The Origin of Species (61 page)

Alex understood all this, this sense of debt, that John had paid his dues when Jiri had not, yet still something stank. Maybe it was jealousy on his part: he was Jiri’s protégé, his acolyte, he had dreams where Jiri led him through narrow blue-lit passages toward some brilliant truth. Yet Jiri never missed a chance to make him small, as if every obeisance, his looking up to him, his putting himself on the line to help him out, needed to be properly punished. That Jiri should turn around and shine his light on this strutting peacock was somehow doubly demeaning.

“You Canadians,” John was fond of saying. “All this wringing your hands all the time, who are we, what am I? The only answer you have? We’re not Americans. It makes me laugh. What did
Pravda
say once, and I don’t quote them lightly: the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.”

By
you Canadians
, Alex knew, he meant Alex.

“At least we don’t go around propping up dictators.”

“With what? Your seven tanks? You’re so grateful the Americans are bad, so you don’t have to be. It’s a nice arrangement.”

Alex could always count on Jiri to pound in the last few nails.

“You have to excuse Alex. I actually found some copies of the
New Internationalist
in his place when I was staying there.”

Alex almost regretted he had thrown Jiri out back then. It would have been easier to keep an eye on him in his own place rather than subjecting himself several times a week to John’s bombast. There were the girls, at least. Occasionally Alex was able to hive one off from the herd and make some progress, though he had to watch his flanks.

“Alex, why don’t you tell us about your little theory? It’s rather clever, really, a sort of worm’s-eye view of literature.”

Fucking prick
, Alex would think, but then trailing behind his fury like a dead weight would be the image of Jiri’s skinhead son, and his anger would stall. Not a word of his son ever crossed Jiri’s lips, yet still he managed, and this was the genius of him, to somehow use him to justify every rudeness, every excess. After Amanda had died, and Alex was sitting in Jiri’s office one day still feeling like he’d stepped on a land mine, Jiri had said, without a trace of emotion, “I’m just glad I wasn’t the one who slept with her.”

Alex couldn’t say where Jiri had finagled that bit of inside information. From Stephen, maybe. In any event, using it was well beyond cruel—it was practically metaphysical, it was like Satan taking him to the mountaintop and saying, “Jump.” Alex had sat there dumbfounded while Jiri, not missing a beat, had gone on to talk about Heidegger or Althusser or whatever. This was back when Jiri was still using his office as his pied-à-terre, so that a sleep smell hung in the air, and Jiri’s effects, all the things that had made the passage, one by one, to Alex’s apartment and then back again, were neatly arrayed around him, his boxes and his books, the suits that hung in his doorless closet. Even in that moment all Alex could see was Jiri’s son, all he could hear was the thunk of a pipe
against flesh. There had been a group of them, from the reports: they had broken the man’s arm, his leg, seven ribs; they had ruptured his spleen. How did you do that, how did you let yourself into those soft places? It was too much to think of, that your own son, your flesh, could commit such an act. You had to feel responsible. One way or the other, nature or nurture, take your pick, you
were
.

These were the thoughts that came to him, why again and again he gave Jiri a pass. Maybe not so much out of empathy as relief, that it was Jiri living with the weight of it, not him.

One night when Jiri had his new theory class up to his place, Alex managed to strike up his own little tangent of conversation with a dark-eyed urban type whom he had some fun with at Jiri’s expense, ranking Jiri’s course list according to degrees of impenetrability. At some point he grew aware that the rest of the class had coalesced around Jiri, riding the wave of an epic anecdote.

“This is after weeks of this, you understand, the plaster everywhere, the broken walls, broken pipes, and these two surly Russian Jews coming by every day who’d been nuclear physicists or something back in the Soviet Union.”

For a moment, when he recognized the story as his own, Alex was foolish enough to feel a thrill.

“So there I am, marking my mid-terms on the sofa, when he comes in. He’s huffing and puffing, carting these bags of gourmet food, nothing like the discount stuff he usually buys—clams, shrimp, fresh oysters, you name it. You should have seen his face when he saw me still sitting there in his living room. Like Mephistopheles had come for his soul. You have to understand what Alex is like—very quiet, very polite, the
WASP
iest Italian you’ll ever meet. But suddenly he’s like a man transformed—what was I doing there, and didn’t he have the right to have a life, and more of the same. I couldn’t figure out what had got into him. Then it comes to me:
cherchez la femme
. The poor man had a date. It all made sense. I should have figured it out when he’d changed the sheets.”

The young woman Alex had been talking up was laughing along with the rest. Jiri had hit his mark.

“Alex, how did that date go, anyway?”

Alex tried to keep his tone light.

“A bit of a washout, really.”

He had cut off his visits after that. He’d see Jiri in the lobby and Jiri would ask where he’d been keeping himself, but Alex would mumble his excuses and move on, determined to put things between them back on a more professional footing. He didn’t need Jiri’s abuse, only his approval, preferably in writing; once he had that, he could bury himself in his books and not emerge again until his thesis was done.

He kept away from the English office as well, and the sordid tales still swirling there of Jiri’s trials. Word had reached him, by and by, of the new misconduct charge—
idiot
, Alex had thought, a man with a death wish—but he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to start making excuses for him again or chipping away at the wall he’d set up to keep himself strong.
That which does not kill me
. Let that hold for them both. In the meantime, sticking strictly to the official channels, he had finished off another draft of the first part of his thesis and dropped it off in Jiri’s slot at Liberal Arts.

To celebrate he had gone out to an antiquarian bookstore he knew of in Old Montreal thinking to replace Desmond’s battered copy of
The Voyage of the Beagle
, which he had been carting around all these years like a penance. The bookstore, it turned out, had closed down, but afterward he wandered through Old Montreal, past City Hall and the Bonsecours Market, along the Old Port to Place d’Youville and back up to Notre Dame. He’d been in the city nearly three years but hadn’t walked these streets more than half a dozen times. It was a different century here, in all this old stone, a different country. New France. Near Bonsecours there was a plaque where Dickens had stayed in the 1840s, though the city was already old by then—the Indians had come and gone, and the French intendants, and all the
ancien régime
, to leave the British viceroys to lord it over the peasant conquered much as the French had done over the Indians and the Normans had done over the Angles and Jutes.

Near the Place d’Armes, where a monument still honored de Maisonneuve’s massacre of the Iroquois back in 1644, Alex passed a gift shop where he thought he spied a familiar jowly face behind the counter: Jiri’s friend John. He couldn’t believe it. “Unreconstructed capitalism,” John had said dismissively when Alex asked him once what he did. “Pure entrepreneur. When in Rome, as they say.” Alex had imagined him in stocks or real estate speculation, yet here he was behind the counter of the kitschiest sort of tourist shop, with maple syrup and plastic moose in the window and T-shirts that read
KISS ME, I’M FRENCH
.

“John? Is that you?”

He turned, his features twisting into the gruesome automatic smile of a salesman. Then he recognized Alex.

“So, it’s you.”

It was as it seemed: this was John’s livelihood, peddling tourist junk to Ontarians bridging the solitudes and Americans amazed how five-year-olds in the street spoke perfect French.

“I make my few shekels,” he said peevishly. “It’s easy work. In the meantime, I think, I read, I do what I want.”

But there were no books behind the counter, only a little TV set tuned to some afternoon movie.

Alex wasn’t sure why he had come in. To shame the man, probably, to puff himself up, though now that he was here, seeing John amidst the Canadian flags and the glass animal figures and the desk-set replicas of Notre Dame, all he felt was a mutual debasement.

The place was deserted. Alex was hesitant to leave, out of a perverse sense of obligation to keep John company.

“Here. Sit. I’ll get you a coffee.”

John poured some thickish liquid from a thermos into a plastic cup, topping it with a shot from a mickey he pulled from beneath the counter.

“To keep out the cold. Saves on the heating bill.”

Some of the tension between them had eased. John’s peevishness had lost its personal edge and shifted into a reflex Slavic melancholy.

“How’s our friend?” he said, as if Jiri were some passing acquaintance.

“I haven’t seen him, actually.”

“That makes two of us.”

He let that hang in a way that suggested he wanted Alex to pursue the matter.

“You haven’t been around?”

“We had an argument, to tell you the truth. A stupid thing, it’ll pass. He’s a little messed up right now, the poor fucker.”

John poured himself a long shot from the mickey, not bothering to dilute it with coffee.

“You know about him, don’t you? About his troubles?”

“I know about his wife leaving him,” Alex said cautiously, then added, “and about his son.”

“Not that stuff, that’s only the tip of it. I mean the past, things always go back there. Always historicize.”

Alex didn’t like the confidential air John had taken on. The last thing he wanted was a tête-à-tête about Jiri’s skeletons.

“He doesn’t talk about it much. Only that he left before the invasion.”

“You’re not going back far enough. Before that. During the show trials. Not Stalin’s, our own. Jiri’s father testified. Eleven men got the bullet thanks to people like him. All innocent, of course, but his father did it for Jiri. For his son. How do you think Jiri got his education?”

Alex felt as if he had been splattered in shit. Why was John telling him this?

John, he knew, had been barred from university. His family had been on the blacklist.

“It has to do something to you, that sort of thing.” He finished downing his drink. “It fucks you up.”

Alex wanted out of there. It was suffocating, this place, with its crammed narrow aisles, the curved mirrors that reflected them back distorted from every corner.

“Not a word to Jiri about this, you understand. Just between us.”

Fucking jerk
.

All of this couldn’t help but change Alex’s view of Jiri. It didn’t make him pity him, exactly—pity, in any event, was something Jiri would have detested—but it dirtied things in some hopeless way. The matter of his son seemed almost small in comparison: that was part of the common run of human tribulations, the delinquency of children, the push and pull of father and son, even if it was at the extremest edge of them. This was different; it was foreign territory. Alex was out of his element, beyond the point where the murky gray of the lower depths gave way to black.

Stop by
. This in one of their chance awkward meetings in their lobby, though now Alex had to deal not only with the specter of Jiri’s son behind him but also of his father. Some spectacled mid-level cadre, no doubt; idealistic once, now disillusioned.
Sign
. There had probably seemed so little to fight for by that point. Only his family; only his son.

He tried the door of the Liberal Arts Building: still open. Inside, though, the place had the desolate end-of-term feeling that Alex used to like but that these days sent a throb of panic through him. Another year gone by. End of term was for real students, not for the likes of the doctoral
damned such as himself. The secretary had gone, but past the warren of cubicles and work stations that lined the ground floor Alex could see that Jiri’s door was ajar.

He was sitting at his desk with a blank look, his fingers tented beneath his chin.

“Ah, Alex. Come in, come in. I was hoping you’d stop by.”

No jibes, no mock surprise, no pretending he hadn’t invited him. All this made Alex very uneasy.

The only things on Jiri’s desk were a folded newspaper and, as if he had been expecting Alex at that very moment, Alex’s submission.

“I haven’t seen you much. Have you been all right?”

“Just busy.” He was still trying to read Jiri’s muted tone. “Getting a start on the next section.”

“Good. Good.”

He leaned in to leaf through Alex’s thesis. There were marks everywhere, Alex saw, lengthy notations in a tight script, unusual for Jiri, who tended to go in for a more global approach that consisted mainly of final withering comments at the very bottom of the last page that undid months of work with a stroke.

Alex waited for it, what little bomb he would lob.

“It’s a bit schematic, of course, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that it goes against everyone. The Marxists, the feminists, the deconstructionists, everything that’s happened in the past twenty years. Don’t think you’re going to throw people off the scent just by tossing in a couple of quotes from Derrida.”

Alex’s heart fell. He couldn’t do it again, he couldn’t start from scratch. He saw his future stretched out before him, all the dead-end jobs teaching past participles and direct and reported speech with those damning letters branded to him, Ph.D. (
ABD
).
All But Dissertation
.

Jiri was still talking.

“There’s Baudrillard, that’s the new wave now, there’s Deleuze and Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus
, that’s where the whole discussion of bodies is happening. But you’re not going anywhere near that stuff, not really. It comes out in the language—you have to be
in the truth
, isn’t that how Foucault put it? All these guys, one way or another, they still follow the discourse.”