A Drop of Rain (12 page)

At least I saw the inside of her gorgeous house. I also found out a little about her life, which can't be as perfect as I thought. Sarah's father, mother and brother did not say one word to each other at dinner. Later, while Sarah and I were upstairs, sitting in her spacious and tastefully decorated bedroom, Sarah's parents and brother were downstairs yelling at each other. Her brother yelled that her father is having an affair with his secretary. Her father yelled that her brother is doing drugs. Her mother yelled that she didn't want to hear about any of this. Her father yelled back that her mother is a “religious fanatic.” Her brother yelled at her father not to yell at her mother.

I felt really uncomfortable hearing all this. Sarah said she thought she would probably run away to Paris or New York before the school year is finished. Sarah also admitted that she had actually invited me over because her boyfriend was at an out-of-town football game. She explained that she needed to talk to somebody about her family's problems, because she was going crazy. We talked so much about Sarah's
family's problems, that we didn't study.

On my way home from Sarah's, I felt angry with Sarah for inviting me under false pretenses and making me fail the biology test. I also felt angry with myself for picking friends who don't care about me. I suddenly wondered:
Does anybody care about anybody?
Then I felt totally depressed. When I got home, I phoned Mary and told her how I felt.

Mary said I should play some music: “Something for your Mom and Hanna. Something soft that makes heart feel good.” So I did. I went to the piano and played some of my old classical pieces, like the Chopin waltz and Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata”. Then I played some of Mom's favourites, like Anne Murray's “Snow Bird” and Rita MacNeil's “Flyin' on Your Own”. I didn't make fun of these songs, like I usually do. Then I played and sang “Hangin' by a Thread”.

I feel better now.

I'm working on a physics assignment due the next morning when the doorbell rings. I peek out the window to see if it's Steve, but it's She Wolf.

I want to pretend I'm not home, but by then she's seen me, so I answer the door.

She is as beautiful as ever. She says that she is working as a cleaner, but I find this statement difficult to believe, because her clothes look too expensive. She also says that the Mapleville Recreation Complex is looking for an artist to paint a mural.

I act totally stupid. She gives me the Rec Plex
telephone number. I don't even invite her to come in.

Then, after she leaves, I rip up the number and throw it in the garbage.

Why did I do that?

Why am I a gutless freak? Why am I scared of a beautiful girl? Why did I turn down my first paying commission? Because I didn't get it myself? Because it came from a girl?

For a while I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling.

I wanted to die. I kept imagining myself some big war hero getting shot in action.

Then I fell asleep without finishing the physics assignment.

What an idiot! What a gutless idiot!

Mr. Bell just gave me a hard look when I said I didn't have the assignment ready because I had to work late at my part-time job. Then he said to get the assignment under his door before the next morning, or else. I copied from Tom at lunch and slid the assignment under Bell's door after school. Bell will probably figure out what I did.

What a freaking, gutless, lying, cheating idiot!

I am not worthy of the animal kingdom.

Many days and nights there is a loud and terrible sound. The air raid siren. When the siren wails, everyone is supposed to run for the underground shelter, if they can.

The shelter is like a big basement. All the neighbours
hide down there when the enemy airplanes drop bombs.

Anyway, one neighbour who usually runs with us is a young woman. She is a friend of Agnes, my grown-up sister. When the siren wails, this young woman carries her baby in a blanket as she runs.

Another neighbour is an old woman—a grandmother like I am now. When the siren wails, the old woman carries a suitcase as she runs. And she runs away from the shelter, towards our house! She always does this!

“Madame, you're running the wrong way!” shouts my brother.

But the silly granny ignores his warning and keeps on running the wrong way.

She thinks she will be safe in our house, which is big and strong, but she is wrong. No house is safe from the bombs. We know people who were killed in their pyjamas in their beds. They didn't hear the siren and went on sleeping.

Anyway, the planes are coming closer. We can hear their terrible roar.

Down into the shelter we run. Down under the ground to be safe from the bombs.

Then we are sitting with our neighbours in the dark shelter. We are listening to the thud, thud, thud of the bombs exploding. We are safe, but what will happen to the old woman up above? What will we see when the airplanes are gone, and we return to our house? Maybe we won't even have a house.

Suddenly in the dark beside us, the young woman with the baby in the blanket screams.

“My baby!” she screams. “It's not here! The blanket
is empty! I dropped my baby! My baby! My baby! My baby!”

The young woman screams and screams.

“Hush!” say the neighbours. “Please be quiet, madame.”

“Hush!” says Mommy taking the young woman in her arms. “There's nothing to be done.”

Finally the whining of the planes and the thudding of the bombs are finished. We can go home, if we have a home.

Mommy keeps one arm tightly around the young woman, who can hardly walk. Grandpa takes me firmly by one hand and Elizabeth firmly by the other hand. Johnny walks behind Mommy, and we walk behind him. Slowly, we mount the steps.

What waits above? Fire, fire all around. Heaps of broken cement and bricks where a building stood. A man with his arms and legs blown away. He is still alive. His head and trunk are flip-flopping like a mechanical toy.

You think we children never see such things? Ha! We see plenty! We even see other children blown up. Sometimes there are landmines. Sometimes they are in the shape of a can, or a bar of soap, or a doll lying on the road. Of course, children will kick or pick up such things without thinking. Then, boom! There is nothing left of that child except bloody pieces.

Anyway, Grandpa puts his arms around Elizabeth and me. He holds us tightly. My brother bolts ahead. He does not listen when Mommy shouts, “No, Johnny! Come back!”

I close my eyes. I let Grandpa lead me along.
Grandpa is almost carrying me, even though I am walking. I have seen enough.

“Look!” Johnny shouts. “Our house is still here! The old woman is all right, and so is the baby!”

I lean into Grandpa. I stay under his arm. He keeps holding me tightly.

But I open my eyes to look.

The old woman is sitting on our doorstep. She is cradling the baby in her arms. The old woman and baby are completely unharmed! Not a bruise or a scratch!

The young woman snatches her baby. She clutches it closely. It begins to cry.

“No harm done,” says the old woman cheerfully. “The baby is hungry. That's all.”

And Mommy, Grandpa, Johnny and I, and all the neighbours who have gathered around, begin to laugh. We laugh and laugh.

Elizabeth doesn't laugh. She is always serious these days. She just stands there and watches the rest of us laugh. Mommy sees this. Mommy goes and puts her arms around Elizabeth.

Then Johnny asks the old woman: “Madame, why do you always run the wrong way with your suitcase? What's in the suitcase? Clothing? Documents? Gold?”

“There's nothing in the suitcase,” replies the old woman, flinging it open for all to see.

And Mommy, Grandpa, my brother, and I, and all the neighbours, laugh some more.

And so it goes, the war. Sometimes I see the night sky lit up like a Christmas tree, with explosions and fire. Once I see a dog with a medicine bag strapped to its back, crawling on its belly under the bullets to
reach a wounded man. The man takes a bandage from the medicine bag, and then the dog crawls away.

My Daddy and all of my uncles—Mommy's big, strong brothers—were killed in that terrible World War. They died in battles far away from home. They died in France. In Africa. But somehow, Mommy, Grandpa, my brother, my sisters and I survived.

Still, we too lost our home.

As Hanna lies dying in my house, hundreds of kilometres from her little rented room in the centre of Montreal, she watches the play of light and shadows on the wall. I watch too, when I can, in a few snatched moments of companionable silence. Sometimes the light is still. The light looks like veins on the back of a hand, or rivers seen from far above, seen by a bird or a mountain goat. Sometimes the shadows stream like water or flame. Sometimes the shadows are still. The shadows look like a huge rough cross, or like the ears of a small animal watching from a corner.

Watching the play of light and shadows, Hanna says she remembers her childhood in Poland. In this clean and pleasant room, with green plants, she begins to remember the good things. It is quiet here, without the constant ambulance and police sirens of a big city. She can even hear birds. Without moving her head, or leaving her bed, she can also watch the trees outside the window. The trees turn from green, to red and yellow, to black and white.

There is nothing more for doctors to do, except to
ease the pain with drugs. My English Canadian doctor provides the little pills. Hanna takes the weakest dosage possible. She has not taken a single one of the morphine pills the doctor prescribed.

She prefers agonizing pain to a mind unclear.

I am afraid she might take a whole bottle of morphine pills, so I do not leave the bottle within her reach.

Am I cowardly? Rationally, I agree with Hanna that, if one is of sound mind, one should be able to choose when and how to end one's own life. Yet I do not want to be accused of murder. And I might be so accused, if I left a bottle of morphine pills near her, and she swallowed them all. Furthermore, I am emotionally unable to accept Hanna's argument that she should die now, so as not to be a further burden on me, so as to die with dignity. I am afraid that she is still alive for some divine reason.

As well as watching the wall, Hanna watches the door. The door is where people come from. Naomi and I come a few times a day, and a nurse comes once a day. The nurses wash her, or massage her feet, or change the bedding, or talk to me. Many days I need more help than Hanna does. I am distraught about Hanna wanting to die. I think I have been distraught in varying degrees for several years.

The nurses are of many nationalities, but none are Polish. All speak English well. Many understand the unusual situation in this home turned hospice.

“She does not want to live any longer,” I say to a nurse. “She says this treatment is inhumane. She does not want to become more and more helpless. She believes in euthanasia. She pleaded with the doctor to
end her life quickly. Of course, he said he couldn't do it.”

Hanna says she wants to die, yet when the doctor in Montreal told her she would die within a few months, her face wilted like a flower in a sudden frost.

If you were awake in the night when the frost came, and if you could see in the dark, you would see what her face looked like.

“She turned her back on life several years ago,” I explain to the nurse. “She lost the will to live when she lost so many people she loved. The same thing happened to her mother. Her mother died at the same age and for the same reason—a broken heart.”

She likes to lie alone in her room. When someone comes to her room, she searches the face. What does she search for? Understanding? Love? Her eyes look like the ethereal essence of six million flowers, so delicate is their expression.

What does she find on the faces? In the other eyes? Fear? Anger? Arrogance? Confusion? Boredom? All the things that people feel. Other people's feelings press upon her. People—the doctor, the nurses, the hospice volunteers, a sister and a niece—are so needy. They need so much from her. She needs nothing from them.

She is like a blessed relic, this wreck of a human being. Each person who encounters her receives from her a true mirror of himself or herself. Receives what he or she needs to learn. The sister is steadied, the niece is teased gently, a nurse is encouraged.

Are all the dying so helpful in their helplessness? Certainly not all of them can be as extraordinarily strong in spirit as Hanna.

I told Joe once that I feel as though I am witnessing
a slow crucifixion. He said that the same notion has occurred to him. He's going to look up a poem by W.H. Auden he once read. The poem is about how, as Christ was crucified, dogs went on living their “doggy lives.”

Joe is astoundingly well read in the humanities. Yet he is never pedantic. He says he's a “seeker.” I could not have a more thoughtful, loving, dear companion.

I believe that Hanna's life has enormous significance. I feel as though I should get the details down, in case, like the apostles, I let decades pass before I write down the whole story. I am a most inadequate apostle.

Must reread W.H. Auden. I promised Eva that I would find one particular poem of his, but I could not find it in my anthology of modern verse. I'll have to borrow his collected poems from the library. I did find Auden's “September 1, 1939”. Liked it just as much as ever.

I have been immersed in a book John Van der V. loaned me:
Quiet Heroes: True Stories of the Rescue of Jews by Christians in Nazi-Occupied Holland
.

The book is by a Jewish-Canadian psychiatrist, André Stein. Stein interviewed some of the few Dutch people who assisted Jews during World War II. Most Dutch people did not assist. Most of Holland's Jews died.