October 1970 (25 page)

Those Were the Days
rode the waves with Gode crouched in the hull, terrified by the force of the wind and the height of the whitecaps, the steep slope of the rudder as Marie-France, hanging over the edge grinning like a cartoon whale, steered the boat toward Île Bonaventure.

They walked along the island's deserted shore, drank muscatel from the bottle and had sex on a woollen blanket that made a bright red splash on the pebbled beach. The gannets that earlier in the summer had covered the top of the cliff like a living duvet had all but disappeared, dispersed along the coast and up the estuary and out to sea. Gode's penis was still buried in the warmth beneath Marie-France's blonde pubic bush when he fell as sound asleep as a rock.

When he awoke, Marie-France was looking through the binoculars at an excursion boat full of tourists that was just rounding the point, en route for the cliffs on the opposite shore. It was called
The Island Gannet
, according to the name she read on its side.

Fat Gill's company. Business was booming. Percé was on everyone's itinerary, it seemed. All the motels and campgrounds were full. Vacationers were having to sleep in their cars. In the early mornings they could be found walking on the beach near the extinguished bonfires, in the hopes of surprising a nude sleeper. The mayor himself had had to admit that hippies had become a tourist attraction.

NINA

IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF
autumn,
1999. After Labour Day and the departure of the cottagers, tranquility had returned to the shores ringed by the forests of Kaganoma. A concert of shrill voices filled the yard where the chickens roamed at will. The yard, about a hectare in area, formed a vague parallelogram, one side of which was the lake. It had been only partially cleared by the previous owner, and fallen black pines had been left to rot among their own saplings, ferns, yews, blueberry bushes, and Labrador tea.

Nihilo wandered to the edge of the clearing, passed under some chickens that were roosting in tree branches, as passive as old biddies. A bit farther on, he came face to face with a feral cat that must have weighed forty pounds, reddish feathers sprouting from its mouth as it sat contemplating him, unperturbed. The feline moved off unhurriedly through the striations of sunlight that slanted through the understory.

It came back later that day, the same or possibly a different cat. Nihilo went out, aimed his shotgun at its huge round head framed by sideburns, raised his line of sight a good metre, and fired. The beast disappeared in a few bounds.

The next time he saw it, Sam fired two shots at it, again aiming over its head through branches of spruce, three metres from the chicken coop. Stretched out like a sphinx on the carpet of spruce needles, his visitor continued to look back at him with the same air of suicidal indifference and fathomless consciousness. This time it didn't even bother to move off.

At the municipal library in Maldoror, across from the hockey arena, Sam cruised the bookshelves for anything he could find about lynxes. He sat at one of the tables near a window and went through the pile. He read about the Spanish lynx reintroduction program, and about another in Colorado, releasing individuals captured in the Yukon and near Abitibi.

The Canadian lynx consumed an average of two hundred hares a year. The kits, usually two in number, spent the first winter with their mother.

Old French trappers had called it the
pichou
, a word derived from the Algonquin
pesheen
. At one time the term was also used to refer to snowshoes made from deer or caribou hide.

In a book on animal symbolism in Amerindian cultures, he read that the lynx was considered a kind of “holder of secrets.” Another work, entitled
Discover Your Animal Totem
, confirmed that to penetrate the deepest secrets you needed to resort to the medicine of the lynx. According to writs of this medicine, the Egyptian sphinx was obviously not a lion, as had always been assumed, but rather a lynx. “If the lynx knocks on your door, pay attention!” concluded the authors, who then went on to issue this advice: “Become a lynx and smile like Mona Lisa!”

Sam met Phil Baron at the White Wolf, where Marie-Québec had four or five shifts a week waiting on tables, usually from three o'clock to nine. Phil was one of their neighbours on Lake Kaganoma, a balding man in his fifties with a long, uniformly silvered ponytail who had dropped everything and blown six thousand bucks on his dream: a hunt camp, rough as they come but with a lease from the Ministry of Natural Resources tacked beside the door. Phil lived with Joey, a young groundhog that accompanied him wherever he went, nestled under the hood of his ancient Dodge Chrysler, curled up on the chassis. Phil liked lifting the truck's hood to show you the brownish red lump huddled up against the engine block. Joey had come into Phil's life during a spring fishing trip when, after drinking half a case of beer, he'd parked his truck above the animal's burrow to take a piss. It took him a while to figure out why, when he was leaving, the fat groundhog had taken refuge in his truck; the engine, well known by his friends for its musical talents, made a noise like a groundhog: a shrill whistle followed by a tremolo.

Now, whenever Phil parked in the town, he looked for empty yards and vacant lots with plenty of clover and dandelions.

From customers at the Wolf, Sam also learned that during the mid-1980s, Richard Godefroid, the former FLQer, had spent a few summers in the area. Once, he'd even rented a cottage on the next lake down from Sam's, Salaberry Lake. Phil Baron had known him well, his informants added, and could maybe be persuaded to talk about him.

Baron's hunt camp was about a kilometre north of Kaganoma. There was always a fire burning somewhere in that corner of the dense forest — dead leaves, branches, slash, old boards, bits of broken shingle — among the slanting “cypresses” (black spruce) that served as his backyard. An open case of twenty-four was always within reaching distance. A chainsaw that could use a good sharpening had been left out in the trees. The yard was a dump. Inside, the camp was a minefield. The dock was a work in progress.

Helping to make a dent in a six-pack of Miller Lite, Samuel listened to Baron tell him that Gode, as he'd been called, had been from the area, from Villebois to be exact, a tiny village pretty much smack on the 49th parallel, just above La Sarre. When he needed to make himself scarce after his release from prison, Gode had gone to Abitibi and worked for a few summers as a brush remover in the forestry concessions of the Northwest. That's how Phil knew him. They'd removed slash together out by Joutel, and it was Phil who'd provided him with the tiles for his cottage on Salaberry Lake. They'd hunted together, drank together. When Gode left, they'd arranged to keep in touch from time to time. If he was passing anywhere near Maldoror, Gode always stopped in at the White Wolf around four o'clock, where he was sure to find his old bud in his usual state of alcohol-induced stupefaction. Once, he even came to introduce a documentary he'd co-produced at the film festival, but his arrival had coincided with a period during which Phil had had a maddening tendency to get himself so pissed he could fail a Breathalyzer test from a metre and a half away, and then conduct a perfectly straight, two-hour conversation with a line of coke in his nostrils as big as the Kaganoma esker. He didn't remember a single thing about Gode's visit.

While Phil was talking, Samuel Nihilo was thinking that, for the second time, their paths had almost crossed, his and Godefroid's, in fact, somewhere on this sandy terrain sprouting severely malcontent pines, the future had turned into the past. It was as if he and Gode occupied the same home range, a territory bigger than that of a cougar, on which they circled warily around each other, distancing themselves, coming closer together, without being aware of it.

“You wanna hear a good story?” Baron blurted out, crushing an empty Miller can with his fingers. “In 1969 or '70, I don't remember exactly, me 'n' a few friends broke into the local firehall and took off with a half-dozen FN and some walkie-talkies. Nothing to do with the FLQ. The stuff later ended up being used by a poaching outfit specializing in moose meat, but that's another story. Except that when the War Measures Act came in, they hauled me in from the room I rented by the week above a stripper bar, and I became the first political prisoner to be arrested in the history of Maldoror. A few years later, the police chief bought me a beer by way of apologizing, and so I got the last laugh on that. He told me that two days after the special law came in, he received a phone call from the head of the QPP. The guy'd called to warn him that from his perspective in Montreal, the guys who drove around Maldoror with a cherry on top of their cars were spending too much time in the doughnut shop. Three arrests in the whole of Abitibi? That wasn't good enough. They needed more. He said he was sending up a few helicopters. Make it look ugly up here, he said, the big kahuna, and then he hung up.”

“That's really what he said? Make it look ugly?”

“Yup. With helicopters.”

“Did Gode ever talk to you about the death of Lavoie?”

“Never.”

Sam read
The Seagull
. Then he read it again. He thought about it. “When Trigorin sees Nina and the seagull that had just been shot,” he wrote, “he instinctively perceives it as a symbol, he imagines the whole story right there: Nina free as the air beside the lake, seduced by Trigorin's idleness, condemned to a death of the soul by something as useless as Treplev's gunshot. The idea of the ‘short story within the play,' which takes the place of the ‘play within the play,' means that Trigorin, thanks to his creative compulsion, foresees both his liaison with Nina and its aftermath. But Chekhov's vision is larger than that: it isn't Nina's seduction that provokes her actual or symbolic death, but the fact that the writer immediately conceives their idyll in the form of a narrative, a story. Something that aligns with real life, but which, unlike the great, romantic love stories, contains its ending in its beginning. In fact, Trigorin doesn't seduce Nina from idleness. On the contrary: he seduces her through
activity
 . . .
”

Maire-Québec was fading. She didn't like her job. The regulars at the White Wolf mistook their bar stools for a shrink's couch and drained all the energy out of her, not to mention that if she had a dollar for every time she heard the words “tits” and “ass” she'd be a millionaire. But a job was a job, and a kind of social standing (however mediocre and libidinous) came with it. Whereas being in a Chekhov play in Maldoror didn't count for much. Because of their precariousness and their isolation, regional troupes saw themselves prevented from participating either in the travelling provincial circuit or on the stages of Montreal, so that being booked for four, five, six, or seven nights maximum, in places like the Loblaw's Happy Times Theatre, was the most they could hope for by way of success, despite all their hard work: the slow approach to the text, the ever-deepening reading, the memorization, line by line, the rehearsals, the blocking, the body movements, the putting on of this second skin of words, the mastering of the role, the dress rehearsal, the performance, the exaltation, the exhaustion, the labour and the stage fright, and then the return to darkness.

At the beginning of autumn, she seemed to oscillate endlessly between chronic fatigue, bouts of insomnia, PMS, polymorphous flashbacks to an old case of mono, and black thoughts that could drag her into something resembling postpartum depression but wasn't.
What's eating you, anyway?
he wanted to shout at her. But he held back, as though he feared provoking an irreparable breach. Waking up the sleeping cat. And it was as though the characters she inhabited during the production prevented her from showing her true self other than to make it die again in the soft glow of the footlights.

He found her sitting out on the deck. As the autumn advanced, her inner unhappiness had become a mask that she could put on or take off at will.

Samuel drew up a chair, sat down, and leaned his elbows on the table.

“I have to go to Montreal
 . . .
I have work to do there. People I need to see, archives I have to consult.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I'll be leaving first thing.”

“And by three o'clock you'll be in Montreal while I'll be here listening to Phil Baron making propositions that would make a porn star blush
 . . .
”

“He does that?”

“They're all the same. You should hear them.”

“Not sure I'd like that as much as you do.”

“Ha!”

“But I don't want you to stay here alone.”

“And where would you like me to go?”

“Why not visit your parents?”

“No way. I'll stay here. The Ghost of Kaganoma will keep me company.”

“Okay. But I want to do you a favour first. I want to show you how to use the shotgun.”

“Are you out of your mind? If you feel guilty about leaving me alone here, that's your problem.”

“Maybe, but a 12-gauge aimed at the gut is a universal language.”

“Don't waste your time.”

“What if a bear tries to get in? What would you do?”

“If you think it's so dangerous for me to stay here, then why are you leaving?”

“To work.”

“Yeah, right!”

Sam got up and went into his study. A rifle is a strange tool that gives birth to a threat even as it averts it. He went back out onto the deck, the Baikal broken and hooked over his arm. Marie-Québec turned her back, looked out over the blue lake and, superimposed on it, the great forest that stretched all the way to Maldoror. She shook her head. No.

KOREA, HILL 187,
SPRING 1953

THE GENERAL HAD LIVED UP
to his reputation
as a solid trencherman, but now he regretted his momentary weakness in the matter of the Armagnac, having taken one too many for the road. He sent General Libby home, already quite tipsy from the three bottles of Romanée-Conti they'd drunk from his personal reserve, requisitioned in Dijon less than a dozen years ago, and brought with him to Seoul. It was an excellent Pinot Noir, thanks to the predilections of the monks from the Abbey Saint-Vivant, and made even more precious by the phylloxera epidemic that had halted its production after 1946. In the jeep that was taking him to the front lines, Bédard, trying to keep down the acid reflux rising from his stomach on the rough road, did his best to interpret the snatches of information related to him by the short-wave radio tuned to the regimental QG frequency. The bad reception, the confused feverishness of communications from the front to the rear, and reports from advance posts certainly didn't help to give him a clear picture of the situation on the ground.

As expected, the Chinese were concentrating their fire on the sector occupied by C Company, on the right flank of the third battalion. As Bédard well knew, that was the most vulnerable point of his plan: a high ridge making an overhang from which a line more than a quarter of a kilometre long, held by the Canadian brigade, was exposed. Over the past few days, the Chinese had increased their patrols in that direction, kept up regular bombardments, and the section had received more than its share of attention. Another detail bothered the general: he was operating with two battalions of the line and another in reserve. And the reserve, consisting of a contingent of the newly arrived 22nd Regiment, had had to be placed under cover of the battalion deployed on the left flank, where there was a dangerous hole in his defences. His room to manoeuvre was drastically restricted.

At night, the communists behaved as if the no-man's-land belonged to them. The Canadians occupying the sector were green, and the Chinese were surely aware of that. Their units were constantly under fire. Bédard had had shell fragments recovered from the area expertly examined for several days. Most of them came from canons that could be used if their positions were attacked. Lots of good reasons to slip away from General Libby.

Bédard leapt from the jeep before it stopped rolling and shot into the officers' mess. He found himself in the middle of a small farewell party in honour of a lieutenant-colonel who was returning home. The men froze when they saw him, glasses in hand. The heavy sound of shelling shook the ground, illuminating the Asian night in the background. The front was barely eight hundred metres away.

“I want everyone at their posts,” the general said, his voice a bit breathless but calm.

The first two patrols sent on reconnaissance by the third battalion, a dozen men in each, were engaged across from the rocky overhang and practically annihilated. Shortly before midnight, the bombardments intensified, still aimed at C Company.

And then came the attack. At the stroke of midnight.

The Chinese flares had done their job well, and the successive assault waves swarmed through breaks in the lines of barbed wire cut by their sappers. They swept into no-man's-land and rushed the advanced positions where they were immediately engaged by a foolhardy squad. Bédard placed the canons from his brigade under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Taylor, who commanded the third battalion, then hurried to the radio phone and called for artillery from the army corps deployed on the heights of land. At exactly 0005 hours, United Nations shells began raining down on the small silhouettes bent double and galloping to meet their enemies in the smoke-filled darkness of the battlefield. And behind them, line after line of replacements from the Chinese army. Bédard listened to a report from American intelligence, charged with the task of intercepting and deciphering communications from the Reds: apparently, the Allied shells were making them eat dirt, but no one was finding it funny.

Bédard went outside to assess the situation. As soon as he got to the observation post, he saw friendly planes flying low over the battlefield, dropping incandescent bombs that lit up the scene as if it were midday. The general squinted several times through the sharp smoke, finally saw them: wave after wave of small, yellow, grimacing soldiers in the blue uniform of the People's Army, fanatics, revenge-seekers, little mechanical toys, he thought. Look at them, columns of warrior-ants charging from an anthill as though it had been kicked with a boot. Numberless hordes, intent on submerging the entire world.