Life in the Court of Matane (17 page)

Leonid Brezhnev
Communist Party Secretary

P.S. Thanks for the maple syrup.

The envelope would have a stamp of me on it, wearing my CCCP helmet with the Earth in the background. That's all it would take for the king to raise an army of the proletariat to march on Ottawa and demand the government immediately recognize the People's Republic of Québec, no strings attached. Triumph. Singing in the streets. Tears of joy.

The fog lifted over Matane, and I entered the deserted port. A salty halo left an aura around each light. Out of breath, I walked the last hundred metres. I couldn't allow myself to be intercepted so close to my goal. The smell of fuel oil drifted along the wharf. Right where my ship should have been, I saw nothing but an all-too- inviting void. I was rooted to the spot. Shivering in the mist. A stranger came up to me on the wharf. He was wearing small round glasses and holding an empty cage. “Time to go home, little one. Your ship has sailed. Maybe another time. You didn't happen to see a little dog? A little mutt?” He'd been coming down to the wharf for days now, he said. He'd met a little Russian dog there. A funny character. He looked a little like me. Like a tireder version of me. Thinner, too. Like a distorted reflection in a dirty mirror. There's no more terrifying sight for man than catching a glimpse of his future self.

I ran to my bike and cycled home broken-hearted. I'm telling you, that man didn't seem at all normal. In the morning, I got out of bed on time. I haven't missed a bus, a train, or a plane since. I'm a model of punctuality, wherever I go. Because, as we all know, punctuality is the politeness of princes. When you're the king's son, you make sure you're on time.

So you're still here, are you? Still looking for her? What do you expect her to say? “Hey, it's you again! Well, you're patient, aren't you? Have you come to wait for the ship with me? No, it still hasn't arrived, but it won't be long, trust me. Oleg will be back. He'll take me with him and we'll go home to Russia. I won't be staying here long; I can promise you that. This isn't my country. I'm not at home here. I don't understand the people here.” If you ever pass by the port of Matane again, it would be very nice of you to make sure she has everything she needs. She's still waiting. That's all she knows how to do, wait for the boat that will take her far from here. The big journey to the unreachable star. She's very well trained, you'll see. She can do all kinds of things.

F
or my twelfth birthday
, Henry VIII gave me twelve hens. It was, he said, time for me to take on my
responsibilities
, and the birds were the perfect way to teach me. Some fathers try to do the same by offering their children a magnificent pony or a gleaming moped to ride, making all the other children instantly envious and proving key to their popularity in the schoolyard. The idea of becoming a teenager while raising poultry left me skeptical, but I was willing to give the king the benefit of the doubt.

When Jewish boys turn thirteen, they celebrate their bar mitzvah, where they are given the world on a silver platter. The world or a condo in Florida, depending on the family's means.

In our house, it was hens that were given. By the dozen.

He had chosen Rhode Island Reds, perfect for budding poultry farmers looking for high egg returns. Hens of this breed lay somewhere between two hundred fifty and three hundred eggs per year. A phenomenal return. Rhode Island Reds are considered docile and low- maintenance. Now, I'm willing to take the farming brochures at their word, but after my terrible experience with hens in 1982, I swore never to encourage the reproduction of what I still to this day consider to be feathered vermin. The Rhode Island Red is the state bird of Rhode Island. Naturally. It had no say in the matter.

In practice, I think the hens were a roundabout way for the king to put me back in my place.

The village school had no shortage of children who worked on the farm, morning and evening. With calves, cows, pigs, and broods to take care of,
they
hadn't had to wait until they turned twelve to familiarize themselves with farming life in Quebec. In some cases, they carried the odours of the farm around with them on their clothes. A waft of manure hung in the air of our yellow school bus every day. It emanated from the Desrosiers kids, the unpleasant gang of boys who called the shots at school. I seem to recall at least one of them committing suicide before they turned twenty-one.

The stout and sturdy Nathalie, who had made fun of me from day one, showed no signs of letting up. Like a hunted animal, I desperately sought a way to shut her up once and for all. As it happened, the poor girl had a pungent stable odour about her. One day, as I was walking behind her, I held my nose, hoping the other kids would ridicule her. But a little brat squealed on me, and it was she who left me covered in bruises. Nevertheless, my efforts were not in vain. Some of the other mischief-makers, who hadn't dared stoop so low to ridicule someone, made the most of the breach I had made in our school's decorum. It didn't make much difference that Nathalie had now joined the ranks of the students who bullied me.

I told the king the whole story. He was livid. There promptly ensued a sermon on our farming roots and my nasty behaviour. The king reminded me in no uncertain terms that a single generation separated me from the farming world and that by insulting Nathalie I was insulting my grandfather, too. “Fair enough,” I didn't dare reply, “but she stinks.” I didn't see how he could compare my grandad Léo to that foul-smelling witch.

I realized I had genuinely wounded the king's pride and that he wasn't going to let it go. Even so, it took two years between Nathalie's assault on my olfactory senses and the arrival of my hens.

For some, existence consists of either being put in their place or putting someone else in their place. The game is over when everyone has been put back in their place, when everyone understands their role in the great pecking order. I think that's more or less what the king was trying to make me understand.

Reading about the USSR had introduced me to
kolkhozes
. I consoled myself with the thought that my henhouse brought me closer to a true socialist existence. The goal of my poultry farming was to turn a profit I didn't have the slightest intention of sharing with anyone. And I didn't have five years to carry out my production plan, just one summer, which—as defined locally—lasted from July to August. I was going to have my work cut out. I would have to come up with egg-shifting strategies to make my business profitable. The formula was simple: The basic equation Revenue – Expenses = Profit (Loss) (R – E = P) would have to lead to a positive result, otherwise I'd be in the red and the experience would turn out a failure. I was put in charge of accounting, marketing, customer service, production, henhouse management and upkeep, egg-gathering, egg-storing, procurement, human resources, and advertising. The P variable was going to depend on neighbourhood egg sales.

One April day, I heard that my red super-layers had arrived. Not knowing what to expect in the shed that had been renamed “the henhouse,” I lost myself in conjecture. I had carefully prepared their new abode, even helping the king build a yard with wire mesh next to the henhouse where the birds would be free to roam to their heart's content, safe and sound out in the open air. They could go back into the henhouse via a small hole in case it rained or they were attacked by a coyote. Secretly, I considered myself lucky he hadn't decided I should take up dairy farming.

The hens were delivered in cages. As soon as they were set free in their Poultry Palace of Versailles, I felt myself invested with an authority I had never known before. I was responsible for these living creatures. This feeling of omnipotence is one any child at that age can aspire to. I could have been looking after a dozen zebus, a dozen amoeba, or a dozen Danish princesses and it wouldn't have changed a thing. I reigned over a dozen living organisms and, aside from the obvious mercantile considerations that were going to control the entire operation, the experiment also had the unspoken aim of putting me face to face with the divine order of Creation. The king had briefed me on the rudiments of poultry farming. It wasn't rocket science. The birds needed very little looking after. Before going to school in the morning, I would have to feed them and change their water. Then collect the brown eggs they had laid in the nest box. Once a week, I was to give them a mixture of powdered sea shells to help them produce solid shells of their own. Poultry farming seemed to require nothing more than consistency and daily attention. The twelve red sisters explored their new surroundings, clucking with pleasure. It didn't take long for one of them to discover the feeder and begin to peck away at it, quickly followed by the others. Hens are like that: they learn by imitating each other. But unlike stray Muscovite dogs, there's only so much they can be taught. I was learning myself as I watched them. At first, back in the early days, I couldn't tell them apart. But then I began to recognize their individual features. I even gave them names. And here I must admit that I was petty enough to name them after my classmates. After I had fed them in the morning, I would stay on to watch them. I soon noticed that they kept pecking each other. At first blush, it seemed as though each hen would peck the neighbour that happened to be closest. I was wrong. After a few days, I realized that one of the hens would peck all the others without ever being pecked back. On the other hand, the smallest of the lot would constantly be pecked by all her sisters without ever daring to peck back. I christened the group leader Madame Nordet. Then came Julie Santerre, the teacher's pet, who—behind a veil of patience—would take the constant pecking from her superior only to wreak her revenge on the other ten. Next was Brigitte, Julie's friend. Then Isabelle, pecked at by Madame Nordet, Julie, and Brigitte, and pecking away in turn at all the other hens. And so the pecking order continued, right down to the group's long-suffering much-pecked member, who remained nameless, such was the extent to which her fate depressed me.

There is little to warm the heart in the apotheosis of animal stench.

In the little fenced-in yard, shouts echoed off the school wall. The schoolyard was a sad place where tensions between the village and rural parents were atoned for on a smaller—albeit no less cruel—scale. I learned all kinds of fascinating things there. Some children's parents, for instance, were convinced that police officers pocketed the fines they handed out for themselves and that this was how they were paid. And so the day the king came home with a second-hand Volvo, they shouted at me that the car had been basically stolen from the people of Saint-Ulric. Or rather they didn't shout. They grunted, and the grunting was followed by a shove to the ground. As a narrative epilogue to the violent episode, they shouted “faggot,” a word whose true meaning I was unsure of and that never failed to spark a deep epistemological crisis. For the longest time, I thought that a faggot was someone who knew how to read. I tried to explain that, in point of fact, police officers' salaries were paid by… But really, what was the point? I remember complaining to the king. He considered what I'd said without responding.

In the early hours of the morning, I continued my observations in the henhouse. The twelfth hen didn't seem to be suffering unduly from the treatment dished out by its fellow creatures. Around mid-May, all the hens began to lay eggs. Enormous mutant eggs too big for the egg cartons and with up to four yolks each. I set the price at one dollar twenty-five for a dozen. I collected seven dozen eggs a week, which in theory should have earned me eight dollars seventy-five. But the hens easily ate ten dollars of feed per week. I began giving them table scraps to satisfy their hunger. You'll be surprised to learn that hens aren't picky eaters. They eat ham, beef, and even any chicken you throw at them. The queen was extraordinarily helpful. She managed to sell at least three dozen eggs a week to her colleagues. She convinced them by pointing out the savings they would make. My Rhode Island Reds were laying like crazy. It was a summer of omelettes, pancakes, and soufflés.

This new source of protein coincided with the proclamation of a new royal edict. The court had decided that I was to take up weight lifting. “Girls like big guys,” the king had insisted, in response to my dubious look. “And you'll knock the teeth out of the guys giving you a hard time!” The king showed me photos from a body building book. To prove it was more than just empty words, he came home one night with a collection of bars, weights, dumbbells, and a weights bench. The basement had become a torture chamber. The decree was remarkable in its precision and in how doggedly the king applied it. There were to be three weight sessions every week, at exactly the same time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. For reasons beyond me, my sister was exempt from the edict. And so thrice weekly, Henry VIII would choose a series of exercises for me in
Body Building for All
to put a bit of flesh on my bones. The names of the muscles provided me with a new form of poetry. Words like trapezius, rhomboids, short abductors, deltoids, biceps, pectorals, and quadriceps brought new-found complexity to my anatomy. Until then, I had never claimed to be anything other than a slightly more masculine version of my mother. Rediscovering her likeness in the mirror every morning provided me with no small consolation, but now the king's exercises were encouraging me to cast a more attentive eye over my anatomical destiny.

Impossible to ignore, the bench, bars, and dumbbells waited outside my room, neatly lined up on a carpet the colour of goose shit. They were my passport to peace in the school henhouse. I forced myself to do the exercises, more bored than I'd ever been, casting longing looks at the books I no longer had time to read and that the king wanted to keep me away from. While my Rhode Island Reds laid their eggs, the king and I pumped iron.

Unfortunately, the natural balance of my flock was rudely disrupted. One day, the king, the queen, and the little brother came back from Matane carrying a suspicious-looking cardboard box from which emanated some high-pitched cheeping sounds. The little brother, who was now four, had been unable to resist the charms of a squawking brood of twelve yellow chicks a farmer had been doing her best to get rid of. My hens had naturally been receiving a lot of attention over the previous two weeks and some of this celebrity had begun to rub off on me. The little brother hadn't taken kindly to being outshone by a dozen miserable hens. So he had kicked up a fuss, citing favouritism and demanding they buy him a dozen little chicks so that he, too, might reconnect with his farming roots. My little brother's whim had, however, been founded solely on aesthetics. He lost all interest in them as soon as the chicks lost the fine yellow down he had fallen so hard for. As chance would have it, the chicks belonged to the same breed as my American super-layers. We kept the little ones in the basement under the heat of a lamp beside my room—right beside the dumbbells—to make sure they had everything they needed. At night, I could hear the cheeping of little orphans desperate for a mother figure. I aimed to reunite them with their kind as soon as they were big enough to live alongside the adult hens. The charming chicks, now featherless, had morphed into hideous bald little creatures, somewhat grotesque and very awkward, teetering on disproportionately long legs.

The time came to merge the two flocks. I dreaded that morning every bit as much as my first holy communion. The chicks were now almost fully grown, a little scrawnier than their counterparts outside in the henhouse, but their family ties were plain for all to see. One morning, after gathering thirteen eggs that probably contained eighteen yolks in all, I decided it was time for the big reunion. As usual, when I went into the henhouse, the bigger hens crammed themselves into a corner, a few of them pecking at the feed. The scrawny younger ones ran around in a cardboard box, obeying their own anarchic choreography, their gaze filled with a mix of apprehension and hope for the future. In a few short seconds, the air would be filled with the sound of joyous clucking, chickenspeak for words of welcome. I set the box down. What happened in the minutes that followed still haunts me at night. The new generation rushed off into a corner, the young hens piling atop each other in a noisy panic while their blood sisters ignored them. The little ones were scared of the bigger hens. “For the love of God, what's wrong? Aren't you all the same breed? You can teach them to lay eggs! Show them the rules of the game in this world of yours!” My twelve feathered apostles turned a deaf ear. “It's only a matter of time,” I thought to myself. “Soon, they'll form lasting friendships and there'll be a coming together of generations as never before. In three days, they'll all be wondering how they ever coped without each other.”