Life in the Court of Matane (15 page)

I must have fallen asleep.

When I woke up from my dreams of cosmonaut dogs, I was already running late for school. The yellow school bus was almost there. I missed it. The king had just come back from his night shift. There was no way I could stay home and he wasn't going to drive me. I tried to reason with him. He shouted and roared, started throwing things around. A fork knocked over a jar. He was out of control. His khaki police tie flew in every direction, lending the scene a touch of comedy. A crazy cop. Insults rained down, but I was well used to that. If I wasn't happy, he added, I could always go back and live with my idiot of a mother. A retard like her would have no problem letting me miss school. I seem to remember he gave me a bit of the old “Clear off! Get out of my sight! Shut your mouth! Scram! Now! Damned nuns! Damn it all to hell!” There might have been a few Virgin Marys in there somewhere, too, along with various objects to do with the Church. While it may not have been reasonable, at least his cursing was to the point. I didn't question his instructions, but at this rate I would barely get to school before it was time to take the yellow bus back the other way. Outside, it must have been ten or fifteen degrees below. I set off. It was strange, I thought, that the king had brought up my mother's name. Very strange. The first sign of détente? We'd see. In the meantime, I had ten kilometres to walk, up hill and down dale through the Quebec winter. The Walkman had yet to be invented. Music would surely have made the trek more bearable. I made do with birdsong. After the second kilometre, a miracle happened. The baker pulled up in his truck and asked me what I was doing out on the road in the freezing cold on a school day. I explained the situation. A little taken aback, he cut short his deliveries and dropped me off at school. I was a heavy sleeper at that age. It took a lot to wake me. Not like today, when I wake up shouting several times a night. Although the little blue pills from the Toronto psychiatrist do help calm me.

My sleeping in that morning was never mentioned again. I think the queen must have made a vaguely disapproving remark to the king. As for me, for as long as I lived in the court of King Henry VIII, I never slept in again. I redoubled my efforts in math and strived to work harder at my household chores on Saturdays. The floors gleamed that winter. One day, I wanted to surprise the queen. I waxed the floors that usually she was content to have me scrub while she came along behind me, pointing out the tiny specks of dust she said I'd missed. “There you go again, doing things by halves.” The floors shone. You could have seen your reflection in them enough to comb your hair. My efforts did not go unnoticed by the queen. I told her I'd had to get down on all fours. I got what I was hoping for: a smile. It's good to know how to shine a floor, it's a useful life skill, and it makes people happy, too.

Springtime came. Two years had passed since the referendum. I was still collecting stamps. And keeping an eye on the dog in space. It turned out to be a Romanian stamp. As Romanian as Nadia Comaneci. One day when I was alone with the king, I asked him to enlighten me about the dog. Although he could be horrible at times, when he was nice he was very, very nice, and he took great delight in explaining what the dog was doing beside a space capsule on a stamp. Henry VIII never missed an opportunity to teach us something new. I made the most of a Saturday spent baking to ask him my question. Nothing made Henry VIII happier and more considerate than baking bread according to his mother's traditional recipe. He would begin preparing the yeast at eight o'clock in the morning and proudly take the loaves out of the oven six hours later. In fact, there
was
one thing that made him as happy as baking bread: beer. And since he was a practical man, he would often combine the two. The queen would keep well away from him on those days. For reasons I still don't understand to this day, he would often insist that my sister and I stay by his side while he baked. As if to make us believe that our being there was somehow useful, he would ask us to add a little flour or a splash of water. We would feel somewhat useful. He would talk a lot. While the bread rose, he would wait in his rocking chair, reading a biography of the prophet Jacques Brel while he drank. I remain convinced to this day that it is impossible to understand Jacques Brel without a drink in hand.

A twelve-pack would be waiting patiently in the corner. At half past nine, he would crack open the first beer, once the dough had been kneaded the first time. He would be in a mischievous, light-hearted mood. Cue Brel's “Bourgeois” who, like pigs, get stupider the older they get. Happily, cue “Vesoul,” too, and we would dance to its dizzying accordion accompaniment in the dining room. Like Brel, we wouldn't be going to Paris, because we couldn't stand the
flonflons
, the
valse-musette
, and the accordion. Fifteen minutes later, the second beer would pick up where the first left off. Cue nostalgia. The king's tongue would loosen; he'd be funnier, too. To the strains of
Rosa, rosa, rosam, rosae, rosae, rosa
, he would recount the hardships of college, the unseen translations to and from Latin that my sister and I would never know since the Quiet Revolution had decided learning math was more useful than dead languages. He would tell us about the priests and the nuns, each less trustworthy than the next. He had flunked his Latin translation at classical college and, the way he told it, this had spared him from the priesthood, a destiny preordained by his role as the family's eldest son. The king never missed an opportunity to knock a priest.

A third bottle would be opened. Cue a little overexcitement. Time for “Marieke,” too. He didn't understand the parts in Dutch, but that wouldn't stop him belting it out along with Brel like an ode to lost love. It's but a small step from overexcitement to despondency, and the fourth beer helped him get there. “Les timides,” those poor tormented men lacking Henry VIII's bravery and brass neck, those poor men who would spend their whole lives shuffling forward, a suitcase in each hand. Cue the flawless portrayal of a bashful man of our own right there in the kitchen, his arms hanging by his sides. Before the fifth beer, the laughs were guaranteed. Then came the tragedy, distinct from despondency with new inflections in Brel's voice. A little anger in
La Fanette
, when he sings that “they had swum so well, they had swum so far that we never saw them again” and of all the times we fail to learn “to be wary of all things.” And so the fifth beer would bring us on to “Au suivant,” the song the king lived by. He would look us square in the eye, feeling every word, and telling us again and again, articulating every syllable, that it's more humiliating to be followed than to follow. I would wonder when the king had ever followed anyone. Sure, he had had followers (all of the female persuasion), with dozens more to come, but I couldn't remember him ever following anyone.

“Les toros” would follow. The same anger, but this time washed down with a sixth beer. A second round of kneading, a second batch of bread rising. A baking interlude that restored a little of the king's sobriety. By then, the afternoon was upon us. Between the sixth and seventh beer, the king would slump into an inebriated gloominess that made him resemble Jacques Brel more closely than ever. The same hangdog eyes. “Les filles et les chiens” didn't help. At this point, his resentment would be focused on things my sister and I didn't have the faintest idea about. Fortunately for us, the eighth beer would be knocked back to “Plat pays,” a land that would temporarily lose its Belgian identity and become the enigmatic place where the king wound up whenever he drank. Because it was there, just at the bottom of the eighth beer, that we would start to lose him. He would begin to lift up off the ground, rising ever higher, ever further, until we needed a telescope to watch him ascend into the sky. The rest would come to us in snatches. The ninth beer. “Quand on n'a que l'amour.” The poetic trance and the insults began. “You don't understand a thing!”, “You're always talking behind my back,” the outlandish “Keep slapping on the makeup like that and you'll end up pole dancing!”, and the hilarious “Get your nose out of that book or you'll turn into a priest!” The king would be raving by now. He still managed to guzzle a tenth beer to the sound of “Une île,” that tropical destination just off the coast of hope, where he swore he would finish his days, not in this land of weaklings too scared to stand up and be counted! The bread turned golden in the oven while the sailors of Amsterdam blew their noses into the stars. The king would be in orbit. Then, the final nail in the coffin. The bread cooling on the counter. The king staggering between the fridge and the sound system. Speaking a language that he alone understood. Our kindest words would sting him hard. Then, the twelfth and final beer, leading straight—do not pass Go—into “La Quête,” played loudly enough for the devil himself to hear. Pity the wretch who failed to recognize this song as the most beautiful thing ever written! Pity the wretch who failed to touch the unreachable star! Might the ground open beneath his feet! Might white mice infest his home! The king would lie down on the sofa and fall into a deep sleep. There was no waking him. Only the queen would manage to get him up one hour later. He would retire to his bed, completely spent.

Baking bread is exhausting.

Alcohol dug an unfathomable chasm between him and the rest of the world. And it was alcohol that put the first cracks in the wall of power that he formed with the queen. Little by little, beer fractured their agreement, breaching the wall for me and my sister to slide out. When sober, the king would be one with Anne Boleyn, forming a cold, authoritarian whole. But add a little wine or beer and the king would leave the queen's gravitational field to become another, a star free to roam the cosmos. The most scathing of the attacks launched after the ninth beer included “I never even wanted kids” or the inevitable “Once I have my boat, no one's ever going to talk to me like that again.” This little game played out more often over winter than summer. The last half-hour the king spent awake would be absolute torture for the whole court. The more he drank, the further he drifted away from us, moving elsewhere, north or south, it didn't matter, to someplace where we were not. And when it was wine he drank, the trip would be all the quicker. As the years went by, he became ever more hurtful before passing out, ever more cutting, harder on everyone. The king drank only on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, Labour Day, Christmas, New Year's Eve, for the entirety of the local shrimp festival, on Workers' Day, Thanksgiving, the Immaculate Conception, the feast of St. Blaise, at baptisms, weddings, funerals, while nodding off, filing his tax return, watching television on a Sunday evening, talking on the telephone with his brothers, learning to navigate a boat, at sunset, when visitors came, when visitors left, on election night in front of the television, on winter days when he stayed home because he wasn't working, during construction work, at family suppers, at police get-togethers, and during the summer holidays.

Otherwise, Henry VIII never touched a drop.

The king would stay sober over Easter at his mother's, the only person in the world who could still claim to have the slightest influence on his alcohol consumption. When he was with her, he only drank half as much. The queen, meanwhile, veered back and forth between being sad and taking her anger out on us. How many police officers have turned into alcoholics from listening to Jacques Brel, I wonder?

And so if we wanted to make the most of his mental state to get detailed answers to certain questions, the window of opportunity was between the second and fourth beers. “What's the USSR?” There were pictures of the May 1 parade on television. I saw an orderly country. The Red Army marching in perfect formation. Everyone seemed so happy.

Even the intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed happy.

My father didn't need to be asked twice. “It's a country that has rid itself of its torturers, one where all are equal, where everyone has access to first-rate health care, and where the education system is vastly superior to our own. In the USSR, there's no such thing as private property. People are appreciated on their merits and all look to the future together.” It was blatant provocation. “Could we move to the USSR?” How come he hadn't thought of it earlier? “No, that's not possible.” He told me that the Soviets—supermen if you asked me—had sent more than a few vessels into space, vessels that were sometimes manned and that had names that set me dreaming.
Sputnik
. “They even sent a dog into space. Into orbit. Laika was her name. I think it was
Sputnik 2
or
3
.”

It was the dog on the Romanian stamp.

I began to envy the little dog that the finest Soviet minds had dragged away from a life of mediocrity down here on Earth. There was no way that she would ever feel the little earthquakes up there in
Sputnik 2
or
3
. Cut off from the entire planet, she was turning silently, in the delicious solitude of a satellite, now immortalized on postage stamps. I kept on dreaming of Laika.

You'll dream of her for a long time, too. Long after she'll have explained to you that she came to once she was in orbit around the Earth. “You don't know what weightlessness is,” she'll coo in her Russian accent. “You just float. Life loses all the heaviness that makes people sad and tired. I could see millions of stars on the other side of the porthole. It's simple: take the number of stars you can see from your home on a summer evening and multiply it by one thousand. That's what it's like. Oleg had been telling the truth: I could see all of Russia from up there. But not only Russia! The whole world was right there. I saw North America pass by four times. Then, it began to get hot. Very, very hot. The tube they had given me to eat and drink through began to heat up, too. I could barely breathe. I stopped barking. The air in the capsule was so warm that I could no longer keep my eyes open. I think I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, I was on the deck of the
Pavel Ponomarev
. The sailors weren't paying me the slightest bit of attention. I think they must have fished my capsule out of the sea. I looked for Oleg everywhere on the ship. He wasn't there. Nothing but brutish sailors getting drunk on vodka all day long. When they had drunk their fill, they began singing such sad Russian songs. The drunker they got, the sadder the songs. Does that make sense to you? Drinking to make yourself sad. As though there weren't already enough reasons to be sad in Russia! The ship docked here one morning. I thought I was in Murmansk. As soon as they let down the gangway, I ran out onto the wharf. I looked everywhere in this town for any trace of Oleg. He wasn't to be found. I must have left the ship at the wrong port, I thought to myself. But by the time I got back to the wharf, the ship had gone. I barked for hours because I could still see it off in the distance. I'm sure they'll come back. Oleg must be looking everywhere for me. He must be so proud of me.”