In the Skin of a Lion Read online

  – Ha, he laughs.

  – He’s complaining about Tory views on Spanish liberal insurgents of the 1830s, based in London. “Of course I do not defend political crimes. It is repulsive to me by tradition, by sentiment, and even by reflection. But some of these men struggled for an idea, openly, in the light of day, and sacrificed to it all that to most men makes life worth living. Moreover a sweeping assertion is always wrong, since men are infinitely varied; and harsh words are useless because they cannot combat ideas. And the ideas (that live) should be combatted, not the men who die.”

  It was a letter Conrad had written to a newspaper. So Patrick listened to his contemporary.

  – How can I convert you? she would ask in the darkness of the bedroom.

  – The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.

  – These are my favourite lines. I’ll whisper them. “I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal.… Let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects.”

  In the darkness he can see just the faint aura of her hair.

  – Say it again.

  On Saturday afternoons the dye washers and cutters, men from the killing beds, the sausage makers, the electrocuters – all of them from this abattoir and tannery on Cypress Street – were free. After bathing under the pipes they walked up Bathurst Street to Queen, the thirty or so of them knowing little more than each other’s false names or true countries. Hey Italy! They were in pairs or trios, each in their own language as the dyers had been in their own colours. After a beer they would continue up Bathurst to the Oak Leaf Steam Baths. Paying their quarters they were each handed a towel, a sheet, a padlock, and a canvas bag. They stripped, packed their clothes and salaries into the bag, locked it, and strung the keys around their necks. There was a sense of relaxation among all of them. Hey Canada! A wave to Patrick. It was Saturday.

  In the whitewashed rooms they sat naked within the steam, brushing a scab, considering a scar on the shoulder. Someone he had never spoken to caught his eye and both of them were so tired they could not turn away their gaze, just watched the other bluntly. He knew nothing about the men around him except how they moved and laughed – on this side of language. He himself had kept his true name and voice from the bosses at the leather yard, never spoke to them or answered them. A chain was pulled that forced wet steam into the room so that their bodies were separated by whiteness coming up through the gridded floors, tattoos and hard muscles fading into unborn photographs. They shifted, stood up, someone began to sing.

  The wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. For the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the Saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station.

  He lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall onto him. Soon this arm would become the arm Alice kissed. They were all being released from the week’s work and began to allow themselves ease, the clarified world of passion. The music of La Bohème, the death of Mimi, hovering over their unprotected bodies, the keys hanging from the cords around their necks.

  Then it was her hand in the doorway touching his heart, against his ribs, aware through her fingers of his weariness. In the small room where he could take three steps and touch the window. There was Patrick and Alice and Hana. If it was warm they would eat on the fire escape. Or if Alice was working he and Hana walked over to the Balkan Café where they sat on wire chairs and were served by long-aproned waiters. They ordered bop and manja, Hana telling him in her clear, exact voice what the names meant. Bop was beans. Manja was stew. As he watched Hana, her face drifted into Alice’s and back again as if two glass negatives merged, then moved apart. It was not so much the features as the mannerisms of Alice that he witnessed in her daughter.

  He was at ease with the precise Hana and the way she seriously articulated herself among strangers. That voice knew what it wanted and knew what it was allowed. He wanted to pick Hana up and embrace her on the street but felt shy, though in games or in a crowded streetcar her arm lay across him as if needing his warmth and closeness. As he did hers.

  But his relationship with Alice had a horizon. She refused to speak of the past. Even her stories about Hana’s father, though intricate, gave nothing away of herself. She was never self-centred in her mythologies. She would turn any compliment away. Her habit of sitting pale and naked at the breakfast table, cutting up whatever fruit they had into three portions, or sitting down with fried eggs made him once whisper to her that she was beautiful. “I’m terrific over eggs,” she shot back, her mouth full. She did not get dressed. She planned to go back to bed as soon as Patrick left for the tannery and Hana left for school. Alice worked in the evenings.

  His relationship with Hana was clearer. There would always be something careful about her. As if she had been badly scalded and so would approach all water tentatively for fear it was boiling. With her there would be brief conflicts, a discussion, and then everything was settled. She would not be bossed and she was self-sufficient. She didn’t expect forgiveness.

  They sat at the round tables at the Balkan Café eating a large meal and with ice creams strolled over at ten to the Parrot Theatre to pick up Alice. They had all the time in the world, Hana translating the information she received on the street, speaking to a butcher who walked beside them for a hundred yards carrying a pig’s head. Patrick watched the gestures towards him. They knew who he was now. A hat raised off a head in slow motion, a woman’s nod to his left shoulder.

  He lived – in his job and during these evening walks – in a silence, with noise and conversation all around him. To be understood, his reactions had to exaggerate themselves. The family idiot. A stroke victim. “Paderick,” the shopkeepers would call him as he handed them money and a list of foods Hana had written out in Macedonian, accepting whatever they gave him. He felt himself expand into an innocent. Every true thing he learned about character he learned at this time in his life. Once, when they were at the Teck Cinema watching a Chaplin film he found himself laughing out loud, joining the others in their laughter. And he caught someone’s eye, the body bending forward to look at him, who had the same realization – that this mutual laughter was conversation.

  He was always comfortable in someone else’s landscape, enjoyed being taught the customs of a place. Patrick wanted the city Hana had constructed for herself – the places she brought together and held as if on the delicate thread of her curiosity: Hoo’s Trading Company where Alice bought herbs for fever, gaslit diners whose aquarium windows leaned against the street. They watched the water-nymph follies at Sunnyside Park, watched the Italian gymnasts at the Elm Street gym, heard the chanting of English lessons to large groups at Central Neighbourhood House – one pure English voice claiming My name is Ernest, and then a barrage of male voices claiming their names were Ernest.

  But Hana’s favourite place of spells was the Geranium Bakery, and one Saturday afternoon she took him there to meet her friend Nicholas. She guided Patrick among the other workers and sacks of flour and rollers towards Nicholas Temelcoff, who turned towards her and stretched his arms out wide. It was a joke, he was covered in flour and did not really expect to be embraced. He shook Patrick’s hand and began to show them around the bakery, Hana scooping bits of raw dough with her finger and eating them. Temelcoff was meticulously dressed in jacket and tie but wore no apron so that the flour dust continued to settle on him as he moved through the bakery. He pulled chains that hung from the ceiling to start rollers moving on the upper level. He brought a small doll out of his pocket and handed it to Hana – and this time she embraced him, her head on his chest. The two men had said no more than four polite sentences to each other by the time Patrick left with the girl.

  One night Hana pulled out a valise from under the bed and showed him some mementoes. There was a photograph of
her as a baby – with her first nickname, Piko, scrawled in pencil on it. Three other photographs: a group of men working on the Bloor Street Viaduct, a photograph of Alice in a play at the Finnish Labour Temple, three men standing in snow in a lumber camp. A sumac bracelet. A rosary. These objects spread out on the bed replaced her father’s absence.

  So he discovered Cato through the daughter. The girl had been told everything about him, told of his charm, his cruelty, his selfishness, his heroism, the way he had met and seduced Alice. “You didn’t know Cato, did you?” “No.” “Well he was supposed to be very passionate, very cruel.” “Don’t talk like that, Hana, you’re ten years old, and he’s your father.” “Oh, I love him, even if I never met him. That’s just the truth.”

  She was totally unlike Patrick, always practical. When he returned from the steambaths on the first Saturday she had inquired about the price and he saw her trying to work out if it was worth it. “I would have paid anything,” he muttered, and he saw she could not understand or accept such extravagance in him. She thought him foolish. In the same way, her portrait of her father lacked any sentimentality.

  – Who were those people in the bridge picture, Hana?

  – Oh she must have known them.

  Alice was in sunlight on the grass slope leading down from the waterworks, looking out onto the lake, her hand keeping the sun out of her eyes. “I had to learn I couldn’t trust him. Not that he ever wanted me to. You must realize that Cato was not his real name, it was his war name. And who knows who he was with or what he was doing on a Wednesday or a Friday. He was self-made. He worked hard, he spoke out. On Thursdays he came shimmering along on his bike, dropped his tackle in the hall as if he were a hurried fisherman, and said, Let’s go!”

  – How long did you stay together?

  – Till he died. We were always breaking up. He thought his life was too complicated. We spent half our time worrying with each other about this. And then on Wednesday nights I would dream out the next afternoon on our bicycles along that stretch of road, in April flood or summer dust. You could blindfold me now, Patrick, and I would be able to take you there, fifty yards off the road, across a creek – lots of mud here, turn right – this is where we always got our feet wet, some gum off a low pine on my hair as I’d leap the creek. Shoulder-high cattails and ferns, then into the longhouse of cedars. Spring crows in the cedar branches! Needles on the earth half a foot deep! When we made love there he would bury something, a small bottle, a pencil, a handkerchief, a sock. He left something everywhere we made love. Such sexual archaeology. There was a piece of wood that looked like the roof of a doghouse. When we got lost we’d always have to look for that – when snow changed the shape of trees or fall made skeletons of everything, or in summer when everything was overgrown chaos. We would go there all through the year, every season, and winter was strangely easier than summer with its bugs and deer flies. We could make hollows in the snow, we were protected from wind by the trees. It is important to be close to the surface of the earth.

  He began to like it, I think, us not being lovers indoors. Still, we always fought. I told him once if he ever broke up with me and said we were ‘crazy’ and that we had to stop, I would knife him.

  – You told me that too.

  – I feel charmed, Patrick, that I knew him as well as I know you.

  – I feel jealous. No. I don’t feel jealous.

  – Because he’s dead? You listen to me so calmly, all this intimacy.…

  – Hana showed me the pictures. Who were the men on the bridge?

  – That’s the past, Patrick, leave it alone. Anyway, you should get Hana to talk to you about Cato and the socks. That’s her favourite story.

  “They were in the woods and came into a field to get away from the bugs. It was summer. Lots of bugs, my mom said. So they took off their clothes and went for a swim in the river. When they came back, there were all these young bulls where their clothes were. About five of them in a circle around the clothes. Only they were not interested in the clothes except for his socks! They were sniffing them up in the air and tossing them back and forth. It really embarrassed Cato. My mom told me he didn’t want to talk about it to others. I just love that – all those serious bulls throwing his socks back and forth. Mom thinks they were very excited.”

  Patrick had the photograph from Hana’s suitcase in his pocket. In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere.

  He was in the Riverdale Library looking for any reference to the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct. He collected the newspapers and journals he needed and went and sat in the Boys and Girls Room with its high rafters and leaded windows that let in oceans of light. He revelled in this room, the tiny desks, the smell of books. It was how he imagined the dining hall of a submarine would look.

  He read the descriptions of the bridge’s opening on October 18, 1918. One newspaper had a picture of a cyclist racing across. He worked backwards. It had taken only two years to build. It had taken years before that to agree on how it was to be done, Commissioner Harris’ determination forcing it through. He looked at the various photographs: the shells of wood structures into which concrete was poured, and then the wood removed like hardened bandages to reveal the piers. He read up on everything – survey arguments, the scandals, the deaths of workers fleetingly mentioned, the story of the young nun who had fallen off the bridge, the body never found. He read about the flooding Don River underneath, ice dangers, the decision to use night crews and the night deaths that followed. There was an article on daredevils. He heard the library bell. He turned the page to the photograph of them and he pulled out the picture he had and laid it next to the one in the newspaper. Third from the left, the newspaper said, was Nicholas Temelcoff.

  Leaving the library, Patrick crossed Broadview Avenue and began walking east. He paused, suddenly stilled, wanting to go back, but the library was closed now and it would be pointless. They would not print the photograph of a nun. A dead or a missing nun.

  He took a step forward. Now he was walking slowly, approaching a street-band, and the click of his footsteps unconsciously adapted themselves to the music that began to surround him. The cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus.

  He saw himself gazing at so many stories – knowing of Alice’s lover Cato and Hana’s wanderings in the baker’s world. He walked on beyond the sound of the street musicians, aware once again of the silence between his individual steps, knowing now he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves.

  If Alice had been a nun …

  The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web – all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire – the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.

  The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge. There were no photographers like Lewis Hine, who in the United States was photographing child labour everywhere – trapper boys in coal mines, seven-year-old doffer girls in New England mills. To locate the evils
and find the hidden purity. Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn. Hine’s photographs betray official history and put together another family. The man with the pneumatic drill on the Empire State Building in the fog of stone dust, a tenement couple, breaker boys in the mines. His photographs are rooms one can step into – cavernous buildings where a man turns a wrench the size of his body, or caves of iron where the white faces give the young children working there the terrible look of ghosts. But Patrick would never see the great photographs of Hine, as he would never read the letters of Joseph Conrad. Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

  Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.

  Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” Meander if you want to get to town.

  I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal.

  Her favourite sentence hovers next to Patrick as he wakens. By dawn he is on the livid floor of the tannery with the curved pilot knife. All day long as he cuts into the leather his mind moves over the few details she has given him about her life. Even in the farmhouse at Paris Plains there had been a silence about her youth, even with Cato she gave out only his war name. If Alice Gull had been a nun? A rosary, a sumac bracelet …

  At six in the evening he returns from work and her open palms press into his ribs. He lifts Alice into his arms and Hana jumps onto her mother’s back. So they move, cumbersome, through the small room, falling onto the bed. The game is that Hana has to try and push them off, putting her feet against the wall and her shoulders against them. Then they are on the floor and Hana falls on top. Then he and Hana try to lift Alice back onto the bed.