Nikolski (7 page)

Lyzandre Doucet listened patiently to his granddaughter but declined to answer her many questions. He was familiar with her fiery personality and was afraid that, on learning the truth, she would feel responsible for events beyond her grasp. Some children are prone to bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders.

“But Grampa,” she insisted, “how long am I going to be able to stand up to my cousins without even a gravestone to point to?”

After half an hour of this torment, Lyzandre Doucet finally confessed that the capelin-head story was a smokescreen for a scandal that no one had ever dared reveal to her: her mother had acted just like the rest of the Doucet family. She had gone away a few months after Joyce was born, with no warning or
proper explanation. She had boarded a westbound ship, but no one was aware of her exact destination. Some said it was Montreal, or even the United States.

Joyce drank her tea without saying a word. This disclosure muddled the situation a great deal. How could she be certain of what had really happened? There was no point in questioning those around her. The answer was no longer to be found in Tête-à-la-Baleine.

Frowning, Joyce mulled over the annoying absence of roads on her father’s nautical charts.

Five years later, Grandfather Lyzandre, the last Doucet of Tête-à-la-Baleine, passed away, carried off by a fit of coughing. It would be the second (and last) time Joyce paid a visit to the village cemetery.

She did not seem to be greatly affected by Lyzandre’s death, and continued to go to the house by the shore. Each afternoon she settled herself by the table—at the exact spot where she had found her grandfather’s body calmly seated before his teapot— and looked at Uncle Jonas’s postcards tacked up on the kitchen walls. No one had had the nerve to disturb the contents of the house; it was as though all of its inhabitants had been cut down by the plague. While sifting through the jumble of family objects, Joyce salvaged her own inheritance: an antique sailor’s duffel bag that had no doubt belonged to her grandfather’s grandfather.

Soon afterwards, Joyce’s uncles boarded up the doors and windows with old planks of wood.

The house survived Lyzandre Doucet by only a few weeks. Its aging skeleton, afflicted by terminal osteoporosis, leaned farther and farther seaward. It seemed to just barely hang on to the shoreline. The great September tides gave the
coup de grâce
to its fragile footing, and it went adrift one Saturday morning. It floated for a while, and then the waves tore it apart and scattered the debris.

Uncle Jonas’s postcards, misshapen and covered with purplish jellyfish, were all that came back with the tide.

Joyce heard about the wreckage only three months later. The whole village was settling the bets that had been collecting for decades at the old house’s expense, but by then Lyzandre’s granddaughter was already in Sept-Îles, completely taken up with her arrival at high school.

She had long looked forward to this chance to be rid of her uncles, aunts and cousins, and had not taken her father’s benevolence into account. One phone call had been enough for him to arrange her accommodations, so that, stepping out from a little-known corner of her kinfolk, an uncle and aunt were there, waiting for Joyce on the pier at Havre-St-Pierre.

The intrusion of these distant relations was like a bolt from the blue. Was this family of hers inexhaustible? Joyce wondered, raising her arms up to the sky. Would
she have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree?

Leaning over the handrail of the Nordik Express, she scanned the small crowd huddled in the pouring rain. She had never met these two new personae and did not have so much as a photograph to identify them. She finally spotted a stout individual wrapped in a green poncho, unfazed by the storm and displaying a wilted cardboard sign where one could make out the word
Joice.
Beside him, a small lady in a yellow raincoat was holding in one hand her umbrella and in the other a Tupperware container full of maple fudge.

Joyce estimated that she could easily slip by them and disappear without being noticed. She looked at the sky. The remnants of Hurricane Paloma, which had travelled up from the Bahamas, had just reached the north coast of the St. Lawrence. The rain and squalls would last for another two days.

“Bad weather for running away,” Joyce reasoned as she went down the gangway.

They tossed Grandfather Doucet’s old blue duffel into the back of the orange Suburban and set off toward Sept-Îles.

As she chewed on a piece of maple fudge, Joyce gave perfunctory answers to her new aunt’s questions. (Yes, she’d had a good trip. Yes, she was eager to begin high school. Yes, her father was fine, and by the way sent his regards.)

What she was really thinking about, however, was just one thing: Route 138. Hypnotized, she looked at the headlights reflecting on the wet asphalt. At last she was leaving her father’s nautical charts and journeying into an unmapped world, teeming no doubt with unknown perils, but where every road she might wish to take lay open to her. Later she would understand that this liberty was in fact limited to the 138, but for now she watched with fascination as the little villages slipped past: Rivière-à-la-Chaloupe, Rivière-aux-Graines, Manitou, Rivière-Pigou, Matamec and the Maliotenam reservation.

If she had been the one holding the wheel of the orange Suburban, she would have continued on to Tadoussac, Pointe-au-Pic, Quebec, all the way to Montreal, where the 138 turned into Sherbrooke Street and plunged into the mysteries of the city’s core.

But it was her uncle’s sweaty hands that held the steering wheel, so they stopped in Sept-Îles.

Five years passed.

Fifty thousand school days.

Two million hours of Cramer’s Rule, of compound-complex sentences with appositive subordinate clauses, of the Treaty of Utrecht, of the atomic mass of potassium nitrate, of anticlinal curves, of constant acceleration in a vacuum, of gross domestic products.

Resolutely locked inside her deep-sea diver’s suit, Joyce waited for the stopover to be over.

When she turned seventeen, she was told she must choose the trade she would ply for the rest of her days. This, at any rate, was the opinion of her high school career counsellor, Mr. Barrier. As earnest as a recruiting officer, he received the students one after another in his beige office. Height, weight, physical condition, psychological profile, attitudes, aptitudes—the students trooped in and out, the counsellor counselled.

Joyce’s case was tricky. For all her limited social skills, her rejection of authority and her impertinence, she still managed to chalk up impeccable grades in every subject. And this excellence prevented her from being shunted aside. Mr. Barrier questioned her testily. What contribution did she think she could make to society? Sooner or later, you had to choose!

Joyce responded with an ambiguous pout. Her five years in Sept-Îles had not supplied her with any certainties. She was aware of only two passions: mathematics and cutting class. Now, it did not take a career counsellor to realize that the prospects held out by these two disciplines were less than promising. What could be in store for a homeless mathematician or a landless surveyor?

Weary of this tedious tête-à-tête, Joyce finally announced that she would like to be a cartographer. Mr. Barrier raised an astonished eyebrow but did not
hazard any comments. A choice was a choice, and he would at last be able to close Joyce Kenty’s troublesome employment file.

The recess bell rang just as she was leaving Mr. Barrier’s office. Ten minutes of freedom before Mr. Turbing’s computer science course. Joyce decided to get a breath of air.

It was a misty Thursday morning with no sky or horizon. Every step she took made a sucking noise on the ground, and an imperceptible breeze carried the scent of the sea up to the high school. Joyce walked across the yard to survey the outside world through the mesh in the chain-link fence. She looked at her watch. Only six minutes of freedom left.

She sighed.

In her view, Mr. Turbing’s classes were part of a vast obscurantist conspiracy. Under his sway, the creative potential of the computer lab was reduced to that of an assembly line. His course was entirely based on Logo, a computer language that involved moving a metaphorical turtle across the monitor of a Commodore 64.

Joyce despised Logo, assembly lines and the authoritarian incompetence of Mr. Turbing.

When the bell signalled the end of recess, Joyce scrambled up the Frost fence, jumped down on the other side and headed off, while three youths sharing a spliff behind the garbage bin looked on indifferently.

Of course, it would have been simpler to leave by the main door, but why bother to swim against the tide if you’re not going to do it in style?

Most of the truckers coming through Sept-Îles refuelled with diesel and caffeine at a restaurant called Chez Clément on Laure Boulevard.

Laure Boulevard was actually Route 138, and all traffic on the Lower North Shore necessarily transited through there. At its western end there was nothing special about the boulevard, but if you came in from the east, after two hundred kilometres of peat bog and scattered spruce, there was always something dazzling about the string of Dunkin Donuts, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s and the like. Overwhelmed by the glitter, motorists would not even notice Chez Clément. For the truckers, on the other hand, this was a vital oasis, one they looked forward to for hundreds of kilometres.

That morning, there were only two trucks in the huge parking lot. Joyce pushed open the restaurant door and savoured the unique atmosphere of the place: imitation wood counters, orange vinyl seats, plastic ferns, a bar section with muted lighting, and the local radio station providing background music. Two veteran truckers sat at the counter swapping the morning’s gossip. Accustomed to talking over the VHF radio, they seemed careful not to interrupt each other, and inserted a brief silence between each of their replies.

Joyce installed herself within earshot of the truckers (something about a big Chrysler wedged into a guardrail) as Francine, with a knowing smile, brought her her usual black coffee and morning newspaper.

Joyce gave her a wink and took a sip of coffee.

The main front-page story was the dismantling of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary. No photograph accompanied the article, so Joyce, unaided, had to picture thousands of GDR residents jostling at the border. There was also a piece about a pileup on Highway 40, and another about John Turner’s resignation.

A few pages on, there was a report on the latest reduction of cod quotas. Joyce’s uncles would likely be fuming for weeks. She felt a pang of joy at the thought of not having to cook for them anymore.

Then, squeezed between two ads for long-distance services at the bottom, an item suddenly caught her attention:

The cup of coffee stayed suspended in front of Joyce’s mouth. Around her, the universe spun in slow motion. Sounds came to her in strangely distorted fragments. Time had stopped. Nothing else in the world mattered but the forty-line epiphany at the bottom.

Joyce finally came around and looked at her watch. Time was once again on the march, and in fact seemed to have sped up considerably. The two truckers paid for their coffee, dropped their tip money on the imitation wood with a clatter and went out to continue their runs, one to Havre-St-Pierre and the other to Montreal.

Joyce carefully tore out the news item, slipped it into her shirt pocket and made her way back to the high school.

It is 5:40 a.m. and still dark when Joyce arrives at Clément’s restaurant the next day.

The air is saturated with various oils—unleaded, diesel, bacon grease—and the gas pumps seem to vibrate under the fluorescent lights. In the west, the last stars have gone out.

A dozen trucks are parked in the half-light, engines idling, running lights turned on low. A tranquil scene. Some drivers are still asleep in their cabs, others are drinking their first cup of coffee at the restaurant counter. One of them has lifted the hood of his truck and is checking the oil, a flashlight clenched between his teeth.