winds came from the west in this country, and so I received many more stamps than she got from me. The white pages of our albums organized the world in alphabetical order—and in English, French-language albums not having arrived yet. In the spring of 1980, country names had not suddenly been magically translated, and the referendum, which had been set to make an ambassador of me, had instead only confirmed my status as a traveller wandering a strange land.

My hands were guided by translations provided from the west.

“Morocco?”

“
Maroc
.”

“
Merci
. Norway?”

“
Norvège
.”

“Ah!”

We devoted entire evenings to sorting foreign stamps that had ended their final journey with us. The queen ordered them from American catalogues.

“Who's the woman on so many French stamps?”

“The Sower.”

“Why so many Madonnas on Spanish stamps?”

“The Spanish are very devout.”

“Why do the Czechs seem so happy to be driving a tractor?”

“They're Communists.”

That was the way of the world. Communists drove tractors.

It seemed to me that the countries included in my stamp album were destined to exist for all eternity. If someone had told me that half of them would no longer be in existence by the time I decided to write about all of this, I wouldn't have believed it. The countries we named in our monosyllabic conversations would all disappear one day.

“Zaire.”

“Rhodesia,” she replied, not missing a beat.

Puzzled, I went on.

“Burma.”

“Upper Volta,” she countered, unperturbed.

I wasn't going to let her win without a fight.

“Yugoslavia.”

“Czechoslovakia,” she said, launching a surprise attack in a calm but measured tone.

I almost lost my footing. I nervously flicked through the pages of my album. Salvation came from the Americas.

“British Honduras,” I said, stressing each syllable for effect, sure that this would prove to be the winning reply in our war of words. How could I have been so naïve?

“The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen,” she countered, fixing her gaze on me.

Sweating now, I aimed for below the belt.

“The German Democratic Republic.”

That was when the unthinkable happened. Beaming like a woman holding a straight flush when everyone else has already put their cards on the table, she floored me with the sublime “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Every syllable still shakes me to the core, even today. Leafing feverishly through my
Traveller
album, unable to find the name of the country that was going to help me find my way out of this predicament, I pretended to have found the fatal weapon and blurted out: “Quebec!”

A tomb-like silence enveloped the whole house in an instant. Eyes dropped to the floor. It was as though a boxer had pulled out a revolver in the middle of a fight and fired a bullet right between his opponent's eyes. I could have lost and kept my head held high. Instead, I had opted for disgrace and a victory without glory. The malicious pleasure of twisting the knife in a wound. The
Ambassador
closed with a thudding sound normally reserved for books of magic spells. The queen stood up and haughtily left the room. She often did that when she heard a hammer word. She would starve us of her presence, holing herself up in a cage of silence and smoking in sadness. I was left alone, just me and my mistake. The long melancholy sigh that had begun on May 20, 1980, and that was to become my family's national anthem, again struck up its sad lament. No one had ever seen the word “Quebec” on a postage stamp. The very idea of it would always be unreal. Almost grotesque.

Looking back today, it strikes me as thoughtless to have included a country that hadn't even dared be born on a list of countries about to disappear from the atlas. Because, of half the countries in our albums, only a handful would survive another twenty years. We didn't know it yet, but it's perfectly possible for countries or individuals to change name and continue to cling to their identity. Because what's in a name, right? How important is it really to insist on being referred to as the British Honduras, Canada, or Micheline Raymond, professional cook? Aren't these names simply the product of an arbitrary series of decisions, nothing more than a matter of public record? If I tell you, for example, in my most threatening, angry voice, that Sweden isn't Sweden, it's Pumpkin, are you really going to contradict me? No. You'll stick to your position and simply pretend that I'm right. It's just like religion. Because a name, when you think about it, is nothing but a way of announcing to the world what is one day inevitably going to end up on a gravestone somewhere. That was one thing we had to understand in the court of King Henry VIII.

With the queen's sudden departure, a little blue stamp had slipped from the
Ambassador
. It twirled its way across the dining room and landed right beneath my nose. There was the cosmos, set against a background as blue as the Quebec flag. To the left was a spaceship:
Sputnik 2
. To the right, a little pointy-eared dog was staring off at something outside the frame. It was a pretty image. With my translator unavailable, I was forced to conclude that the stamp came from a country called “Posta Romina,” that it was worth 1.20 Lei, and that it commemorated an event known as
Primul calator in cosmos
. A blue dog in space? I found no trace of Posta Romina in my
Traveller
, no more than I found Quebec. The stamp's origins were to remain a mystery. The diplomatic incident was quickly forgotten, and that night I fell asleep dreaming that I was in a space capsule high above the Gaspé Peninsula, with a little dog at the controls.

Will you be bold enough to venture back to the wharf in Matane for a fourth time? Perhaps you'll have better things to do. The Gaspé Peninsula is big; there's so much to see. You'll have spent all day thinking of Laika, even while you stood in front of the aquarium at the salmon fishway on the Matane River, where visitors wait patiently for the plucky fish to pass by on their way to spawn. At the sight of so many fish packed into the tiny aquarium, your thoughts will turn to Laika in her centrifuge. Come evening, rather than continue on your way, you'll decide to stop by the bookstore and pick up a dog-training manual, because you've never owned a dog before. You'll head back to the port, once the fog has come in. You'll wait for Laika there. You'll find her in a state of panic. She'll be turning in circles on the quay, barking all the while. “What's wrong, little Laika? You're all worked up!” She'll tug at the bottom of your pants to get you to follow her to the end of the dark wharf. She'll motion out to sea with her head, barking more and more excitedly. You'll see a huge blue and white ship emerge from the fog. Laika will be beside herself. “They're here! They've come back! I'm going home!” As the boat draws nearer, you'll realize that Laika is perhaps no longer in full possession of her faculties. The boat she has mistaken for a Russian ship is simply the ferry that runs back and forth between Matane and Baie-Comeau twice a day. It's late. Usually it comes in at eight o'clock. This evening, it's pulled up to the wharf in Matane two hours late, well after sunset. “Poor Laika. That's no Russian ship. It's the
Camille-Marcoux
. Can you see the name? It's a very French name, not at all Russian.” Laika will realize her mistake. She'll lower her eyes. Together, you'll watch in silence as the cars drive out of the belly of the
Camille-Marcoux
. Calm will return to the wharf. You'll risk a question. “Tell me, Laika. Do you want to see Oleg again? Do you miss him?” Laika will give a long sigh. “Oleg? Of course, I want to see Oleg again. But more than anything I want to see Moscow in the snow. Because, you know, Russia is just as cold as it is here. It was cold in early November when they named me Laika. When the people in lab coats left, Oleg told me that I was going on a long journey, to a place where no living creature had ever gone. I was separated from Albina and Muchka, the pair of them still squealing like rats. There was a trip by truck, then up in a big elevator. Oleg had put me in a cage. Right at the top of the elevator, there was a little round capsule, barely bigger than I was. Oleg glued some electrodes to my chest and suited me up. There were two other men there. As they slid me tail-first into the padded capsule, I understood why only bitches had been chosen for the project. There was no way you could lift so much as a foot. No room at all! Not even to turn round. Oleg patted my head and spoke softly to me. He seemed very sad. He told me I would have a wonderful trip, that I would see all of Russia and all of the Earth far off in the distance. Then he shed a tear. I think he had grown fond of me. At any rate, you had to admit Oleg had done a good job of raising me. When they closed the capsule door, I realized that something wasn't right. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. I waited for something to happen, for the capsule to start spinning like the centrifuge, for someone to make a sound. Nothing. For two days and two nights, nothing happened. Someone would occasionally pass by the porthole and peer in at me. I barked to let them know I was getting bored, that their game was no fun. Then, on the morning of the third day, there was a noise. Looking out through the porthole, I saw the big elevator get further and further away. Then the capsule started to shake hard, harder than in the testing. I bounced off the padded sides like a ball, I was pressed tight against the floor, unable to move, my heart was racing, there was whistling, explosions, terrible noises. I was sure I was going to die. I could no longer see a thing through the porthole. Everything was going horribly fast. I passed out.”