“This pain in the shoulder area,” the doctor said, kindly, “could've been the first sign.” He gave Anna a quick look as she was getting up from the examination table, dizzied, her feet cautious and unsure, testing the firmness of the ground. “But you can't blame yourself. It was easy to miss.”
He gave her a sedative that made her head swim, a small, white, oblong tablet.
“It couldn't have been the first one,” he said. “There was scar tissue on his heart. For all we know it could have been hereditary.”
“What?” she asked, uncomprehending.
“Heart failure that strikes like that. It often runs in the family. How did your husband's father die?”
“I don't know. I don't think anybody knows for sure. He died in the war,” she said, slowly. It seemed to her that the lining of her mouth had lost all its moisture and something bitter in her throat was crawling toward the tip of her tongue.
At five in the morning the bedroom in the Westmount townhouse is still dark. Anna wakes up and lies motionless, terrified by the thought that the borderline between what is still possible and what is already lost is so thin, so easy to cross.
Once she had awakened to murmurs reaching her from his study; a low hum of his voice, breaking through her sleep. She kept her eyes closed, waiting for William to come back to bed.
She heard him tiptoe through the room, freezing with a hiss as he tripped, trying not to wake her up. And he, thinking her asleep, sat down beside her. “I love you,” he whispered, his hand gently smoothing the curls of her hair. She held her breath, as he bent over to kiss her cheek.
Now she closes her eyes and imagines that he is still with her, lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, and she can almost hear the rhythm of his breath. Imagines he has just woken up, and rolls over toward her, his eyes heavy with sleep, and she extends her hand to smooth the hair on his chest. He locks her hand in his, and kisses the tips of her fingers. Shaking his head he smiles at her, a cheeky smile that softens his handsome, weatherbeaten face. At fifty-one his grey hair is no longer a statement.
“You dyed it? Why?” she asked him, once, just a few months after they met.
“To look older than my age?” he tried to laugh it off. “To make pretty women wonder?” His voice teased her, made her laugh with delight. “You do like it, don't you?”
“Come on, seriously,” she wasn't going to give up.
“Do all Polish women always have to know everything or is it just you?”
“Just me,” she said. They were walking up the Mountain, past the trees covered with ice, bending under its weight. He stopped. His eyebrows rose, deepening the lines of the forehead.
“Let's say I'm not too partial to the Aryan look.”
She squeezed his hand and pulled him forward, and then she felt a surge of blood rising to her face.
In her mind she lets her eyes wander to the mound of ashen curls between his legs. “Hi there, sunshine,” he murmurs, and begins to hum as he swings his legs to the rug.L'
amour est un oiseau rebelle
⦠she hears the phantom words. He is in the bathroom now, leaving the door half-open, vanishing into the vapours of a hot shower, emerging from the mist with a towel across his shoulders and she watches him directing an imaginary orchestra, bending over the green marble counter, stopping to inspect his face, to trim unruly hairs from his nostrils, and then, his voice rising to a crescendo of the finale, bending in a deep bow, waiting for her applause.
The feeling that death is an illusion, that nothing ever ends overwhelms her. Her heart begins to race. The soles of her feet tingle. If she hurries she can still catch him, bent over his desk, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. In her father's stories elves and fairies could be caught like that. All that was needed was to surprise them, to snatch something they cherished, without which they couldn't remain invisible.
But death is no illusion. On her kitchen calendar January 26, 1991, is circled with a thick black marker. “At noon,” she wrote that day in her diary. It is already the first week of April. A few hours later, on the front lawn Anna will spot the first, shy patches of melting snow, revealing yellowed grass, last year's uncut growth.
In the nursing home, Käthe's room is painted pale blue. In certain light this is the colour of her eyes.
Käthe's hands are gnarled, spotted, her skin is pale and wrinkled, folds of it gathering around her mouth. She raises her head and frowns. She is wearing a black dress with a white lace collar; her grey hair is taken back, braided tightly and woven around her head like a crown.
So often for the last ten years Anna has tried to find the connection between William and this small drying body, the pursed, thin lips, the mouth set back into the skull. William whom, in her blindness, she has thought so strong. Indestructible. There was little resemblance, she has decided, almost none. Perhaps a shadow, in his lips, in the shape of his fingers.
There is a patch of sun on the lawn, in front of Käthe's window. Dappled, swaying in the wind, moved by the branches of an old oak tree. “Victory oak,” Käthe had said when they brought her here for the first time. “Like the ones in Breslau.”
Anna remembers them too, old, gnarled trees commemorating the Prussian victories of the last century. Black bark, leaves smaller than on Canadian oaks. One of them stood on the First of May Square in Wroclaw, with its twin monuments of Fight and Victory, on the left a naked man
wrestling a lion, on the right, the same man, now triumphant, straddling the conquered beast. The oak tree was cut down in the seventies, sliced into slabs the size of a table to make room for a pedestrian crossing underneath the intersection, linking the city core with newly constructed districts. Wroclaw was bursting at the seams then, its narrow streets crowded with cars, the
Jugendstil
buildings blackening from the soot and diesel fumes, dissolving in acid rain. The streets paved with pre-war, smooth grey stones were slippery, treacherous, but the back asphalt with which some of them were covered was not much of an improvement. As it melted in the sun, it took in the shapes of car tires and stiletto heels, its black, sticky surface releasing the sickly smell of tar.
“The tree wouldn't have survived in this air,” Anna has heard, but now she doubts such explanations. Because of something William once said, she went to the library and found out that, deprived of the means to stand up and leave, trees have developed formidable defences. Oak trees step up seed production every few years to support the extra population of mice that would feed on gypsy moth larvae. When attacked by fungi, some conifers can subdivide themselves into compartments, walling the infection in. Trees may seem slow, she read, insentient, brooding, but they have simply exchanged drastic and immediate responses to danger for a subtler strategy of survival.
“It's cold here,” Käthe murmurs, and Anna spreads a brown chequered rug over Käthe's knees. The nurse has dressed her in two pairs of thick stockings and a pink angora sweater. When she walks, Käthe's feet shuffle, slowly, one after another, on the vinyl floor of her room. She knows she can no longer have rugs, for she can trip over them. The wires have to be neatly tucked against the walls and fastened with silver tape. She has to take precautions against falling. Her bones are thin and brittle, refusing to take any unexpected pressure, to bend more than absolutely necessary. She has broken her hip once already, and even her shuffle is unsteady, heavier on the “good side.”
Käthe turns to the window and watches a squirrel, his thin, scrawny body shaking as he digs a hole in the lawn.
“The squirrels are cheeky, here,” she says. “Black, not red. I could never believe that there were no red squirrels in Canada. When I came here, with Willi, after the war, he thought they were rats, and he was scared.”
It was William's decision to bring Käthe here, after that November afternoon, a year ago, when Anna spotted her mother-in-law on her knees, climbing the steep flight of stairs to St. Joseph's Oratory. She had never told William her own reason for going there. It was not a secret, just an omission. Her little Polish ritual, like slipping a layer of hay underneath the tablecloth on Christmas Eve or crossing herself every time she boarded a plane, quickly so that no one would notice. William would only tease her at times like that, say something about the bloodlines that ran that deep. It was the anniversary of her grandmother's death and she lit a candle for her and prayed for her soul.
She had just come out of the Oratory, when a lonely woman pilgrim on the stairs caught her eyes. At first she only saw a loose, black coat, then she could make out the shape of the wobbly figure. Curious, she came nearer; the middle stairs were to be climbed on the knees, but Anna had never actually seen anyone doing it. In her black coat and hat, the woman looked like a giant ant surveying an unfamiliar path, probing the air in front of her before making the next step.
The sky was grey. Anna felt a drop of rain on her face and it was then that she recognized that the kneeling pilgrim was her mother-in-law. “She shouldn't be here in this weather,” she thought. “She's had such a bad year.”
Käthe had had a bad year. Her once strong body, which could withstand 36-hour shifts of nursing, was giving in. She'd had pneumonia in the spring. In late September, a fever that wouldn't go away, painting the tops of her sunken cheeks with reddish hue. Anna visited her often, then, helped her around the house, stocked her fridge with groceries.
They got along fine, without William around. A thought like that was a sore spot, and Anna tried to ignore it. Käthe's stories of her nursing days was what kept their conversations going.
Homo homini lupus
, Käthe liked to begin, her lips twitching slightly, a grimace of disgust. People were like wolves to each
other. A pack of predators, ruthless in pursuit. They left their traces behind, the trail of the hunters imprinted in the flesh of their prey. Bruises, torn muscles, broken bones.
Once she summoned a surgeon back to the hospital, dragged him from his New Year's Eve party, because she didn't like the paleness of her patient's cheeks. “She was only a young girl,
ya
?” she would tell Anna in her thick German accent. “I knew she was bleeding to death.” The doctor tried to reason with her, but Käthe stood her ground. “What's with you,” she asked, shaking with anger. Wasn't it his duty? His sacred duty he swore to uphold? She had been right. The girl did have an internal haemorrhage and she, Käthe, had saved her life.
“Ya, ya?
” she was like that, she would tell Anna. “The Iron Kate.”
That November afternoon Anna rushed back to the lobby of St. Joseph's Oratory in search of a payphone. William said he would be right there, would have to miss a faculty meeting, but would come. “Watch her,” he snapped. “It's going too far,” and Anna immediately regretted having called him at all. She should've tried to get Käthe into a taxi, call William only when she was safely home. But it was too late.
Fifteen minutes later she saw him in the courtyard, below. No hat, no scarf, his grey hair tousled by the wind. His black coat opened. He left the car parked by the curb, lights flashing.
“Where is she?” he had motioned to Anna from below, throwing his arms up, but then he noticed Käthe himself, the only pilgrim on the stairs. She had already climbed the first few steps of the second landing and was now motionless, her head bent.
“Mother!”
Käthe did not acknowledge William's presence. She lifted her knees awkwardly to the next step, steadying herself with her hands and then stopping again to clasp her palms and pray. Anna thought that the boards must be hard, and that her knees must hurt her by now, but Käthe kept praying, her eyes fixed on the ground. William ran up the side flight of stairs and stood on the second landing, watching her from above, motioning to Anna to come and help him. Only when Käthe reached the landing did
she open her eyes.
“Mother. How could you!”
There was no surprise in her eyes. But she did not protest when William took her firmly by the shoulders and led her down to the car.
The nursing home room is too small to let Käthe keep much from her old apartment. Most of her things are in Anna's basement. The enamelled wineglasses and beer steins are carefully wrapped in layers of white tissue and placed in cardboard boxes marked, “For Julia.” So are her books and her embroidered linen. Out of all Käthe's furniture William took one piece only, a rosewood curio cabinet with a crystal glass Käthe had bought years ago at an auction. He said he liked it when he was a boy, and that it would be just great for his music boxes. The bed and two night stands have been brought here, to the nursing home. The rest of the furniture, William decided, was not worth anyone's trouble.
On the night stand to the left there are the photographs of William, Julia, and Marilyn at the seaside, their skins young, smooth, without a blemish. In the one Anna is looking at now, Julia is not more than three, and William holds her up, above his grey hair, like a trophy.
“Marilyn called,” Käthe says. “She will stay in Boston. The library is expanding, and she is now in charge of rare books.”
“She didn't come to the funeral,” Anna says. It sounds like a complaint and it is.
Anna wrote to Marilyn after William's death. A short note was all she could manage. A few details of how she found him that day. Then, in a moment she has regretted ever since, she added a plea for forgiveness. She could never understand why they couldn't stop hurting each other, after all those years.
“They didn't let me go to the funeral,” Käthe says in a cautious whisper, and looks around as if someone might hear her.
In one of the photographs on the wall, William's hair is all blond. This is a Breslau picture, a determined look of a five-year-old, dressed in a velvet suit of a little lord. Anna knows this look. Tainted by impatience. With the photographer, the clothes
that on this occasion are festive and uncomfortable. With his mother who, he told Anna many times, was there, too, a cold, watchful figure in the corner, her eyes ordering him to stay still.