Sweeter Than All the World (34 page)

He has already gulped Hitler to page 51, the indigestible brutality of Document 12:

A male so far right as to have no left foot or testicle? Or left cranium? That actually made sense.

There is a knocking at the door. And again, like persisting memory. His door? No one knows he is here. Then the rattle of keys with another gentle knock makes it obvious, and he calls:

“Yes? Come in?”

He hears the door open; the hotel maid. The skin of her bare arms and her face is not quite as black as the stockings on her slender legs; her superb hair, if possible, blacker.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just here to turn down your bed.”

She may have said that. He is looking at her and after a moment she comes towards him, very close between the two queen-sized beds, and places a rectangle of silver-wrapped
chocolate beside the telephone on the table nearest his elbow: two. Does she think he is expecting someone? She turns her back to him, lifts counterpane and blanket from the bed on which he is not sitting, folds it back triangular with one smooth motion to the white sheet, the white pillow; the pale skin of her inner fingers sharpens that edge straight at herself quick as a gesture.

Such bent textures of slender black; such tightness. There is a seam of her uniform tucked at her waist and he speaks to that.

Would you care to earn some extra money?

Her back straightens into an instant of hesitation, then she turns. The beds are so close he must very nearly touch her. Her right thumb and finger offer between them at the exact point of his shortsighted focus a plastic package. A condom.

You will have to include the 7 per cent Good Service Tax.

He swings his legs towards her and she is standing between his knees, so close his nose edges a button of her uniform. The uniform is buttoned grey up between her breasts to the dark vee of her neck, down the middle between her thighs, one straight line up and down, five buttons only for easy egress, ingress, aggress, under her fingers they are slipping open, top to bottom, he does not need to move his head, he can hear it, and she wears nothing underneath, he can hear it, only the pantyhose, black textures changing in the light tighter than glistening skin; her body absolutely there. As it of course always has been, somewhere.

The full white goodness of Sir Thomas theological Browne. Adam sees his own pale hand gesture and she shifts slightly, aside, and with long fingers (the plastic still gripped between the thumb and finger of the right) widens the pantyhose elastic out at her waist, slides them down over her hips, down her long legs, together with the shoes off her feet, first left then right. Is there anything else?

Her endless skin laid it seems against his very eyes. He tries to tilt back, to see her face and she is towering so valley and hill over him that he cannot decipher his thoughts—nor does it matter since she is already doing what he would want to imagine were he capable of it: an ineffable movement of her arms lifts both her hands to her breasts, pushes them up so that the nipples beak forward, and her breasts are so full and her neck so long that if she bowed her head over him she could curl her moist tongue around either nipple, whichever she chose, it is as if she spoke these impossible possibilities into his very eyes, numbered them in his ears.

Everything else?

His senses stagger, perhaps he is tilting, but her hands continue to push her breasts up, and they are completely distorted now, they are being lifted from her ribs, she is slipping them up past her face like a knitted sweater, over her head and she drops them behind her without a sound, her hands quick as water flowing down her skin and stripping off her hips and buttocks, the hollow between her thighs, the backs of her legs (that little safety plastic flickering) and her hands rise to her belly, her groin, the black centre of her curled mons, which ever since she turned to him has always been there and a tongue-length from his face, and it is gone: she is become the thing itself. And once her
dreadful hands reach her exquisite face, who could say she is there at all. This poor, bare, forked animal.

“Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

She stands at the door. It may be that Adam shakes his head. When the door sighs and clicks shut he glances at the bed for whatever she has stripped off and left behind. Nothing.

On the screen of the cupboard TV the woman and the man still sit motionless and silent, though talking. The electrical box can offer Adam any number of backs, faces, breasts, hands, bunched buttocks, nipples, knees, cunts, elbows, hair, thighs—in Canadian hotels all possible human parts are now available except entering cocks and assholes—bodies in whole or in part moaning with relentless endurance hour after hour, airbrushed colour nothing at all like these patterns of shade and density that solidify Blondi’s German shepherd corpse, the dog that belonged to the German Shepherd, their leader, guide, chief, commander—god. Following the six white and grey and black Goebbels’ children: Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, Heide, Helga, all H in honour of His Inexpressible H-ness and falling into their last sleep with the Third Reich prayer caught in their teeth:

Fold your little hands, Bow your little heads, And think of Adolf Hitler. No rhyme or reason in English. All the parts of the children so carefully dissected by Soviet forensic officers, two lieutenant-colonels and three majors: each child brain, tongue, lungs, heart offering up the smell of bitter almonds.

And glass splinters in every small mouth. A few corpses among those European mountain millions, the few he has himself held living and dying; his own. These six so harmless, and with four inexpressibly harmful adults proving what everyone already knows: that a human body will burn only badly and in part, unless placed, or piled if necessary, inside a scientifically designed and properly fuelled oven. Or chained individually over or inside carefully stacked, carefully split and tended wood.

Adam’s stomach heaves, a pathetic exorcism of bile and revulsion. He is staring at the other bed, folded triangular and crisp to its white sheet.

Under the other books, beside him, lies the biggest: the one he inadvertently carried away from the church hall. Susannah would say, That’s you, your subconscious would pick up the glowering, almost devilish book-face of Norman Bethune: a man vaguely known to some as good, though continually and throughout his life an egotistical bastard. Well, Adam would respond, not according to Chairman Mao. What did Mao know, he only met Bethune once and never answered a single letter he wrote. Okay, but he did sacrifice himself when no one, not even a state, demanded it of him, rich as he could have been. Maybe because he knew he was dying. We all know that. I mean, he was sick. Maybe, but that’s better than becoming worse, the way men usually do when they face death, apparently he became better and better as his blood circulated rot through his body from the gangrene that entered at the bare tip of his finger. That’s the official record, it could as easily have been the bare tip of his cock, would you say if a man is in pain and dying at his farthest extremities long enough, slowly enough, does gathering goodness at last become a possibility, mould you eventually into a good
wholeness? Not a Hitler, he came apart piece by piece, hair, teeth, brain, and he just got worse. All that, with only one testicle to begin with, are you having death pains?

Stretched on the bed, Adam has to laugh; he could tell her no, not in his testicles. Nor anywhere else, not yet, though it’s inevitable. Pain, in the enervating comfort of a Toronto hotel where a tall woman has just turned down his bedding and left him two exquisite chocolates: he feels blank and alone, but—unfortunately—he knows from long experience this is no pain unto death. Nothing possible at his fingertips in this oblivious room will make him, or anyone anywhere, any better. But if Susannah were actually here, stretched on this bed with him, or humming in the bathroom—or Trish in the connecting room, or Joel—there are people he knows in Toronto, women and men, but this trip, however many days it may be, is simply one of his
blank moves
, to keep it that way he should have gone to a musical, or a comedy. A ridiculous movie with John Candy. Or run to China.

He could have, he should have run to China himself for the Great Leap Forward, and shown Chairman Mao what another dedicated Canadian doctor could do in a Revolution, cultural this time, summer 1965. He was exactly the right age for the sixties, not yet thirty, he could have been politically and medically ready—but he was married, Susannah was about to give birth to Trish, he was creating a life’s career out of medicare. A liberated Mennonite choosing culture and revolution when he might be working like a dog to make himself rich? Trish once asked that, almost.

Lucky Bethune. Inheriting class and wealth, plenty of lovers, smart, a failed marriage quickly over, no children, three
highly acceptable revolutions to escape to in a decade, Russia, Spain, China, all of them marvellously far from home and family, on opposite turns of the globe actually, and in languages you fortunately cannot speak: you feel good about “saving lives,” so called, treat as many wounded soldiers as possible and send them off healthy enough to kill again. Then from the isolated Wu T’ai Mountains of China, August 21, 1938, you can write at last:

Write so peacefully about trained and blooded killers; whose hatred and love, gentleness and cruelty conceived dreams to rule the world and all the people in it. Chairman Mao at their head, with no more discernible a trace of conscience than Genghis Khan. Abruptly the deftness of Bethune’s scalpel is so temporary, his disordering of the alphabet too masterfully contrived, as any doctor would recognize: “How beautiful the body is; how perfect its parts; with what precision it moves; how obedient; proud and strong. How terrible when torn.” When burned, beautiful? “The little flame [!] of life sinks lower and lower, and, with a flicker, goes out.… Like a candle goes out. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest and extinction, then submits.” Huh!

God, gain, profit. Even Bethune dying could not escape that prayer of excuses. As if Bethune already anticipated Mao’s coming manias when he at last totally controlled the Chinese, his behaviour thirty years later indistinguishable from any horror the Japanese perpetrated. Well, distinguishable perhaps because it was worse, since no stranger, no matter how sadistic, can ever hurt a race—or a family—as deeply as one of its own members.

But of course in spirit Bethune can insist all men are brothers, so he can go to China and be good enough to die, can go there and be good enough to watch: what is happening there is not happening to him though of course he understands and sympathizes so deeply—Adam sees himself briefly in Illinois that convulsive November, 1963, and knows in a rasp of sarcasm he is rethinking himself—from far away I can always write lone-somely home even though when I am home I cannot endure half the silly bastards who imagine they are my friends simply because they knew me once, but cannot imagine what I am become. If, now, I am any more than bits and pieces of something at any
given time. And I can run anywhere I choose in the world, to the Wu T’ai Mountains of China, now that I have heard of them, but I can’t drive down the highway from Edmonton to Calgary and knock on the house door of the woman to whom I am still legally married, and when she opens it, touch her, with either a word or a gesture.

The electronic shimmer of her voice, my voice, occasionally meeting. No touch. Our son left, our daughter gone; the mirrors of the past refuse to break.

What is the matter with me?

The TV mouths move without visible emotion, still presumably explaining why a weak-minded man like Lee Harvey Oswald, who in a short life had been used by everyone he ever met—and by so many organizations, both illegal and official, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union and perhaps even in Cuba and Mexico—how such a slight man, acting alone, could not possibly have conceived and carried out the assassination of the most carefully guarded man in the world with such brilliant and untrackable success. The fact that he happened to be working, temporarily, on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository was as unlikely as his being able to fire three shots, or four, with such accuracy at a target moving away from him, from a bolt-action rifle in less than six seconds, the last shot blowing John Kennedy’s head apart so that Jacqueline Kennedy’s first instinctive reaction, her mouth open in unutterable scream, was to scramble onto the trunk of the Cadillac and gather up the bloody pieces. The scientific question was: would those skull pieces land on the trunk
behind
them if the killer bullet came from
behind
the car?