Way the Crow Flies (39 page)

“Herr Fried?” he says. “I’m Jack McCarthy, sir.
Willkommen in Kanada.”

The door closes. The slide of the safety chain and it opens again, a little wider. Jack extends his hand. “It’s an honour to meet you, sir.”

Oskar Fried takes his hand briefly. The man feels frail.

Jack looks into the light grey eyes. Fried’s face, delicately lined parchment, pale. He is somewhere between fifty and seventy-five. “May I come in, sir?” he asks, because Oskar Fried has made no move. He appears shell-shocked. He must have been through one hell of a trip.

Fried turns and retreats slowly, almost at a shuffle. Jack follows him into the apartment. The smell of tobacco. Familiar. The lights are off, the curtains drawn, as though he were in hiding—which he is, though presumably the Soviets haven’t the first clue where to look for him. Jack glances around. The dull greens and browns of a furnished apartment; the tobacco masks a generic air freshener designed to mask a generic loneliness—the smell of the solitary male. Wall-to-wall indoor-outdoor, respectable lampshade yellowed with years of nicotine, a cheap print of Niagara Falls over the perfectly decent couch. Jack will have to get the man out to the PMQs for a visit to a real home as soon as possible.

“How are you settling in, sir?” he asks.
“Uh, brauchst du, uh, brauchsten Sie etwa?”

Fried doesn’t smile at the attempted German, but says by way of reply, “Do you bring money?” His voice is thin, his accent more raw than Henry Froelich’s. Uneroded.

Jack smiles. “I’ve got it right here, sir.”

He takes a small brown envelope from his inside breast pocket and hands it to Oskar Fried.

Fried takes it. “I thank you,” he says, with an old-world inclination of the head that puts Jack in mind of Froelich again.

“You’re most welcome, sir.”

Oskar Fried is a spare man—as though he had been drawn with a pencil. His glasses are wire-rimmed, not the robust black frames Jack had pictured. He was right about the bow tie, otherwise there is no trace of the meaty Brylcreemed physicist he had envisioned. Fried’s white dress shirt is buttoned up but still loose at the neck, revealing the narrow cords and loosening flesh of undernourished and advancing years. Jack recognizes the permanently starved look of some Europeans—no amount of good food can possibly make up for the war. Henry Froelich has that look, although, even with his stoop and lean cheeks, Henry’s face is warm and mobile. Oskar Fried looks to be etched in sandstone. Seventeen years behind the Iron Curtain will do that. His suit jacket and trousers are of indestructible brown wool manufactured sometime in the last fifty years. But even in a lab coat, he would look like … a clerk. Jack feels disappointed, then immediately guilty. The man is exhausted. Traumatized. Stranger in a strange land.

Jack walks over to the window—“May I?”—and opens the curtains, squinting at the flash of daylight.

Fried jumps to his feet.
“Nein, bitte.”

Jack draws them closed once more and turns to see Fried holding an ice bucket. He blinks to readjust his eyes and sees that the bucket contains bits of bark and stone. Growing up from its midst, supported by a coat hanger, is a flower. Purple, almost black.

“Orchid,” says Fried.

Jack smiles and nods.

“Dunkel,”
says Fried. “Not light.”

“It grows in the dark,” says Jack.

Fried nods, almost smiles.

Jack feels a rush of pity for the man. Is it possible to be farther from home than he is now? And has the U.S.S.R. ever really felt like his home? He may very well have found himself in the wrong part of his homeland at the end of the war, trapped in what was
suddenly East Germany. Forced to make the best of it. And now, a chance at freedom. He has been brave enough to grasp it, this wisp of a man. And perhaps generous enough too. “Herr Fried, I want you to know that we appreciate what you’re doing.”

Fried listens closely, nodding.

Jack continues, slowly and clearly, “I want to thank you for coming.”

“You are welcome,” says Fried.

Poor bugger holed up here, taking the thanks of the free world from some RCAF type he doesn’t know from Adam. Answering to a name not his own. “Look, sir, when you’re settled in, you call me at work, okay?” Jack takes the money envelope from Fried and writes down his office number and below it his home number. “This number here,” says Jack, pointing to it, “is my home. But only for emergency,
verstehen Sie?”

“Ja
. Emergency.”

Once Jack has arranged to bring Fried out to Centralia—for brunch this Sunday, perhaps—there will be no reason for him not to use the home number. But until Jack has been able to introduce Mimi to the “visiting professor,” and to think of a plausible friend-of-a-friend scenario, it is best that Fried call him only at work.

“Would you like to come for a quick spin around the city?”

“Spin?”

Jack moves his hands as though on a steering wheel. “In
ein Auto
. A drive?”

“Yes, I drive.”

“No, would you like to come for a drive with me? Now?”

Fried shakes his head.

“Well when you change your mind, sir, this is a beautiful part of the country—
sehr schön.”
He points to the sad painting on the wall. “Niagara Falls. Magnificent. And if you like flowers”—Fried nods—“there’s a greenhouse at Storybook Gardens, wouldn’t be surprised if they had orchids.”

Jack rubs his hands together and looks around—hi-fi, good, no TV, however, although there is a set of rabbit ears on the win-dowsill. Too bad, it would help Herr Fried’s English. “Have you got enough food, sir?”

Jack steps into the small galley kitchen and opens the fridge. Fried follows and stands at his shoulder.

It’s well stocked—Simon has seen to that—but it’s bound to get lonely, eating alone night after night.

He longs to ask Fried what he will be working on; to hear his opinion on the current crisis in Cuba, get him to talk about the space program. But that subject is off limits for now, Simon has made that clear, and anyhow the poor chap is already spooked. Culture-shocked.

“Sir, would you care to join my family this Sunday for—?”

Fried is already shaking his head, but Jack continues, “My wife’s a great cook and she speaks pretty good German,
besser denn mein
, eh? In fact we’ve got a German neighbour, a science type like yourself—”

Fried says, still shaking his head, “I do not do this—”

“It’s entirely up to you, sir, I just want you to know you’re welcome and it’s fine with Mr. Crawford—Simon.”

“J
a
, Si-mon,” says Fried, as though it were two words.

“Now, you know what to say if anyone asks why you’re here?” Jack puts his hat back on and adjusts it.

“Guest professor of Western University, London.”

“That’s right.”

Jack takes a last look around. There is nothing more for him to do. The fridge is stocked, there is toilet paper in the bathroom, and on the small dining table is a map of London. Simon has seen to everything. Except for a TV. As an afterthought, Jack goes to the map and circles Storybook Gardens.

“Orchids,” he says, eliciting a faint smile from Fried.
“Auf Wiedersehen
for now, sir.”

“Goodbye,” says Fried.

The door closes behind him and Jack hears the slide and schunk of locks, followed by silence. He can feel Fried looking at him through the peephole, waiting for him to leave. He turns back the way he came, down the silent swirl of red and orange, and dismisses a mild sense of anticlimax. Well, what did he expect? A glass of schnapps and a chinwag about the space race? Give Fried a week or so, Jack thinks, and he’ll be thirsting for company. Jack will have
him out to the house for supper, relaxed and nursing his pipe—that’s what the tobacco smell was, he realizes now, Fried and Froelich smoke the same brand. The two of them might very well hit it off—both Germans, both men of science displaced by war. Jack reaches the elevator and pauses at the recollection that Henry is Jewish. Well, what difference should that make to Oskar Fried? Jack has committed that error once already: assuming that Henry was an anti-Semite because he was German. He presses the button and waits. Fried is a scientist. He of all people is likely to be above that sort of thing—what does it matter if you’re black, green or blue when you’re splitting the atom? Maybe Jack can pour a few good Löwenbräus and get them talking politics—if not science. Introduce his kids to Fried, knowing that one day he can tell them they met a real live defector. A Soviet scientist, straight out of the history books.

The elevator opens and he steps in. As the doors close, he hears a small dog yapping from somewhere in the building; otherwise he encounters no one on his way back to the car.

Madeleine has built a tank and a station wagon. Claire has finished her house and built a church which they have agreed is also the school and the A&P. They are arranging farm animals around their new subdivision when the phone rings in the kitchen.

“Hello? … Hi Sharon …,” says Mrs. Froelich. “Yeah, she is.” She laughs. “Well I wouldn’t mind if she did … no big deal … sure, I’ll send her home….”

Madeleine watches out the Froelichs’ living-room window as Claire walks away down the driveway. Marsha Woodley is there at the foot of it, talking to Ricky. Claire reaches out and takes Ricky’s hand. Marsha takes Claire’s other hand and the three of them walk down St. Lawrence Avenue like that, toward the McCarrolls’ house, just as though Ricky and Marsha were her parents and Claire was their little girl.

Jack drops off the staff car and returns to his office to find a message telling him to call the CO. He asks his admin clerk, “When did this come in?” Has he been missed? His clerk answers, “An hour ago, sir.” Jack dials the CO’s extension—what will he say if Woodley asks
where he has been? Jack doesn’t relish the thought of lying to his commanding officer.

He needn’t have worried. Woodley was calling to advise him that the prime minister has finally ordered an increase in the alert status. The Canadian armed forces are at “military vigilance”—a level just short of the U.S. defcon 2. But Diefenbaker still has not made a statement in support of the U.S. And the alert is to be implemented secretly. “You’ve got to be kidding,” says Jack.

Our Voodoo interceptors “may or may not” now be armed with Genie nuclear missiles which we “may or may not” have in our possession.

“Fun ’n’ games, eh?” says Hal.

“Bunch of Mickey Mouse politicians.”

“Let’s keep our eye on the ball, shall we? Old Dief needs all the help he can get.”

Jack gets the message. There has been enough bellyaching about government in the past couple of days; the people of Canada elected Diefenbaker for better or worse, and that’s who the military is working for. The new state of alert will have little effect on the operations of RCAF Centralia. They are in for more high-tension thumb-twiddling; all the more reason to cool it with the complaints.

“Righto,” says Jack.

“’
Wiedersehen.”

Jack crosses the Huron County road and enters the PMQ patch. He feels tired for some reason. Kids are out playing. In the Boucher driveway, a team’s worth of hockey equipment is laid out to air, and up ahead, in Jack’s own driveway, the Rambler is parked awry, which is how he can tell Mimi’s been out shopping. Everything looks normal. But that’s just a veneer. Normal has begun to mean that we could all be annihilated in a matter of hours. He takes a big breath of autumn air.
You never had it so good
. Who said that? How can something be so true and so false at the same time?

He sees his daughter come out of the Froelich house with the German shepherd dog. Jack would rather she didn’t get so close to that animal—they can turn on you. But she’s fearless, clutching its fur, her eyes squeezed shut as the dog “guides” her across the
street. And he remembers what it was he was going to do today. Drop in on Mr. Marks.

He watches her arrive at the front step and open her eyes. The dog lopes home; she turns and sees Jack and runs to him. He opens his arms, catches her and swings her around—“Dad, give me an aeroplane!”

He takes her by an ankle and a wrist and spins. She’s fine. She has forgotten all about “duck and cover.” He won’t alarm her by bringing up the subject again, with its attendant spectre of annihilation.

“Eat up, Mike,” says Jack. But the boy picks at his dinner. One-word answers to all Jack’s questions. “How was school?”

“… Okay.”

“Sit up straight, mister, and eat what your mother cooked for you.”

He feels a degree of annoyance that he knows is out of proportion to the situation. He would like to blame it on the current world crisis but he knows it predates that. The boy is becoming sullen. Mimi says he has entered the “awkward age.” Jack replied, “In my day, we couldn’t afford an ‘awkward age,’ we were too busy putting food on the table.” And she came back with that French astringency: “You want him to have the things you never had, well this is one.” He was stung, but glad that his wife is able to best him so reliably in these matters. It gives him permission to be “a nice papa.” Because lately he has had the sense that he is flying blind when it comes to the boy. His own father never would have stood for these truculent one-syllable retorts. But then Jack wouldn’t wish his own father on anyone.

Mimi says,
“Qu’est-ce que tu as, Michel?”

The boy looks up at his father. “Dad, are we on alert?”

Jack stabs his mashed potatoes with his fork. “There’s nothing for you to worry about, Mike. The only ones who should be worried are those poor old crows, they must’ve got an awful fright when the siren went off today.” And he winks at Madeleine.

“What if there’s a war, are we just gonna sit there?” asks Mike.

Madeleine expects him to be told that there isn’t going to be a war, how many times do I have to—? But her father eats steadily, chewing, chewing his potatoes, his lips getting thinner. Is someone in trouble?

“What does history tell you, Mike?”

“What do you mean?”

“‘Waddyamean?’”—imitating his son’s surly tone. “I mean, what did we do when war broke out in 1914?”