Come Back (19 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Hal was hunched around himself. Oddly down on the floor.
And still his stupid instinctive male thinking: the first, the simplest cure for all men and women: sex. After all his decades of growing old.
Ach Gott
.
Love, let it be love.
He must find what he had known, then. He rolled to his knees, hoisted himself onto his feet, crunched through papers, began to climb the two stairs up through his house. His legs were heavy as logs but his head light as a single thought; the space of the house seemed to be turning round and round around him but the weight of his legs balanced him upright, as long as he was upright the turning cannot waive his lightness. Inside his office finally, he leaned down against a filing cabinet and reached for the bottom drawer handle. Still he did not fall, not quite, and
there were the heaps of his diaries: on his knees, searching, October 1993 … 1987 … 1994 … only October it could only … yes …
Sunday October 23: Van. Fest.
Author Brunch Edm. return
Beth G drove me to airport / friend of
Gabe at NFT 1985! told me in van on way
in Montreal (film scout) week before his
death / so not at funeral / very hard alone
almost ghostly experience / still dreams
of him / thinks of him / he comes in
dreams but never speaks
So. His thick, pocket-size 1994. Hal stared at the flat words. And inside the “Name and Address” back cover: Beth Garneau (knew G) 604 654 3219.
He could call her. She offered him her number, he has never called her. Fifteen and a half years. Late fifties now, almost catching up. He sat in his armchair and lifted the phone. What will he say? The Orange Downfill passing, did you ever see—the mechanical voice comes: “There is no one available to take your call right now, but if you” hung up.
And sat staring at the ends of files lining his wide desk. He has tried off and on to arrange what he did with his lifetime. His sieve of memory. They drank airport lattes, he was suddenly absolutely certain, yes, so why didn’t he write down what they said—words wasted on driving—they had, they must have said it.
He: “Did you love him?”
She: “I would have, if he had let me.”
The closed computer on the desk beside Hal’s arm. Flat, coiled, waiting with mind-boggling Google, uncountable Wiens sites and images—his e-mails, uggh. Hal fled back to the basement, to the specific, limited paper Yo stored for them alone in such restricted order. What a thin life to find in this scrambled chronology of scraps jotted down. Thinner than skin, but enough.
SPIRAL NOTEBOOK
(3):
March 18, 1985
I phoned your house, asked for your mother—and it was you! I didn’t even know it, your voice was so different I hung up. Then I caught on and phoned right back and talked nervously to you, about Joan. But I couldn’t talk and foolishly hung up again without giving the phone number, which you even asked for, your voice breaking in a cough. I can’t talk to you, not even when I don’t have to face you.
Ailsa, how have you been? Your cough, are you ill? Do you still think about me? How did you feel just now talking to me. Do you want to hold my hand again. I see you sitting on your hotel bed in Frankfurt (that early morning, we were driving to Chagall in Mainz, your dad and brother were already gone to Marburg with mine) looking so sad, why? Oh all I want to do is hold you. Are you lying in your narrow bed, are you really sick, can I comfort you get you some water, pills, put on a record, wipe your forehead. Or just sit silently beside—or perhaps you want me to leave. Ailsa, your voice was so harshly deep …
Gabe you’re a useless human being
Run away run away
Existence is an ugly pain.
Please tell me why I exist,
in a neat English paragraph
I can understand. No thank you
Mindless dribbly stuff looks more like the rantings of a
fool than
I sit here alone and write your name down the whole
page again
Ailsa Helen
Helen fatal beauty
go abstract
line curve colour gesture
left foot right foot
eat, eat
stand talk
talk of eat
tea/coffee sit tell stories
soak feet lovely feet
heart pounds long thin limbs thighs
move
move
eye movement voice fingers
like pen on paper
trivial
I don’t remember what what
I remember remembering but have forgotten go back
Re-membering, putting together lost parts of the
dearest lost body
where are they
Ailsa Helen I’m sorry to think of you
as a saviour
you’re just a lovely
young girl—nothing more—nothing less either
Please—I know not what I do
DAILY PLANNER
1985:
March Thursday 28–Friday 29
Ailsa—I look at your picture and I weep. You are so beautiful, what have I done. I drink and smoke. Where are you, where in the empty world? Please God give me the courage to talk, please, it’s not much to ask—
Great! Gabe you sound like a most mature person
I think I’ve been sick since childhood, I realize I should not project my desires onto one person but my life drags on—I repeat the same babble—why can’t I escape, to where, I am nothing but a creature of continuous hope for the nothing I seek which I know is not in existence. The mind keeps bumbling, to kill the mind, to kill nothing. Take my life—please I would
Gabe. Shut up
March Sunday 31
Palm Sunday. Church choir very good “If these voices are silent, the very rocks will cry out.” Where are you, rocks? Cry!
In hallway I look for A, she’s there and once looks directly at me. Then what? Not a flicker in my brain, what in that church building where I’ve gone for 18 years, surrounded by people warm-hearted and laughing,
elders good as any grandparent— and smiling me a gutless jelly
What am I blathering! Face it: I need a lover and A is a child. Once upon a time we held hands, she was barely 13
April Monday 1–Tuesday 2
Fool’s day. The world is alive with beautiful women and I am a fool.
I need to cut this desire to write because I never edit this dribble, as trite as
Lunch with Oleg at U, he’s still studying philosophy and a teaching sessional. To have a mind to think like that, clear, logical, straight ahead, and act. Like Socrates
Don’t go near Dad’s office in English he’ll be there, offer Java coffee
April Saturday 6
Easter Saturday, Auditorium, Bach
St. Matthew Passion
. To the second performance, alone, parents with Grant and Joan went to first. Oh the beautiful contralto, she sings
“Erbarme dich
”:
Have mercy (no—pity, pity) on me, my God:
for my tears’ sake, look at me.
My heart and eyes weep bitterly before you.
Have pity.
Under the singing violin, the beat plucked by the violoncello, gently steady, relentless and harrowing. A beat stealing your heart
Scrawl at right angles to full page
I weep. What have I done. Please, I
—why do you read this whoever you are—
I realize this (madness) must end. It’s not the greatest choice a person can make, but really, what choices does one have. Being human does not give you profound choices, because one has to make these choices within the given moments and within the given personality one has that creates the existence we call “being human.” To void is simpler. Do I make myself clear?
April Monday 8–Saturday 13
Best Boy for 6 days. National Film Board
Where Is Lily?
shoot in Jasper National Park. Mountains and grey braided rivers. Pick up van at 8:30, drive
And that’s blank. Not one word about that Best Boy week of work. Nothing of film people met, of technical skills observed, of creative connections. And the mountains—as a boy you “played mountains” in our backyard sandbox, lines and ridges of stones relining the Machu Picchu we visited when you were five, that picture of you and Mir beside the Great Sundial against mountains and Inca bright sky with your jackets tied around your waists and laughing, the Urubamba River far below—didn’t Folding Mountain and the milky Athabasca River jog a single slip of re-membered happiness?
Not one intriguing person in the
Lily
crew? Not a word.
April Friday 26
Paris, Texas
opening at Varscona, maybe for a month / let’s hope / stay and see second showing till end of Super 8 part. License Plate: 78734J
Shave off moustache a.m. Start reading Nabokov’s
Ada
April Sunday 28
Start growing new moustache immediately
Gabriel, what happened? Your Oldman River Quest was marked so emphatically in your calendar. Was it the ambivalent doubleness—duplicity?—of river: both the life of the soil and the oblivion of irreversible time? One moustache shave was enough, and Nabokov’s indulgent novel?
Hal recognized he was in his basement. The ceiling light was on, his hand gripped the edge of the box, a red file folder lay in it. Neatly labelled in that familiar hand:
Oldman River/25 Years Later
He opened it. A sheaf of blank writing paper; the brooding grey image of “Duino, Castello: dev. Jan 12/85,” then fifteen, sixteen pages more, blank or dated erratically: “Feb 2/85 … Feb 4/85” … no date after “Mar 5/85.” Line quotes from Rilke:
… we don’t love like the flowers for a single season …
… the fathers who lie at rest in our depths
like ruined mountains
and the dry riverbeds
of earlier mothers …
And then again page-long lists of definitions: “tedious … felicity … dinge … bore … perversion … obsess … smug … things—bah not getting anywhere!!”
But between the last pages in the folder, a small, heavy Ziploc bag; half a page doubled inside, covered with Yo’s writing and folded around:
Ceramic Pottery, Oldman River Dueck Site
Taber, Alberta, July 6, 1971
Rim Shard: roughly triangular, slightly convex. Blocky, well-rounded rim
Colour: interior tan grey, exterior grey black. Compact textured clay
Size: roughly 8 cm × 4 cm × 6 cm Thickness: 3–11 mm
Period: AD 150–250
The tan and grey and black fragment lying in his hand: a prehistoric piece of prairie Aboriginal pottery. The memory of that day unfolded like an opening flower.
The ‘71 summer holiday trip home to Taber when Gabe was ten, and Hal’s old school friend Jake drove them in his jeep to his ranch along the river, wound down ravines and through coulees between his red cattle and showed them the eroded bends of the Oldman
banks, the black blotch of ash in the face of one sheer cliff.
“See, it’s a very old campfire site,” Jake said. “Prairie Indians always camped in a valley in winter, where there’s lots of trees for firewood, and shelter from snowstorms.”
Gabriel said, “But it’s deep in the ground.”
“Right!” Jake said. “Because long ago the river flooded and hid it under mud, but now after hundreds of years the river has washed it away again—see, so we can find it.”
The two were ten feet below Hal in the eroded edges of the bank. Hal was peering down anxiously—ever Daredevil Jake!—he could see Jake’s left arm braced against the steep cliff and his right holding Gabe very tightly. The boy’s hands were scratching, poking at the cliff, black ash falling on the spikes of crumpled clay all around them and down to the swirling brown water.
“Hold it,” said Jake, “careful … there’s some big piece … wood … hold it …”
