Life in the Court of Matane (16 page)

You won't dare contradict her. You'll think back to the Romanian stamp, which you might also have had when you were young. Plucking up your courage, you'll try to convince Laika it would be better for her to come back into town with you because it's cold at the port. That the ship might not ever return. You'll reassure her, telling her there's no vodka or sad Russian songs where you're taking her. She'll shake her head. “Impossible! Listen, you're very nice and thank you for the meatballs, but I can't leave. I know they're coming back. Just think about it! They didn't save me from the freezing streets of Moscow only to forget me here. I'm sure I cost them far too much for that. It just doesn't make sense… When you make such an effort to train a dog, to teach her how to sit, to sit up and beg, to keep calm in a centrifuge, you can't just leave her in the port in some unknown country! I'm much too important to them! They'd never do that to me. I guarantee it: A Russian ship will be here to save me by tomorrow. I'll miss it if I leave with you now. I'll miss my chance to go back to Russia! No, truly, you're very kind, but I think I'm going to stay here.” Then you'll be sad. Sad she won't follow you. So much so that you'll wonder which of you needs the other most. Did Abbé Faria need Dantès as much as Dantès needed Abbé Faria? Was Oleg really so attached to Laika? Does a queen become attached to her subjects? You'll leave the port of Matane—and Laika—behind.

In the thick cold of oceans' languors.

It wasn't until later that the meaning behind my first dreams of space was revealed to me in an assignment set by our geography teacher, Mr. Ferguson. The instructions were vague: “Write a research paper on a foreign country.” It was a wafer-thin excuse to get us into the library and have us copy out paragraph after paragraph from an encyclopedia. It kept us occupied, and gave the lackadaisical teacher plenty of time to go for a smoke outside. The girls immediately opted for countries with names shrouded in an aura of grandeur or exoticism. “I'm gonna choose Austria, just like in the movie
Sissi, the Young Empress
.” “I want to do the United States—that's where the bionic woman lives!” “It's Australia for me. I've always wanted a koala.” Every choice set off a chorus of “Ahhhs!” or “Shoot! That's the one I wanted!” The boys' choices reflected their wilder nature. “I'm choosing Germany. Because of the bombing.” “I want Japan because my dad just bought a Toyota.” A few poetic souls went for names that sounded nice—or that sounded funny, like Togo or Cuba. Each was given his or her piece of the planet according to criteria every bit as valid as those at the Yalta Conference. “And what about you?” the teacher asked me, itching to go outside and eager to ensure no one would sit idle during his brief absence. Only one choice seemed possible. I had to get to the bottom of things. Since I had illusions of grandeur and was always keen to impress, I replied, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” which was greeted with general hilarity since my classmates had never heard of the country and thought I was joking at first. The professor was already hunting for his lighter in his pockets and replied, “Very well. If you want to make life difficult for yourself.” He headed out of the library, leaving us to fight over the encyclopedia volumes. My claim to volume U went uncontested. Our little Austrian, a girl from a well-off family who had fallen for the charms of Sissi or the Von Trapp family, was horrified to find she had to share a volume—and a desk—with the bombardment-obsessed Germany enthusiast (
Autriche
and
Allemagne
both beginning with the same letter in French). She spent the remainder of the school year trying to convince us she'd had no choice. The centre pages—which they had to hold up in turn in order to read and write down the information on their respective countries—kept falling, and this awkwardness was reflected in their work. The histories of both countries were reduced to hopeless gibberish, so much so that the teacher unearthed gems like “Bordered by Italy and Denmark, Germany is known for its great composers, Bismarck and Adolf Hitler.”

My assignment was a resounding success. I got the highest mark in the class. On the cover page, I used up almost one entire red crayon colouring in a map of the USSR. If I squinted hard enough, the country looked like an elephant, its trunk the Kamchatka Peninsula. I had also confirmed the origin of my little stamp. It was indeed the little dog, Laika, that the Soviets, to the world's great surprise, had sent into space aboard
Sputnik 2
. My stamp came from Romania, friend to dogs and the USSR.

What was most important to Laika, aside from the extra treats it earned her, was the petting and the congratulations that came every time she did what she was told. Dogs aren't aware of the future the way we are. They have short memories. If you go out to the bakery for twenty minutes, your dog will greet you when you come back as though you had been gone for three days. When dogs are taken from their mothers, they have no memory of her at all. (Apart from cosmonaut dogs—they remember everything). They have no idea what will happen in two days' time. They recognize a handful of people they see often. But that's the extent of their social life. What they love more than anything is seeing their owners happy. If you happen to be sitting on a sofa, all alone in your apartment, and you begin to cry as you think back to the past, your dog will take pity on you and put his little paw on your toe as though to say: “I don't know why you're so sad. We've just eaten. The sun is shining. The leaves on the maple trees outside are rustling in the July breeze. We're together. Let's go for a walk!” The dog makes no distinction between the simple past and the present perfect tenses. It doesn't grasp that the simple past is used to speak about something that happened only once and that the present perfect describes a past action that may well be repeated in the future. I like to imagine that, just as they closed the space capsule on Laika for the last time, she began to suspect something was up. When the force of the acceleration on liftoff pinned her to the padded floor of
Sputnik 2
, Laika must have given a little yelp. Then she heard a long whistling sound.

A few hours after
Sputnik 2
's launch, the Soviets announced what they had known from the very beginning. Laika wouldn't be coming back to Earth.
Sputnik 2
wasn't designed for a return flight. All the scientists knew this, even Oleg Gazenko. The dog was to die, poisoned after ten days. Years later, scientists no longer moving within Russia's orbit revealed some horrifying details: Laika had probably survived no more than a few hours aboard
Sputnik 2
: a malfunction had caused the temperature inside the capsule to soar to 41 degrees Celsius and she had literally been baked alive in the sun's rays. She died of fright and heat. I am quite certain that Laika, sweating, thirsty, and overcome with the heat, three seconds before her last breath above our atmosphere, thought back to a dark Moscow street half buried under the snow, a stone's throw from Lenin's tomb. She must have felt something approaching nostalgia for the cold. A lingering scrap of humanity. Just like when the Little Match Girl gave up the ghost in the Scandinavian cold, perhaps she saw her mother's face in the Russian sky, right above the colourful onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. But there'll never be irrefutable proof of that. I suppose.

When he wasn't baking or holding forth on the virtues of planned economies, the king would take us down to the port in Matane to see the cargo ships. More often than not, they were ships under the Liberian flag come to take stacks of logs back to England. On this particular grey Sunday, we also expected to see an old African boat, rusted and haunted by smiling sailors. You could see nothing but their eyes and teeth in the darkness, the king said. Well used to the routine, I stared out over the raging October sea, hoping a sea monster would loom up out of the water and gobble me up, swallowing whole the fate I no longer had any desire to meet and freeing me in the process. Our car drove onto the wharf just as I was reaching the conclusion that this whole place and this family must look much nicer from space. A mental orbit.

When I opened my eyes, the Soviet flag was fluttering in front of the red Volvo.
I will come like a thief in the night.
The Kremlin had answered my prayers. Help was at hand. Elbows resting against the ship's rail, three wise men smiled down at us. My heart was pounding. Another more naïve boy lacking in foresight might have run out to the end of the wharf shouting, “Take me with you! Take me back to Leningrad!” We stayed there for a quarter of an hour in the drizzle, looking through the blue curls of my father's cigarette smoke at the three men waving down at us.

That night, Baikonur was the setting for a dream that I still have often to this day. My psychiatrist is very fond of the dream; it's one of his favourites. I'm lying down in my space suit. My cosmonaut helmet has the letters CCCP on it.

“Control tower to comrade Dupontov. Are you ready for liftoff?”

“
Da
!”

The countdown begins.

“ПЯТЬ, ЧЕТЫРЕ, ТРИ, ДВА, СТАРТ!”

They say the cosmonauts were thrown back against their seats by a force equivalent to an elephant sitting on their chest as their rockets accelerated. They could only sit, immobile, while they waited for the unbearable pressure to end. They also say that the acceleration stopped suddenly, at which time the cosmonauts' bodies would empty through every gushing orifice. There are no pictures, of course. It's surprising to learn that the body's first reaction in the absence of gravity—far from its planet of origin, in other words—is to vomit violently. That empty feeling.

An alarm clock thrust me into a yellow school bus and my classmates' sarcasm. Julie Santerre had a field day. “You look depressed. Did you lose another referendum?” In my waking dreams, I programmed the trajectory of a Scud missile from a nuclear submarine straight to her house. A smoking radioactive crater would be all that remained of her, her Canadian flag, and her collection of Nathalie Simard records.

That same evening, my father told me he had gone back to the port to see the Russians. “They're all crazy about maple syrup. They drink it by the glass!” By the glass? Did the world really need to know that communism had managed to put a dog into space to understand that there was currently a shipload of supermen in our port at the end of the world?

My plan was simple, and I wasn't going to waste any time putting it into action. My bedroom down in the basement was separated from the rest of the family by the ground floor, a buffer that would guarantee my successful escape. All I had to do was not fall asleep. Once everyone was in bed, I pushed back the covers, still fully dressed. I had a bag full of the bare essentials at the ready: a can of maple syrup (to bribe the sailors who would find me hiding in the hold), my assignment on the USSR (to prove my unequivocal commitment to my new fatherland), a pair of mittens knitted by my grandmother (you never know), and the stamp with Laika on it (my passport to this socialist paradise).

In silence, I closed the basement door for the final time, took out my union-made bike as quietly as I could (pushing it along on its rear wheel so that the tic-tic-tic didn't alert the neighbour's dog), and went for one last ride along the roads of this damned country. In the dark night, under a million stars, I rhymed off the names of all the Soviet republics out loud to give me courage. From west to east: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia… On my way down the hill—the hill that would lead me to freedom—I felt the salty air of the St. Lawrence press itself against my face and I thought to myself that the feeling of acceleration couldn't have been very different to that of my own
Sputnik
lifting off. Giddy with speed, I cut through the air on my bicycle. The fog patches made it feel like I was passing through a bed of clouds. Suddenly a flaw in my escape plan threatened to spoil everything. How was I going to get on to the ship? It was much too tall, and the port of Matane wasn't exactly coming down with ladders. Hergé had the answer. In
Prisoners of the Sun
, Tintin, my childhood hero, clambers aboard a ship by grabbing on to a mooring line. This rope would be my Ariadne's thread to the heavens. The rest would be down to diplomacy. All I would have to do is crouch down under the tarp of a lifeboat and bide my time until the cargo ship reached open water. Once it would be too late to turn back, I would emerge from my hiding place and demand to be brought to the captain. I would explain myself to him and, upon my arrival in Murmansk, I would be taken straight to Moscow, possibly aboard an Aeroflot plane, where Leonid Brezhnev himself would welcome me in person. He would understand. My eight-page assignment on the USSR would allay any doubts. I'd become the first Quebecer to join the party ranks and, after an intensive Russian course (courtesy of the superior education system), I'd take a
Sputnik
flying class. They'd pull out all the stops to launch the first cosmonaut from Quebec (or Canada, depending on what the Yvettes made of it). The possibility of meeting the same fate as Laika didn't dampen my enthusiasm. I'd die in space, in a blaze of glory. To my tearful family, having followed my
Sputnik
's launch from their living room, the Kremlin would send a letter containing, essentially, the following:

Moscow, June 16, 1982

His Royal Highness King Henry VIII,

Your son has made the ultimate sacrifice for the USSR. In his honour, Red Square will be renamed Dupontov Square. His death, just like Laika's, is proof that communism is a seed that grows in the hearts of all those who thirst for justice. Should you look to the sky on a star-filled night, perhaps you will see zipping eastward over the Matane sky what you will take to be a shooting star. In fact, it will be a Sputnik piloted by your son. Rest assured that Sputniks now come equipped with an undercarriage. Your son will no doubt be tired after the journey, but you can console yourselves with the thought that at least you don't feel any earth tremors when you're weightless.