When Alice Lay Down With Peter (42 page)

“Barcelona,” said Helen. “Madrid. To fight the Fascists.”

Ida knew at once. She looked up sharply. “You can’t go.”

“Finito went.”

“Finito is a boy.”

“I’m a boy.” Helen stood, scratching at the grassy sting on the palms of her hands. She looked over the lilac hedge. The parade had passed. The swastikas remained, tacked to the trees. She was filled with hate. “Why is your face smeared with blood?” she asked Ida.

“They came.” Ida shrugged. “They wrecked the press. Broke the glass.”

Helen spat at the ground. It was her grandmother’s gesture but different, taller, elegant. As Ida watched, Helen became ever more statuesque, darker somehow. “Helen,” said Ida, “these were local Nazis. You don’t have to go on my account. We’re talking Spain here. Franco.”

“It is the same. They are one. Fascists,” she hissed this word. “Fascists.” Helen raised both fists. She was claustrophobic. And so lonely. She had to fight with those who shared her love of freedom, or her hatred of confinement.

She yearned to see Finito. Finito! Brother! How often they had talked of going to Spain. Of palm trees and yellow trams climbing pale green hills; of peasants fighting to overthrow their landowners, fighting in the streets and villages to rid themselves of priests. To fight for liberation.

Finito never questioned Helen’s right to join the anarchist army. They had talked about it forever—during Helen’s pregnancy, while they stoked the stove—Finito never even noticing that Helen could no longer get out of her chair. They practised saying,
“Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.”
They said,
“Federación Anarquista Ibérica.”
It appealed to the latent Impossibilist in Helen that the Canadian government had made it illegal to fight Fascism in Spain. Helen, anarchist, celebrated the advent of the absurd. Not since the days of the Histrionic Theatre had she been tempted by irony. She would join the republican army!

“Think of it!” Finito had said. “Madrid! Hand-to-hand against the Fascists!” Helen drank in the pure whites of Finito’s
eyes, fondly watched the muscles work in his taut neck. On the Spanish highways! With Italian warplanes zinging over our heads! A people’s army, with rifles that were useless even in the First War! Badly equipped! Untrained! Against German machinery! It was Impossible!

She was looking for Bill. Maybe he was still at the picnic grounds. She started to walk across Jubilee. Her blue skirt swayed against her legs. Like petals, like wings. Her arms moved gracefully at her sides, her long black hair curled around her neck and her breasts moved beneath the fabric. She was a woman. Her breasts were full of milk. She loved being a woman. She loved it. The ache seized her belly and cramped her thighs. In the months to follow, the need to hold her baby would squeeze her lungs; she would become asthmatic with longing for Dianna and ruthless with desire for Bill. She looked over her shoulder. Ida, godmother, cradled the baby, stopped at the curb and stared, incredulous. “No, Helen,” said Ida. “No.”

Helen looked over her shoulder, but she kept walking. She met her daughter’s gaze, the terrible clarity of Dianna’s grey eyes. The baby did not cry. Perhaps it was Dianna’s proximity to the violence of birth that caused her to maintain a sense of proportion, for she was not surprised. And maybe she retained the intimate knowledge of her mother’s impossible body, for she was not accusing. But Helen looked into Dianna’s eyes and was knifed by commonplace immeasurable mother-love. The pain it made her know led to the only promise Helen ever made (next to her wedding vow, and that was another Helen).

She promised to come back.

“I’ll only be gone for a little while. A few weeks,” she said.

“I promise I’ll be back. Very soon. I have to do this. Please.”

She sobbed and turned away. She was looking for Bill. She was going to say goodbye.

T
HE
M
C
C
ORMACK LAND
is surrounded by the Red, on an oxbow. The lowest part, at the end of the oxbow, like the bottom of a cup, flooded too often and we left it wooded, oak and aspen mostly, dogwood, wild rose and the like. Marie’s ancient house was near the bottom of the cup, in the stand of black spruce. We had fixed it up for Helen and Bill, and moved our things into the old house Peter had built. Helen had loved to be close to her grandmother Marie again. Both she and Bill had learned a lot about love from Marie’s boggy voice.

When Helen left for Spain, Bill couldn’t bear to go back. He chose instead to put up a modest cabin for the baby and himself a short distance away. It was still on “our property,” the quarter-section “purchased” by my parents, Dianna’s great-grandparents, back in 1869. Bill moved their few belongings while he finished the inside, just in case Helen was late getting back. She had gone away for one month, six weeks at the most. It was only a little while, and then Helen would be here and they could all be home. Marie mourned for them, her loud croaking in the night, but Bill was firm in his instinct for transformation, knowing when to accommodate the changing face of fortune.

Even within the circumference of our land, Bill and the child seemed nomadic, though when their yearning for Helen was most acute, such restlessness was more accurately fugitive.
Bill breathed in her temporary absence. He would never judge Helen’s urgent flight towards war. It was something she needed to do, and such a passion must be honoured. Bill was definitively light. He was devoted to metamorphosis—hunter to running stag, bereaved lover to pool of water; it kept him looking ahead, sustained his abiding faith in the illusory shiver of things—loss, fear, doctrines, even faith itself. He survived Helen’s departure. He was a deep breather. In his lungs, Helen’s spirit would endure. Spirits do. Until our breath runs out.

As for Dianna, deprived of her mother, she grew as cold as perfection itself. The kind of cold that slows decay while it sustains life, a brave accuracy. As if she’d been born exactly suited to endure the uncanny, ideal, formal logic of Helen’s fateful leave-taking.

So we all waited, listening for Helen’s footstep, for the soldier’s return from war.

PART SIX

I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it
.

—Gertrude Stein,
Reflection on the Atomic Bomb

B
ILL GOES BACK TO WATCHING THE WOOD NYMPHS
patrolling the grass in the meadow. His bare legs have bright yellow hair. He shines. The stubble presses against little Dianna’s back. The sky is not a blue bowl that shelters us from angels. It goes, she has just learned, straight up. Forever. If she goes up fast enough, faster than light, she’ll get so young she’ll disappear. This information will make her eventual understanding of the birds and the bees comparatively soothing. It is one thing to learn about babies. Quite another to think about
before. After
there is a carcass, lots of them, partial mice, bad meat in the woods, roadkill. Bodies. Being dead is one thing. But
before
. Dianna rubs her forehead. Where are we?

Missing.

It is 1941 Dianna is five. Her mother, Helen, is “missing” and her godmother, Ida, is “underground.” Not dead. Hiding
from the government. The wild blue flax has not yet bloomed, and skinny little aspen spawn out from the witch-fingered oak. With her muscles made of child fat, Dianna raises both legs straight up and forms a V framing the blank blue sky washed with sun. Actually, the sky is black. She turns to look at the grass, the fresh leaves. It only looks blue, it only looks green, because of the air.

Hitler attacked Russia last week. Godmother Ida isn’t going to be “underground” much longer. She’s coming
up
. Then they’ll go to town together. Ida is a Communist. The government didn’t like Communists in the winter or before. Now that Hitler is fighting in Russia, Communists can come
up
. And maybe, when the Russians beat Hitler, her mama will come home.

Her father, Bill, explains this to Dianna. Dianna gets so tired she lays her head on his lap. He strokes her hair and smiles. “It’s so complicated, it’s simple,” he says.

She always has a dream. In her dream, her mother is home. Dianna can hear her fighting with Dad in the kitchen, both of them sad. It is her mother’s voice. “Where can I go?” her mother is asking. “Everywhere on earth is the same, and I cannot go to heaven.” Her mother cries, “I don’t want to go to heaven.” When Dianna has this dream, she wakes up crying.

She has been worried. Her mother doesn’t want to go to heaven. So Bill tells Dianna about the sky, how it is really black. That it is not a blue bowl. That there are no angels behind it calling her mother’s name.

Sometimes they imagine themselves healed. In the afternoon, when the soothsaying dreams are most forgotten. This is a happy
land. Through the war and after, it will be increasingly, persistently, happy. Oh Canada. A big pie with a fly net over it sits on the kitchen counter in the mid-afternoon.

A
ND SUDDENLY MY GRANDDAUGHTER
was nine years old. Ida hadn’t been underground for a few years running. The Russians were winning the war for us, and everybody loved the recordings of the Soviet Army Chorus. Ida’s background was Polish/German /Russian Jew. Close enough! She cheerfully joined a local chapter of the Canadian—Soviet Friendship League. It was the spring of 1944, and Soviet troops had broken a German Panzer attack. All the good war news was from the Russian front. To celebrate, Ida cooked up a big Bolshie picnic with Russian-style borscht, coleslaw, fruit soup, cheese blintzes, potato knishes, gefilte fish with horseradish. We ate outside in icy sleet, a grey slush thrown at us from the north. We were all bundled up in our smelly old buffalo robes, stamping our feet under the picnic table while Ida served us with blue fingers sticking out of her gloves. Ida sang in fake Russian—Irving Berlin songs backwards.
“Enil ni llaf ot emit eht si won.”
And the prophetic
“won snaciremA eh lla s’tel.”

Dianna cradled in her grandfather Eli’s lap. Her grey eyes examined the infinite lines on Eli’s soft skin, the grainy old barn-wood face, while she played with his missing parts—the lost thumb, the smithereen of his ear. When the wind gusted, we all sighed together, Ahhhhh, Ahhhhh. And laughed like spies in the Arctic, irrelevant and naughty.

Bill was quiet, as usual, listening. He wore a sky blue toque with earflaps tied under his chin. He looked like Khrushchev. Dianna, with one hand caressing her grandfather’s cheek, reached back to touch her father’s arm, to make sure he was still there. She sensed his distraction right away, pulled herself up and stared at him anxiously. Bill cocked his head at the crevice of the picnic table, where a moth was tucked headfirst, sheltered from the weather, a big black moth with cape-like wings. Bill smiled a small smile, like someone who has passed away in a dream of peace. His eyes were full of empathy for the living. “Oh,” he said to the black moth, “you have come very far.”