In the Skin of a Lion (7 page)

Two of Nicholas’ friends died on the trip. An Italian showed him how to drink blood in the animal pens to keep strong. It was a French boat called
La Siciliana
. He still remembered the name, remembered landing in Saint John and everyone thinking
how primitive it looked. How primitive Canada was. They had to walk half a mile to the station where they were to be examined. They took whatever they needed from the sacks of the two who had died and walked towards Canada.

Their boat had been so filthy they were covered with lice. The steerage passengers put down their baggage by the outdoor taps near the toilets. They stripped naked and stood in front of their partners as if looking into a mirror. They began to remove the lice from each other and washed the dirt off with cold water and a cloth, working down the body. It was late November. They put on their clothes and went into the Customs sheds.

Nicholas had no passport, he could not speak a word of English. He had ten napoleons which he showed them to explain he wouldn’t be dependent. They let him through. He was in Upper America.

He took a train for Toronto where there were many from his village; he would not be among strangers. But there was no work. So he took a train north to Copper Cliff, near Sudbury, and worked there in a Macedonian bakery. He was paid seven dollars a month with food and sleeping quarters. After six months he went to Sault Ste. Marie. He still could hardly speak English and decided to go to school, working nights in another Macedonian bakery. If he did not learn the language he would be lost.

The school was free. The children in the class were ten years old and he was twenty-six. He used to get up at two in the morning and make dough and bake till 8:30. At nine he would go to school. The teachers were all young ladies and were very good people. During this time in the Sault he had translation dreams – because of his fast and obsessive studying of English. In the dreams trees changed not just their names but their looks
and character. Men started answering in falsettos. Dogs spoke out fast to him as they passed him on the street.

When he returned to Toronto all he needed was a voice for all this language. Most immigrants learned their English from recorded songs or, until the talkies came, through mimicking actors on stage. It was a common habit to select one actor and follow him throughout his career, annoyed when he was given a small part, and seeing each of his plays as often as possible – sometimes as often as ten times during a run. Usually by the end of an east-end production at the Fox or Parrot Theatres the actors’ speeches would be followed by growing echoes as Macedonians, Finns, and Greeks repeated the phrases after a half-second pause, trying to get the pronunciation right.

This infuriated the actors, especially when a line such as “Who put the stove in the living room, Kristin?” – which had originally brought the house down – was now spoken simultaneously by at least seventy people and so tended to lose its spontaneity. When the matinee idol Wayne Burnett dropped dead during a performance, a Sicilian butcher took over, knowing his lines and his blocking meticulously, and money did not have to be refunded.

Certain actors were popular because they spoke slowly. Lethargic ballads, and a kind of blues where the first line of a verse is repeated three times, were in great demand. Sojourners walked out of their accent into regional American voices. Nicholas, unfortunately, would later chose Fats Waller as his model and so his emphasis on usually unnoticed syllables and the throwaway lines made him seem high-strung or dangerously anti-social or too loving.

But during the time he worked on the bridge, he was seen as a recluse. He would begin sentences in his new language, mutter, and walk away. He became a vault of secrets and memories.
Privacy was the only weight he carried. None of his cohorts really knew him. This man, awkward in groups, would walk off and leave strange clues about himself, like a dog’s footprints on the snowed roof of a garage.

Hugh!
A doctor attending his arm, this is what woke him, brought him out of his dream.
Hah!
It was six hours since he had fallen asleep. Kosta was there. He saw that the veil and his shirt had been cut open by the doctor. Somehow, they said, he had managed to get his arm back into the socket.

He jerked his hand to the veil, looking at it closely.

She had stayed until Kosta came down in the early morning. She talked to him about the arm, to get a doctor, she had to leave. She spoke? Yes yes. What did she sound like? Hah? What more did Kosta know about her? He mentioned her black skirt. Before he left, Nicholas looked around the bar and found strips of the black habit she had cut away to make a skirt for the street.

When he walks into the fresh air outside the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, on the morning after the accident on the bridge, he sees the landscape as something altered, no longer so familiar that it is invisible to him. Nicholas Temelcoff walks now seeing Parliament Street from the point of view of the woman – who had looked through his belt-satchel while he slept, found his wide wire shears, and used them to cut away the black lengths of her habit. When he walks out of the Ohrida Lake Restaurant that morning it is her weather he grows aware of. He knows he will find her.

There are long courtships which are performed in absence. This one is built perhaps on his remark about her hair or her almost-silent question as he was falling off some tower or bridge into sleep. The verge of sleep was always terrifying to Nicholas so he would drink himself into it blunting out the seconds of pure fear when he could not use his arms, would lie there knowing he’d witness the half-second fall before sleep, the fear of it greater than anything he felt on the viaduct or any task he carried out for the Dominion Bridge Company.

As he fell, he remembers later, he felt a woman’s arm reaching for him, curious about his name.

He is aware of her now, the twin. What holds them together is not the act which saved her life but those moments since. The lost song on the radio. His offhand and relaxed flattery to a nun with regard to her beauty. Then he had leaned his head back, closed his eyes for too long, and slept.

A week later he rejoins the flatbed truck that carries the tar and fire, jumps on with the other men, and is back working at the bridge. His arm healed, he swings from Pier D to Pier C, ignores the stories he hears of the nun who disappeared. He lies supine on the end of his tether looking up towards the struts of the bridge, pivoting slowly. He knows the panorama of the valley better than any engineer. Like a bird. Better than Edmund Burke, the bridge’s architect, or Harris, better than the surveyors of 1912 when they worked blind through the bush. The panorama revolves with him and he hangs in this long silent courtship, her absence making him look everywhere.

In a year he will open up a bakery with the money he has saved. He releases the catch on the pulley and slides free of the bridge.

THE SEARCHER

P
ATRICK LEWIS
arrived in the city of Toronto as if it were land after years at sea. Growing up in the country had governed his childhood: the small village of Bellrock, the highway of river down which the log drivers came, drinking, working raucous, and in the spring leaving the inhabitants shocked within the silence. Now, at twenty-one, he had been drawn out from that small town like a piece of metal and dropped under the vast arches of Union Station to begin his life once more. He owned nothing, had scarcely any money. There was a piece of feldspar in his pocket that his fingers had stumbled over during the train journey. He was an immigrant to the city.

What remained in Patrick from his childhood were letters frozen inside mailboxes after ice storms. What he remembered was loving only things to do with colour, hating the whiteness, stepping into the warm brown universe of barns, the breath and steam of cattle rolling out, the acrid shit and urine he could summon up even now in the heart of Toronto. The smell had paraded grandly over his first seduction in a hay bed, the angry girl slapping him when both were full and guilty. What he remembered was frozen laundry, carrying overalls like a body into the kitchen and seating them in a chair, hoping his father would see them before they melted and lolled over the table.

Then summer. Blackflies and mosquitoes. Leaping not into hay but into the black underwater colour of creek, walking
naked to the farmhouse, chewing rhubarb, clothes under one arm. You bit the glossy skin of the raw rhubarb and ripped its fibres open and sucked the flavour out. You put the smallest pellet of raspberry onto your tongue and opened it delicately with your teeth. You stood in a field on a hot day obsessed with this precise taste.

Now, in the city, he was new even to himself, the past locked away. He saw his image in the glass of telephone booths. He ran his hands over the smooth pink marble pillars that reached up into the rotunda. This train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city. He could be shaved, eat a meal, or have his shoes coloured.

He saw a man with three suitcases, well-dressed, shouting out in another language. The man’s eyes burned through everyone who at first received his scream personally. But the phrases were for angels in the air to assist him or for demons to leave him. Two days later Patrick returned to pick up his luggage from a locker. He saw the man again, still unable to move from his safe zone, in a different suit, as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world.

Patrick sat on a bench and watched the tides of movement, felt the reverberations of trade. He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.

When Ambrose Small, the millionaire, disappeared in 1919, it was discovered that the police had his Bertillon record. Between 1889 and 1923 the Bertillon identification system was used to locate criminals and missing persons. Bertillon’s method consisted of the measurement of certain parts of the body: the length of head, width of head, length of right ear, length of left foot, length of left middle finger, the length of left forearm. In homes and prisons and mortuaries all over North America limbs were measured and the results sent in to the Toronto police. During the fever of the case over 5,000 people claimed to be Ambrose Small. They claimed they had amnesia, were kidnapped in a brown sack, were disfigured, were hidden in geological holes in the Scarborough Bluffs, were stretched to longer than five foot six inches on racks, were overfed, had all their hair removed, had their memories wiped clean by certain foods, had their pigmentation altered, were turned into women, had the length of their right ear changed, were in the meantime hungry and penniless and would someone mail $500 to Nelson, B. C., or Wichita, Kansas, or Cornerbrook, Newfoundland.

A woman in Hamilton saw Ambrose with his throat cut. She woke one morning to feel blood on the pillow, looked up and saw someone was sawing her neck, and she said I am Ambrose Small. Then she woke up again. Another had a vision that she
was unlocking the safe at the Grand Opera House and saw a curled-up skeleton inside resting on documents.