Best Canadian Stories 2020 Page 9

  “It just feels dumb.”

  “I don’t know how to make you feel better,” he says. “I’m really allergic at your place. I have health issues. Maybe if we get a fan it will be better there.”

  I stop checking my phone, and focus on walking the strip of sidewalk not blocked by garbage bins or parked cars. I keep my head down to watch for mounds of dog shit. I step over the body of a pale white gecko turned upside down, its tail removed from its torso. I soon reach another construction site, this one completely obscuring the sidewalk.

  “Can you please calm yourself down?” my phone reads. “Please?”

  I march down the middle of the street, moving to the side only when I hear the cars approaching from behind. When I come to the street that leads to Sasha’s apartment, the sidewalk begins again, and I climb the hill, passing the cemetery and reaching his building. I insert a ten tetri coin into the metal box in the elevator and press the number eight. The elevator jerks to his floor and soon opens to his landing. I press his doorbell and he answers, hugging me at the door.

  “I’m glad you came,” he says. I come inside and take off my shoes. “I just feel frustrated,” I say. “I don’t see the point of renting a place if I’m going to be here every night.”

  “You need an office,” he says. “And I needed you to have your own place. It’s for me to feel secure and for us to give this another try.”

  “So we’re dating again?” I ask. “We’re monogamous?”

  “You’re my monogamous girlfriend,” he says. “I love you and no other, but I need you to have your own apartment.”

  “Okay,” I agree.

  The next morning is the Day of Victory over Fascism. “Everyone else does May 8,” Sasha tells me on the taxi ride to Vake Park. “We do May 9 when the Soviets signed.”

  We stayed up late smoking hash and slept in, and Sasha is worried we’ll miss the people in military uniforms or the nationalists picking fights with old grannies for wearing the orange and black ribbon of Saint George which commemorates Russian soldiers in WWII, symbolizes Russian patriotism, and is now illegal to wear.

  We stop at the edge of the park. Sasha is disappointed by the size of the crowd, and tells me it was busier in previous years. Still, we navigate through the crowds of young people and families taking photographs in front of the fountains and head toward a group gathered at the foot of a giant stone figure with two outstretched hands, one clutching a flower. We squeeze past chairs set up in front of the military band, mostly occupied by the elderly. I comment that the band sounds like Tom Waits and Sasha seems happy that I’m getting into the spirit of things.

  “There are the nationalists,” Sasha says, pointing to men in black T-shirts and camo at the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier.

  We watch parents pushing to the front of the memorial, where they take pictures of their children placing flowers on the stone surrounding a small burning flame. News cameras are arranged in formation, and Sasha points to the men dressed in green fatigues surrounding a photograph propped up on the feet of the stone figure. “There’s the photograph of Stalin.”

  I realize that the men standing on either side of the memorial are in fact guarding the controversial figure. Stalin is still revered and worshipped in the region, Sasha explains, mostly by the elderly, but the men surrounding the memorial aren’t exactly geriatric.

  “I want to punch them in the face,” he says. “Should I do it?”

  He tells me about a Stalin statue that stood in Gori for fifty years, before being removed by police cordon in the middle of the night. It is illegal to put up any new Soviet symbols on buildings or signs, but old symbols can stay.

  “So is that why people wear the ribbons?” I ask. “As protest?”

  “Some people think things were better under the Russians,” he says.

  “They’re idiots for wearing them, but the Georgian nationalists are no better.”

  We watch a group of young men harassing a group of old ladies, each wearing the ribbons. The scene at the park crystallizes. Sasha points out the police officers and politicians, the Russian sympathizers, the group of Georgian nationalists on the far end of the park carrying signs with an image of the ribbons crossed out like a no smoking sign.

  “There they are,” he says. “Maybe a fight will break out.”

  We observe the young men following the old ladies away from the memorial and toward the edge of the park. Sasha considers approaching the men, but thinks better of it. He tells me he’s worried he’s talking down to me and I tell him I enjoy his play-by-play. This makes him even more exuberant and he divulges something that happened the year before that he hasn’t told anyone.

  “I stole the portrait of Stalin and burned it in the flame,” he tells me.

  “It was in the evening but there were still a few people gathered. I ripped it in half and burned the pieces. And then I left the park before anyone could do anything.”

  He tells me he’s thinking of doing it again this year, but there are too many people, and he’s afraid of the nationalists.

  “Am I a coward?” he asks me. “What would you do?”

  I want to watch him rip the photograph and burn it in the flame, but I tell him to listen to his gut. We stand on the edge of the memorial for a few more minutes, Sasha waiting for an opportune moment to rip the photograph away from the group of middle-aged men and teenagers, but the moment passes, and I know he isn’t going to act.

  “People are watching us,” he says. “We’ve been standing here too long.”

  I follow as he abruptly turns and heads for the fountains. We walk past teenagers posing for pictures in the ankle-deep water. Sasha points out the old men wearing military uniforms adorned with medals. “Some of them are faking it,” he says. “Wearing their fathers’ uniforms for the attention or praise. Most people that fought in the war are dead now.

  This guy looks pretty young. I should ask him how old he is, but his medals look real.”

  A group of men in leather jackets pass by. “They’re the Georgian nationalist bikers,” Sasha says. “All they care about is ripping ribbons off old people.”

  We reach the edge of the park where the anti-Russian protesters are gathered, holding signs. “Georgia is an occupied state,” Sasha reminds me. “They consider the Russians their colonizers.”

  Sasha calls out to the old man from the photography event, who’s carrying his camera and photographing the various factions of people. Sasha laments the lack of activity compared to the year before and the man tells us that the opposing political party was apparently banned from entering the park.

  “It’s a public event,” Sasha says. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “The police must have thought they’d start trouble.”

  We reach the edge of the park, and we rest on a bench. “Okay, my monogamous girlfriend,” Sasha says. “Do you want to get food?”

  I’m tired of Georgian food, oily eggplant and heavy khinkali, so opt for his favourite buffet, which Sasha warns is going to be a madhouse.

  “You take a number and everyone’s salivating over the glass display case,” he says. “It’s usually a war zone in here. They installed the number system to add some civility, but sometimes forego it entirely.”

  We try a new location on the edge of Vake Park and Sasha is disappointed that it’s not as chaotic as he imagined. “I guess no one’s heard about this one yet,” he says.

  He chews with his mouth open, meat sticking to his lips, as he asks whether I’m still thinking of heading back to Yerevan to finish the residency.

  “Davit and Nara have already left,” I tell him.

  “You could take the marshrutka.”

  “Then what was the point of getting the apartment early?” I say. “I thought that meant you wanted me to stay.”

  “I asked you to come, and I’m glad you did,” h
e says. “But you should think about yourself. Don’t you think it looks bad to leave the residency early?”

  “You think I should tell them that I left? You told me it was fine.”

  “Well, if you’re not going back you should probably email someone.”

  I start to cry, and Sasha tells me he’s sorry for bringing it up.

  “I’m only trying to look out for you,” he says. “I say this because I care.”

  When we have sex that afternoon, Sasha asks if I’m still on my period and comments that I’m dry. He spits onto his hand and rubs it on my cunt.

  “You don’t seem that into it,” he says.

  “I am,” I say. We lazily start fucking, but he asks to stop after a few minutes.

  “I lost my boner,” he says. “I was thinking of World War Two and the Ukrainians murdering Jews. My mom will be happy.”

  He gets up to use the bathroom and I scroll through the pictures of Yerevan I have saved on my phone. I’ve decided to pretend I’m still in Armenia, that I haven’t left the revolution for the asshole of my boyfriend. I hear Sasha showering, and settle on a picture of Mount Ararat taken from the Cascades on my last clear morning, its peak a wisp of cloud floating over the last of the Soviet expansion blocks, weightless and free.

  Mother Tongue

  Madeleine Maillet

  The neighbourhood has the quietude of the muggiest summer days; cars pass on the road, air-conditioner blades turn in backyards, but there are no sounds of kids playing, no birds call. Arousal washes over me like a breeze. Since Maman died, desire, when it comes, has been divorced from any object. When I asked my high school boyfriend what was the weirdest thing he ever masturbated to, he said, summer vacation. Just the idea of it. Now I’m a mildly depressed forty-three-year-old woman with the sex drive of a boy. A respite from noise makes me horny. But my husband’s starting the lawn mower, rupturing the quiet. He’s got his shirt off. His posture has that correctness that comes from the motor’s kick. In the evening sun, he looks like he belongs in a naturalistic painting, but his sweating and squinting undo the impression—it’s 98 degrees Fahrenheit with the Humidex, whatever that means, probably boiling in Celsius. Claire is working on a landscape with her sidewalk chalk in the driveway. I can see her horizon: blue above, green below. She has her shirt off too, her eight-year-old shoulders starting to broaden.

  My husband says it’s fine—says we raised her to be uninhibited by her body. Whenever he says it, I wonder, why not of? Does it mean something that I think she’s uninhibited of and not by her body, as if it’s only an incidental part of the whole. But there are more important things than prepositions, for which there are no rules, only conventions, which means they can only feel wrong. I call Claire inside, say, “Daddy has to weed whack the driveway, tu le reprends plus tard, finish your art after.” But it’s that I don’t want a debate: Why can Daddy take his shirt off and I can’t?

  I’m washing the potatoes for supper, new potatoes, the little ones. They seem lucky to me, luckier than the larger less regularly shaped potatoes, more likely to be chosen in the store. Although, there is something pleasing in the wartiness of yams. Claire is singing along to Hey Mr. Postman in the living room. I peek in and she’s running out of breath, singing back-up and lead—De-liver de-letter—looking into the bay window, at her reflection and past it, trying to win herself over while shaking her finger prohibitively. Wait! Wait a minute Mr. Postman. She places her hand on her hip jauntily and I notice she’s knotted her tee-shirt to reveal her midriff. Her voice thrills itself as it rises to a panic. She throws her head back. She’s a natural.

  The water is boiling. I throw the potatoes in and put the green beans in the steamer. I feel like I’m getting away with something, with both side dishes cooking in one pot. The radio is playing Earth Wind & Fire now, and I bet Claire is lip syncing. In a pan yellow bubbles of oil pale and chase each other around. Because denying this rhythm is a waste of joy, my shoulders bob along to the music. I slice a trout fillet into three pieces. Claire’s little slice is first, always Claire’s first, then mine, then my husband’s. It pleases me to slide my knife along the cutting board, separating each piece from smallest to largest, making sure it’s perfect before they go in the pan. Claire isn’t lip-syncing, she’s making snow angels, enjoying the friction of her limbs against the carpet. She’s never bored. She gets that from me. And Earth Wind & Fire, the horns, they are very heady, too heady for children really, but the rhythm is easy. I take out three plates and three knives and three forks. I flip the pieces of trout and their colour has richened from the true red of flesh to the brown red of meat. I call to Claire, “À table! À table!” I am teaching her French because of Maman. Everyone knows you can only love your child properly in your mother tongue, or is that a French thing, la langue maternelle, la langue du coeur. A matter of elevating a preference to the status of a value, like frankness.

  When I go into the dining room she is straddling the arm of the sofa, dragging herself forwards and back against the fabric, her hands gripping the edge, her hair a curtain. One knee is bent on the sofa, the other leg trails lazily along the floor as she masturbates. I cannot look at her. I watch the pallor of the bottom of her foot travel back and forth.

  “Stop it. Stop.”

  She plants her foot and looks at me with resignation. I want to slap her.

  “How many times, Claire? Avec ta mine de qui, moi? T’as pas honte?”

  Sam’s sweaty hand is on my shoulder, and my throat’s readiness has become a tightness. He sighs and his voice is conciliatory. “You do your exercises in your room,” he tells her. “You know better.”

  She says she’s sorry, and there is trepidation in her voice. I want to send her to her room. I don’t want to feed her. He is so understanding of her. Behind me, I’m sure he’s smiling a reassuring smile, because she is at ease again, standing, waiting. It’s like he’s her mother. I give up. Go back to the kitchen. Retreat, at least, is never an over-reaction. They set the table together. She wonders what insects eat. Sam knows the answer is leaves and twigs. I put the green beans in a bowl and drain the potatoes, this oppressive moisture on my face that smells faintly of dirt, it’s a release. I exhale all this hot steam very slowly. I slide the trout onto a plate and carry the food to the table. Claire is talking about butterflies, wondering what they eat. She asks, “Is it different, because they look so different? Do they get their colours from the things they eat?”

  “How do you mean?” Sam asks. He balances green beans across the width of the spoon. I should’ve brought tongs, but I’d just be fussing if I got up now. He has beautiful hands—musician’s hands. He plays viola. We live in Minneapolis. We’ve lived in Cleveland, Chicago, and Cincinnati. Chicago was my favourite, because they have jazz like Montreal has jazz, but the symphony here offered him the first chair, and here we are.

  “Like in the fall,” Claire says, “a caterpillar eats yellow leaves, red leaves, purple leaves, then it goes into its cocoon, and it’s colourful; when it comes out a butterfly. But if all it eats is green leaves in summer, it’ll turn into a green butterfly, and that’s good! It’s good camouflage!” She is so smart, my daughter. She isn’t looking at us, she’s staring off at green butterflies, a green too stiff in a flutter of green leaves. It’s hard to hold a grudge against a person with no guile.

  My husband still holds the serving spoon, beaming at her. “How many potatoes?”

  “Four,” she says, “They’re little. They’re my favourites.”

  “I know,” I say, and it feels like a reproach, but I haven’t spoken to her since I got angry, and I can’t help that it sounds like that. Only talk will make talk easy again. “I’ve seen a butterfly being born,” I say. “When they’re ready the thread of their cocoon starts to unravel, and they come down slow and steady. It looks like they’re in an elevator. An elevator in the air.”

  “I bet they get dizzy b
eing born,” she adds.

  My laughter brays with the ease that is between us again. “Yes, yes, I bet.”

  Sam smiles at me. “Thank your mother for supper,” he says with a nod to me and to her.

  “Merci, Maman,” she says.

  We don’t speak French at the table, for Sam’s sake, but we know he loves the sound of it. Claire, reminded of her dinner, smashes her potatoes with the back of her fork, and takes her knife and scrapes up some butter, and awkwardly spreads it across the potatoes she’s still smashing—striking the fork’s tines. Her hands are contorted. We don’t correct her. We watch her figure it out together.

  I ask Sam about his rehearsal tonight. They’re preparing for the Pops series. Of course, the Sunday Pops series. Last month was music from the movies, Star Wars, The Godfather, etc. Before that it was Sinatra.

  “What is it this month?” I ask.

  “We’re doing The Beatles,” he says. “Haven’t you always wanted to hear an orchestral arrangement of Yellow Submarine?” We laugh our cultured laughter, and Claire laughs to be laughing with us, too loudly.

  “There’s a yellow submarine?” she asks. Her nose wrinkles; this is her incredulous look—it’s my sister’s too. This slightly upturned retroussez nose that’s so expressive. Sam smiles grimly—his pitch is obviously right, he can’t fake that, but his tone is a protest against the song’s—nasal, thin, worse than Ringo’s. I groan. Claire gets the gist immediately. Now she and Sam are a team.

  “We all live in a yellow submarine!” they sing wildly.

  I take my part: in a frail irate tone, I ask, “What is that infernal racket?” She guffaws at me for making fun of my own seriousness; to prove that I can take a joke, that I am a joke with my adult prudishness. Why am I trying so hard? But it’s too late to sing with them.

  Serious, suddenly, Claire asks, “What was the yellow submarine?”

  “Oh,” Sam says. “It was imaginary. An imaginary submarine.”