The Governor of the Northern Province (25 page)

Instead, he was looking forward to what skating was going to be like. He could find no precedent for it in the treks and trudges and wading and climbing and dancing he'd done in his prior life. Which made it the better. A free moment, perhaps a time to decide things about what that sharp boxer had said. The question was what now to do with this knowledge, how to start living from it. And, more immediately, whether he should wait until just after he grabbed on to a bureaucrat's position via some pitiable earnestness before he decided to give up on the whole business and just become an everyday Canadian and forestall death by memorizing the many little-known things that Canada was the first nation to do or discover or invent or—

“HOLD ON TIGHT BACK THERE SO YOU DON'T FALL! OKAY LET'S GO I GOT YOU FOR ONE GO AROUND THE KIDDIE CIRCLE AND THEN IT'S BRAIDAN'S TURN!”

His arms lifted a bit and then were pulled forward, the slack on the rope disappearing, and suddenly Bokarie felt the tug more strongly and he broke his crouch at the knees and had to tense his leg muscles to keep from falling over. He heard a little
shush
as the skates cut through the last little ridge of snow and then they found the ice with a soft sweet sound like when a needle touches a record, and even though his entire body was wound up with fear at the strange motion of it and his ankles felt as if they were about to pop off, he was skating.

The thrill was simple and beautiful and made him forget much and regret, while he was upright, all the grinning nastiness he'd had towards this place. He even didn't mind getting pulled around by the rope, thanks to the helmet. Looking around, Bokarie saw that no one was taking any notice of him, and that he liked. He did. The adults were too busy holding kitchen chairs for the littlest ones to push, while the next sizes up swarmed around him like so many bugs scattered across the surface of water, some with sticks for balance and others constantly evolving and devolving from all fours to two legs and all too busy enjoying and concentrating to care what and who was under the red helmet at the end of the rope switching through them. Farther out on the ice there were brassy teenagers and glory-hungry men moving around each other with hot speed, dipping and dive-bombing and dancing and careening and crashing and howling, and Bokarie had no interest in joining that lot and bettering them at their game. He'd done enough of that already. This was enough for him, for now, this anonymous bliss of glide, the carnival noises around him loud enough to stuff his ears against any particular encouragements from his immediate fans. Because he didn't want any of that either. He was content only to be let alone for a while at this skating, at the joy of doing something for its own sake and leaving it at that. A happiness.

Enough to be here and enjoy it and stop taking Canada for all it was worth and instead take Canada for what it was at its looping best—a wide open cold space whose people stumbled now and then but always kept trying to do more with their talents than was realistic. You had to admire this. He didn't feel like laughing at it all anymore. This could be enough for him, left at that.

Bokarie's fall started with a slow jitter in his exhausted ankles and then a sudden whoop up and slam down against the ice. A cold current shot across the old scar on his back and it started throbbing as he lay there and assured every worried pudgy hot-chocolate-mustachioed face that bent down to him that he was fine, and yes thank goodness he was wearing the helmet.

IV.

Her lips opened.

“How was last week's skating trip with the riding schoolchildren? I'm sure there's pictures enough, so I don't need details just now. Besides, I have some exciting news to share with you.”

“Yes?” he asked, wondering if he should tell her this morning of his plan to leave the office at the end of the year. She didn't need him anymore; they'd made their way to the capital city and he was ready to move on. If not as a bureaucrat, perhaps as an ice-skating coach? He'd seen a program on the television recently and found the lead Canadian pair's moves entirely banal. Plus he'd watched enough North American sports to sense that he might find the right audience for his Bible belting there. Jesus Christ seemed to be the personal Lord and saviour of the most successful athletes.

“We're going home.”

“But we're not scheduled to return to the riding for another month. Why now?”

“No, not the riding. Home.
Your home
.”

“My?”

“Sorry, your homeland. The news is that I was just added to the Governor General's trip to Africa for next month, and of course, when I told them about you, everyone insisted you accompany me as chief attaché! That means chief attachment. Which you will, there's no argument there. You're absolutely going. I can get my mum to run the office while we're overseas. And get this, the Governor General has even decided to make Think Pink—with your African translation about it being the colour of dawn in your homeland—the motto of the mission! New hope for the continent and all, plus new wristbands,
our
wristbands, to hand out to people. Speaking of your homeland, I can tell from your face you're still a little nervous about going back over there, and I understand. I even mentioned this to Madame GG (as we call her) when she invited us along and she said not to worry. I looked into it and this is a big donors' conference in one of the better countries in terms of plumbing and civil war, and so it shouldn't be too difficult or dangerous for you to go there, especially with a Canadian passport. Do you have one? Me neither. Never been out of the country myself, though I guess you already have, in a manner of speaking. But we can go do the pictures together. Anyway, I didn't have an answer for her about where you're from when she called me earlier today with the invite, and come to think of it, I really don't know which one your homeland is.”

Both sets of eyes were cast away at this, one out of embarrassment, the other out of fear.

“It almost feels like you've mentioned so many, which is my fault probably for not listening sensitively enough and I apologize, especially for when I was a little harsh near the end of the campaign. But forget that and just tell me, once and for all, Bokarie, the name of your country.”

He swallowed and sucked at his cheeks to get some wet into his mouth before his lips opened. His face was shattered over with shards of the many masks he'd used since starting his cross over the pond and into this place. Shattered with grief and terror and grimace and grin and now desperate pride.

“My country is Canada.”

“Right. Of course it is. Sorry about that.”

11

HABITAT FOR INHUMANITY

I.

Pulling up from the mess she'd made, Jennifer craned forward and then arced in a semicircle, looking around the cabin. No one else seemed nervous about what to do with their sick bags. If they'd even used them. Jennifer could feel hers, so recently ripped open and now bulging with evidence of her greenness, of this being her first time flying out on a trade and aid mission to Africa. Her first time flying anywhere.

It was steaming beside her ankle and the overhead air nozzle was on high, drying off her scalp and forehead. She was feeling cold-headed and warm-footed. She was looking for something to calm things down but too embarrassed to ding the stewardess to come over. Instead, she decided to remember that this was what it was like in her dad's truck in the months after Christmas and before the spring thaw, when only the bottom heater vents worked. That was a comfort, remembering that time, that place, while squirming, while strapped into this one. As good as any sip of ginger ale.

She would send her parents a card from Africa, and if they had gift shops over there, maybe even bring something back for them. An exotic feathered fishing lure for Dad's tackle box perhaps. Some tribal-coloured thimbles to adorn Mum's sewing room. Jennifer spat into a napkin, a little bilious after-effect. She still didn't like this backward homebody thinking. It was very small-town. Should have been behind her by now. But she needed it. The blipping screen in front of her explained that things were moving forward at hundreds of kilometres an hour, and sure she wanted her rise and hurtle forward to be this way. She just didn't expect it to be so hard to stomach.

After the plane had left Ottawa airspace and settled into its southeast course, Jennifer had been pleased with how little she had shown by way of nerves, especially compared with Bokarie, seated beside her, looking very grim, his lips pursed and his eyes fixed out the window. She wondered if this was his first flight too, but that wouldn't make sense. He couldn't have canoed to Canada from Africa, after all. Perhaps it was the jitters of going back. She could understand that; she had been nervous about her first town hall meeting in the riding after the election. But it had gone well and suggested the town's confidence in her rule. Three concerned citizens had shown up. Fewer, if you didn't count her parents and Bokarie.

Speaking of which, he'd been mighty moody these past few weeks, falling sick whenever a planning session for the Africa trip was announced, asking for a transfer back to the riding because, he said, he missed his old customers. She nearly had to drag him across the icy sidewalks of winter Ottawa to get his passport photo done. He even came to her office one evening, just before they were to leave, to give notice. Said he wanted to go into ice dancing or skate sharpening or something. He sounded almost a little desperate, which was new for him. But Jennifer played it well. Leaning up and over her desk and down into him, she said she regretted that he no longer had interest in serving the public good but she could understand his desire to be an entrepreneur—that was a very immigrant thing. She said she was okay with his wishes and even that she would help him out as much as she could. She reminded him of how far he'd already come with her, the possibilities she'd made possible, indicating what could be done for him now from her latest office.

Afterwards.

Jennifer felt aloud that they had become professionally close enough, after their various struggles together, that she could speak plainly to him. She assumed he thought likewise and she was open to hearing him out. But her first. Bokarie was her ticket onto that plane to Africa. She wasn't going unless he was. And she was going. And when they were over there, he was going to explain to anyone who asked what pink meant in his homeland. Because the whole of Canada was counting on him to show well on this trip; this would, incidentally, guarantee success upon his return and entry into whatever private sector he chose. He'd be greeted and rewarded, she promised, like a medalled Olympian. There was little better than that.

“But if you don't show well,” she had continued, “well, maybe, Bokarie, you're not so eloquent as I had thought. Maybe what you'd said at the first Little Caitlin rally was good enough for small-town applause but that's all you've got in you.”

His eyes, which had been like broken slate until she said this, suddenly went narrow, hard and harsh. As she was expecting. LBJ attacked the men beneath him on their points of pride. To rip them open enough to make them need to overcome his scepticism. Bokarie nodded defiantly and cut out of the office and was gym-bag-packed and ready to go the next morning. Still, boarding the plane in front of her, he wasn't jangling and bopping around like usual. He was stiff, formal. A walking plank.

While pleased that she'd convinced him, Jennifer had wanted to ask what was wrong with this going back. She decided against it, but doing so was like trudging home with something itching at your ankle when you just want to keep moving instead of reaching down to it and so you decide it will go away on its own. But it didn't. So she accepted the little bites as the cost of forward movement. The extra wondering about why Bokarie's not being fully
himself
had started up after she told him about this trip to Africa. To his homeland.

Jennifer knew to call it his homeland because rather than dowdy old
home
, which everybody had,
homeland
suggested something more rarefied, worthy of cherish, full with the delicate mystery of the distant places that newcomers came from. She liked these phrases, had memorized them from the introduction to an anthology of new Canadian immigrant writing that she'd found in the Parliament Hill library shortly after her triumphant entry into Ottawa.

She'd gone there, as she had to such places in the past, looking for material conducive to her design; this time, it had been to find the right terms to introduce Bokarie to her new colleagues. Not like the people back home, they'd want fancy wrapping for the import she was bringing with her. And so she consulted a glossy book of writings about the immigrant experience in Canada.
New North Strong and Me
.

But none of this thinking about Bokarie was of immediate concern. He was on board and he'd have to be back to his old self by the time they reached Africa. Of more immediate concern was the hot sour lump at her feet.

Jennifer blamed this latest smack of sick on their brief stopover in St. John's to refuel and to participate in a tarmac ceremony involving the Governor General and a handful of starched and permed local potentates. Also present were the requisite award-winning area children's choir and the stooped Legion colour guard. The fifteen-minute event was somewhere between solemn and congratulatory and intended to commemorate a recent commendable achievement that spoke to the long history of commendable achievements in this particular locality. Such sessions were regularly crammed into the Governor General's schedule whenever she touched down somewhere in Canada Minor en route from Ottawa to Toronto or Vancouver or, as in the present case, when off to even more important elsewheres. She and her staff were fine with the disembarking and stiff standing in the strong wind while the bagpipe recording finished, and then the smiling purgatorial wait through a welcome address by a local leader or, worse still, a local youth leader, and then the Governor General's own boilerplate two-paragraph address, and then the nodding graciously through an
only just one more, pleeeease
photograph session, before everyone waved and thanked and went back to their downloaded playlists and plane novels. On the return flight, the brief stopover was planned for an airport in Nova Scotia so that Madame GG could de-board and quickly officiate, alongside the chatty local member of Parliament, at a ribbon cutting for a centre newly opened to study freshwater parasites in the Maritimes.