Nikolski (8 page)

Without hesitating, Joyce walks toward the truck. When the driver sees her approaching, he turns the beam of his flashlight on her face.

“What do you want?” he growls.

Not exactly encouraging. Joyce has prudently taken a few steps back and, for a moment, considers turning around, going back to her bed—maybe the sheets are still warm—and dropping the whole thing.

She is about to beat a retreat when a detail brings her up short: at a certain angle, the trucker’s head—gaunt face, goatee, severely receding hairline—reminds her of someone. But who? Her memories flip by like a library card catalogue. Twentieth century. Political figure. Russia. Revolution. Goatee.

With unreal precision, Joyce remembers in a flash where she saw this face for the first time: on one of Uncle Jonas’s postcards!

The card had been pinned up for years in the Doucets’ kitchen, right beside the King Cole calendar. It had been posted from the U.S.S.R. in November 1964, but little else was known about it, for the only legible words were those of the postmark:
— Leningrad—12 XI1964. Each time she looked at this card, Joyce imagined her uncle Jonas in the middle of a snowstorm, his beard coated with frost, asking a bewildered longshoreman where the nearest mailbox might be.

On the back of the card was a scarlet stamp of Vladimir Lenin, pasted there like a tiny wanted poster offering a bounty of 16 kopecks for the head of the ferocious Bolshevik.

Struck dumb, Joyce stares at the trucker’s severe features. There can be no mistake: here is Vladimir Lenin, lost in the parking lot of a truck stop in Sept-Îles at a quarter to six in the morning.

Joyce smiles at the anachronism. Then she gets serious again. If Uncle Jonas had the guts to haunt the icy docks of Leningrad when he was fourteen, who can prevent Joyce—no less a Doucet than he was—from doing as much?

She takes a deep breath and hazards a step in Vladimir Lenin’s direction.

“I’m going to Montreal. Can you give me a ride?”

JOYCE SITS SURROUNDED
by marine mammal identification handbooks, rolled-up posters and piles of travel brochures. The young woman behind the steering wheel manoeuvres skilfully through the rush-hour traffic, while her co-pilot, fumbling with a map of Montreal from 1979, carps about the one-way streets.

The couple picked Joyce up seven hours earlier, aboard the ferry from Tadoussac. A stroke of luck, as they just happened to be on their way to Montreal to give a series of lectures on the whales of the estuary. The woman drove unhurriedly, fingers interlaced behind her head, steering with her knees, while her partner explained to Joyce the intricate breathing cycle of the great sperm whale.

In Quebec City, they insisted on treating Joyce to lunch. She then dozed off amid the stacks of flyers, and awoke when they were already in the heart of Montreal.

“End of the line!” the woman announces cheerfully. “Where would you like us to drop you off?”

“Anywhere is fine,” Joyce answers with a shrug of her shoulders.

The woman smiles at her in the rear-view mirror, cuts sharply across the right lane and stops the old blue Hyundai next to a Metro station. Joyce collects her bag and, in the time it takes to slam the door shut, finds herself alone in Babylon.

She rubs her eyes and notes the name of the Metro station: Jean-Talon. It means nothing to her.

Where to begin? She looks around, spots a telephone booth. She pushes the door open and hefts the phone directory. A vague sense of anxiety washes over her. Can she have underestimated the population of Montreal? Her fingers speedily flip through the pages: Dombrowski, Dompierre, Donati … Doucet. No trace of her mother’s name, not even a Doucet F.

The Montreal phone book is as deserted as the Tête-à-la-Baleine cemetery.

Joyce staggers out of the phone booth, her stomach in knots. Her reasons for running away no longer seem as clear as they did this morning. The sun is going down gradually at the far end of the boulevard. Soon it will be night, and she feels all at once very, very much alone.

She adjusts her bag on her shoulder and starts walking in no particular direction.

After two blocks she ends up at the Jean-Talon market. The air is cloying and laden with essences and
odours, with wafts of alcohol, pollen, putrefaction and engine oil.

Joyce stops dead in her tracks. Never in her life has she seen so much garbage at once.

She is unable to turn her eyes away from the boxes of fruit compacted and tied up in juicy cubes, a mishmash of peels and cardboard. She contemplates the multicoloured layers of leaf stalks, leaves, vegetable cores, mangoes, grapes and pineapples, interspersed with fragmentary phrases:
Orange Florida Louisiana Nashville Pineapple Yams Mexico Avocado Manzanas Juicy Best of California Farm Fresh Product Category No. 1
Product of USA.

The accumulation of trash reaches its peak at the west end of the market. A garbage truck is parked there and two garbagemen are throwing cratefuls of flowers into the monster’s mouth. From time to time, a gigantic steel jaw descends, chews up the mass of leaves and cardboard and unceremoniously gulps it down.

Joyce stares at the truck, completely spellbound by all this waste. She has never experienced such a sense of
abundance.

Suddenly, her nose starts to twitch. She looks down and sees a Styrofoam bin stained with pink spots. She fans away a swarm of flies, squats down, holds up the bin and sniffs. Fish blood. The smell is so familiar to Joyce that she feels tears welling up in her eyes.

She pulls herself together and looks around. On the nearest storefront a huge salmon is leaping skyward,
circled by the name of the business in red neon:
Poissonnerie Shanahan.

She feels strangely relieved.

The door opens onto a jumble of antennae and pincers—
Miscou lobster, $10.99/lb.
Joyce admires the tank for a moment, then swings around while taking in the details: cod livers in oil, Norwegian bacalao, pickled periwinkles, garlic snails, freeze-dried shrimp, Bavarian-style marinated herring, sea horses in Cajun sauce. And under lock and key in a custom-built cabinet, several microscopic jars of bright orange caviar, as costly as uranium 237.

In the glass display counter, dozens of creatures are laid out on a bed of crushed ice. Joyce has seen most of these fish only in her father’s reference books: tuna, snappers, goatfish, mullets, groupers, mussels, crabs, giant scallops and miniature hammerhead sharks.

Behind the counter two men are conversing in Spanish. The taller man steps up, wiping his hands. He looks Joyce up and down.

“Have you come about the job?” he asks with a Cuban accent.

“The job?”

“Do you have a résumé? No? No résumé?
No importa.
Any experience in a fish shop, at least?”

“A little,” she says with some hesitation, thrown off by the turn of events.

“A little? What do you mean,
a little?
You’ve sorted sardine cans at the IGA?”

Joyce scowls. No one gets away with insulting the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette! She is about to fling a Miscou lobster at his face and clear out when the second man puts down his cloth and walks up to her, hands on hips.

A silence worthy of a Sergio Leone film settles on the fish store.

With a commanding gesture, he has Joyce come around to the other side of the counter, pulls out a peculiar orange fish, lays it on the cutting board and draws a knife out of its sheath.

“Can you fillet this?”

Joyce has trouble believing that ten minutes after arriving in Montreal, here she is with her hands on a fish, hemmed in between two inquisitorial Latinos. She sighs, picks up the knife and tests the blade with her thumb. After that, everything happens very quickly. She slices off the head of the goatfish, amputates its pectoral and dorsal fins, makes a precise incision along its back, locates the spine with the tip of the knife and, as deftly as a samurai, cuts the fish open from end to end. The blade slides back and forth along the vertebrae. Joyce extracts the skeleton, a slimy jade jewel which she nonchalantly chucks into the garbage can.

Fifteen seconds by the clock.

The two men inspect the fillets, nodding their heads in approval.

“¡Vale!
Can you start tomorrow morning?”

Joyce leaves the Poissonnerie Shanahan with instructions to come back the next day at nine a.m. sharp. She crosses the street and, when she is certain no one is watching her, takes a whiff of the blood smell still clinging to the palm of her hand. With her eyes closed she can almost believe she is back in her father’s kitchen in Tête-à-la-Baleine.

A streak of blue and white jolts her out of her reverie.

A police car glides ahead of her with the quiet slowness of a shark. The driver turns his head in her direction, sunglasses covering his selachian gaze. A shiver travels through Joyce from her coccyx to the nape of her neck.

The car drives off going south. Joyce lets out a sigh of relief and looks at her watch, which tells her it is getting late. A red sign in the glass door of an old building attracts her attention.
For Rent—furnish 1
^1/2
—heeting and electristy incl—now vacant see janitor in basemint.

She ventures down to the
basemint,
and wavers between the furnace room and an unmarked door. She knocks on both. The janitor, yawning, opens the
unmarked door. A Kraft Dinner aroma drifts out from the apartment.

“I’m interested in the one-and-a-half,” Joyce tells him.

The janitor looks straight at her without speaking, and scratches the rim of his belly button. He leans against the door jamb, revealing nearly all of his tiny apartment: floor strewn with dirty clothes, piles of pizza boxes, closet filled with three rusted sinks, messy toolbox. And a TV set playing an old episode
of Miami Vice
at maximum volume.

“Do you have a job?” he finally mumbles, noisily raking his fingers over his three-day beard.

“At the Poissonnerie Shanahan, right across the street.”

He sniffs, grabs a heavy set of keys and, without a word, starts to climb the stairs ahead of Joyce.

They go up to the third floor and stop in front of apartment 34. The door is scarred with numerous gouges from a crowbar. The janitor peevishly sifts through his set of keys. He quickly loses patience and begins to try the keys one at a time. The lock finally responds, with a metallic click and the creaking of wood.

The inside looks exactly like the outside: half the cupboard handles have gone missing, a light bulb hangs out of its socket with its optic nerves exposed, some sickly lotuses are flowering around the window, the bathroom is cramped, the refrigerator was
manufactured at about the same time as the first Apollo rockets, the walls are pocked with cigarette burns and, as for the carpet, its uncertain colour tends toward Soviet green.

Rounding off the picture is a suffocating stench, a blend of stale air, mould and rug disinfectant.

Joyce examines the room with a blissful smile, dazzled by the mere prospect of having her own little Providence Island.