Nikolski (9 page)

“I’ll take it,” she stammers, and sets Grandfather Lyzandre’s duffel bag down on the floor.

The janitor utters a growl—
One growl for yes, two growls for no,
Joyce concludes—and goes downstairs to get a blank lease form.

Now alone, she pulls out of her pocket the newspaper clipping about Leslie Lynn Doucette, smoothes it out on her thigh, and pins it to the wall with a rusty thumbtack that she has found lying around.

STE
-
CATHERINE STREET.
Seated at an imitation marble table covered with puddles of drying coffee, Noah has just finished his first letter to Sarah. He pushes aside the clutter of glasses, unfolds his road map of Manitoba and studies the landscape with his pen in his mouth.

Sarah is in the south of the province, somewhere in this maze of villages, of roads laid out in a grid, of rivers that run in a straight line for hundreds of kilometres because nothing gets in their way. All the areas of the map look alike. Yet she can’t be everywhere! Where should he send his letter? Manitou, Grande-Clairière, Baldur? After a series of sketchy calculations, Noah addresses it to General Delivery in Ninga.

At the next table, a vagrant wearing a Maple Leafs hockey tuque is talking to himself. This no longer surprises Noah, who has gotten the impression that all Montrealers talk to themselves. He licks the flap of the
envelope, folds it down carefully and wipes a bead of saliva off the paper.

The next part is the most difficult: the return address.

Noah spreads the
Journal de Montréal
over the road map, opens it to the “Apartments for Rent” section and peruses the columns of cryptic abbreviations and unknown neighbourhoods. He came into town less than forty-eight hours ago and knows nothing about the local geography. Mile End, Hochelaga, Longueuil—where should he live? He finally gives up and, with his eyes shut, points arbitrarily.

When he opens his eyes his finger has landed in the middle of an intriguing ad:

At the next table the monologue grows more intense, with the guy pointing a threatening index finger at an imaginary listener. Noah reads the ad over again twice and decides this is the ideal offer. He fishes a handful of change from the bottom of his pocket and goes out in search of a telephone booth.

After three rings, a young girl answers. She speaks with an edgy voice and a curious accent. Noah asks for Maelo, who comes to the phone.

“I’m calling about the four-and-a-half to share. Is it still available?”

“It’s still available,” Maelo affirms. “You know I give priority to political refugees?”

Stammering, Noah says, “I come from Alberta.”

“Okay,” Maelo answers, apparently satisfied. “So, how about we meet at five-thirty?”

Starry ray, rainbow smelt, sturgeon, herring, sardine, sea trout, eel, cod, hake, threebearded rockling, John Dory, mullet, red goatfish, thicklip grey mullet, Atlantic bonito, swordfish, ocean perch, Norway red-fish, American plaice, lumpsucker, dab, rock sole, Atlantic saury—the apartment is teeming with fish. They swim on every wall, in the form of posters, postcards and polychrome rubber scale models.

The place is clean and tidy, but Noah notices nothing except the fish. Has he stepped into the abode of some sort of fish fiend?

“This is the first time in ten years the room is unoccupied,” Maelo explains. “I’ve always lived with a dozen cousins. They showed up at the rate of one a month. Every night we had to figure out how to make room for everyone. We would sleep on the couch, on the floor, under the table. We would take turns sleeping.”

Noah’s eyes are wide open. You can have enough cousins to fill an entire apartment like this one?

“But where did they come from?”

“From San Pedro de Macorís, in the Dominican Republic. My whole family is from there. Five generations of Guzmáns in an unbroken line. My greatgrandfather founded the city, and today all my cousins are leaving for New York or Montreal.”

“They don’t like San Pedro?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that, they adore San Pedro. But you can earn a better living here. Now my grandmother Úrsula has been left all alone in the family house. Ninety-three years old, as hard-headed as a tortoise. She’s never travelled more than five kilometres from the sea. Well, this would be your room. It’s not very big, but …”

Noah steps gingerly into the room.
Not very big?
This one room alone contains as much living space as all of the old silver trailer. He feels like a cosmonaut who has gone out for a walk around his Soyuz and discovers the void in every direction: millions of stars, infinite spaces, and pangs of nausea. He holds onto the door jamb.

“So tell me, why have you come to Montreal?”

“I’m here to study archaeology,” Noah gasps, wiping the sweat from his neck.

“Archaeology? Cool! I’m going to have an intellectual for a roommate! Listen, if you want the room, it’s
yours. Ordinarily, I would ask 170 not including electricity, but in your case 160 will be fine.”

“When can I move in?”

“Right away. Do you have a lot to move?”

“Everything is in here,” Noah answers, patting the side of his backpack.

Maelo looks at the pack and smiles.

“We’re dealing with a genuine refugee! I’ll lend you some sheets.”

The mattress is lumpy, the pillow completely flat, and the quilt is studded with starfish, but none of it should prevent a good night’s sleep. As soon as the bed has been made, the apartment-sharing arrangement is finalized with the payment of the first month’s rent, an outlay that reduces Noah’s wealth to the square root of zero.

Here is a crucial question: How will Noah manage to fall asleep in such a huge space?

Lying amid the starfish, he can hear the air throb around his bed and the tiniest sound wave bounce and amplify on the walls. He has never had a space that belonged to him alone—except the pygmy-size bunk bed in the silvery trailer—and he doubts that he will be able to fill up these thirty cubic metres of outer space with his meagre assets: three road maps, some clothing, a pad of letter paper and an old book with no cover.

In sum, he feels unworthy of occupying this place, as if he were afraid of wasting something. But what exactly would he be wasting? Space? Cubic centimetres? Emptiness?

Can emptiness be wasted?

THE NORTHERN BLUEFIN TUNA
(Thunnus thynnus)
is an astonishing animal.

A good-sized female can lay as many as twenty-five million eggs at a time. This profusion testifies to the voraciousness of the tuna’s predators. Each microscopic larva has no more than one chance in forty million of reaching the adult stage, eight years hence. The survivors grow into superb creatures—a fifteen-year-old tuna can easily measure three metres in length and weigh in at three hundred kilos. Some individuals, though rare, can weigh up to seven hundred kilos. Such specimens are called, rather perceptively, Giants.

Tunas are gregarious and tend to gather according to size: the smaller they are, the more densely populated their schools will be. Conversely, the Giants often swim alone. They are wonderful swimmers, and from one season to the next they migrate over unimaginable distances. They spend the summer beneath the Arctic Circle, and in the winter take refuge in the tropics,
travelling from one hemisphere to the other as easily as a city-dweller changes neighbourhoods. Some specimens tagged in the Bahamas have later been sighted in Norway and Uruguay.

To produce a kilo of protein, a bluefin tuna must swallow 8 kilos of herring, herring that have previously consumed 70 kilos of miniature shrimp, which in turn have ingested some 200 kilos of phytoplankton. Thus, beyond outward appearances, 2.5 kilos of tuna lying on crushed ice in a fish store represents something like a half-ton of plankton—a terrifying equation that would drive away the customers if it were revealed to them by mistake.

“The golden rule of fish stores,” Maelo explains, “is
never
mention the food chain to the customers. This isn’t Japan.”

Because, as everyone knows, the Japanese have strong stomachs and steely eyes, and they buy their tuna at auctions held right on the blood-soaked wharves. The clientele of the Poissonnerie Shanahan is, shall we say, more delicate, being by and large made up of suburbanites from Laval-des-Rapides, Chomedey or Duvernay. But one should not be fooled by the innocuous demeanour of these predators. According to some estimates, the bluefin tuna population in the Atlantic has declined by 87 per cent since 1970, a rate that matches quite closely the expansion of the suburbs over the same period.

“It can thus be deduced,” Maelo concludes, “that suburban development is very much in step with the movement of the tuna shoals.”

He slices a thin strip of raw tuna, slides it into his mouth and chews it with an ambivalent expression on his face. He seems torn between his respectful admiration for the Giants, and the delicate taste of their flesh—an insoluble dilemma. He shakes his head and puts down the knife. The sashimi lesson is over.

Fifteen-minute break. Joyce pours herself a cup of black, too-sweet Dominican coffee, and goes to sit in the back doorway with her feet propped up on an empty box of mussels. A sip of coffee and a thin smile. She watches the already familiar bustle of the Jean-Talon market. What seemed larger than life a few days earlier has now taken on familiar proportions, a scale of 1:1.

It has been seven days since she ran away, and Joyce is becoming accustomed to her new routine. She shows up at work exactly on time, listens dutifully to Maelo’s biology lessons, smiles at the fussiest customers and makes progress with her Spanish. Her aim is to become a model employee, to blend in with the great mass of sardines in the shoal, to dissolve into the ecosystem.

The golden rule of running away: Pay attention to your camouflage.

In this regard, Joyce could take some pages out of her own mother’s book. She has looked up all the possible variations of her name in the phone directory and
harassed a half-dozen telephone operators, all to no avail. Did she assume a new identity and start a new life with a suburbanite? Has she gone into exile in the Bahamas? Is she still alive, even? A total mystery.

Joyce has the feeling that the last ties with her buccaneering forebears are slowly unravelling. She hangs on to the newspaper clipping about Leslie Lynn Doucette as the ultimate proof that the family vocation has not died out. And yet she knows nothing about this distant cousin. She has no idea of her plans, her buccaneering techniques, her favourite targets, her modus operandi and, especially, the fatal error that allowed the FBI to nab her.

Joyce will have to learn everything on her own. Piracy is a self-taught discipline.

Maelo appears in the doorway and announces that there will be an exciting lesson on the anatomy of the octopus
(Octopus vulgaris).
Joyce finishes her coffee and stands up.