Poached Egg on Toast (25 page)

Until the momentary flush of rowdiness when he tries to raise a singsong after dinner, slapping his legs against the rug. Mother has already slipped quietly away, and has driven herself back to the hotel. She kisses Burr and me at the door. “He’ll come by taxi, later,” she says. “We’ll stop by for a few minutes on our way home in the morning. We can say goodbye then.” And when Father leaves, not more than a half hour later, he falls flat on his face on my front lawn.

Burr and I lean against the door and curse and laugh in outrage and relief after the taxi pulls away. I swear to her that I’ll say something the next day. Not when he’s drunk, when he’s sober. I’ll let him know—no shouting or screaming—that it matters to us, that we’re all in this together, that we, they—I don’t know what I’m going to say.

In the morning, Burr and I stand on the step to greet our parents. Strength in numbers, we say. My heart is fluttering wildly. “Steady,” says Burr, “steady.” If I don’t speak, will she?

Father slides out of the passenger seat and shuts the car door, but just as he begins to walk towards us, the children swoop around from the backyard, having heard the car. He looks down at his grandchildren, scoops up the youngest and swings him to his shoulders. There’s an outcry from the others; they all want a ride. Father will not be looked at, face to face. He could be anyone’s grandfather, some pleasant old gentleman romping with his grandchildren before he sets off on his journey home. Has he erased himself so thoroughly? Or have we done it for him?

Maybe he really doesn’t remember.

One last scene. After Father’s death, I have a dream, and I phone Burr to tell her.

A group of people has gathered at our childhood home. Family, friends, workmates of Mother, even drinking partners of our father. We are there to celebrate, though what we’re celebrating, I don’t know.

When Burr and I walk through the door, we don’t see Father. We begin to look for him, upstairs and down. “I’ll bet he’s in the rat cellar,” says Burr, and we go out and walk around to the side of the house. We have to push back the bushes because spiraea has grown over the double trapdoors. We raise the slats and descend the ladder; look at each other and prepare to hold our breath. But here, something happens. The earth cellar opens into an amazing network of underground rooms. We understand now that this is where Father lives. He’s been bringing down odds and ends, bits and pieces, for years. He’s constructed extra rooms, three of them, and these have ceiling tiles and are lined with wood. Old linoleum has been spread across the floor. There is a chair in one corner, even a secondhand fridge. I think of the hanging socket and wonder if the fridge has been plugged in.

And now, we see Father. He is standing in the middle of the first room, an overflowing bottle in one hand. Champagne, something we’ve never seen him buy or drink. From above, there are noises of celebration—people shouting, congratulating, many voices. Shall we stay down here to celebrate? There is a moment when we must decide.

I marvel at how much work Father has done to the place. The shelves are neat; the ceilings tight. I move into one of the bedrooms and reach out a hand to smooth the spread, an old one, made of ribbed chenille. I give it a shake to show Burr that, look, Father has even carried a mattress down here. But there is no mattress. As I lift the spread, I see the decay, the disintegration of all that lies beneath. In that single moment when I lift the spread to give it a shake, it becomes clear that everything has been eaten by insects, is in shreds, or has rotted away.

But his face. I see Father’s face. He has turned towards us while champagne flows over his hand and runs down his arm. He’s looking at Burr and me, and he’s about to celebrate, and we clearly see the expression in his streaked and watery eyes.

During takeoff, Marta called up her angels. Morav, she said to herself. She closed her eyes. Daddy. Aunt Elspeth. Uncle Harry. Jill, who died before me and was too young. She forgot Grandmother O’Hare, and was reminded later the same night. Grandmother O’Hare walked into her dream and stood with a pinched face, severe, silent because she’d been left off the list.

There was a windstorm in Frankfurt, but flights had not been cancelled. Marta felt the wing outside her window tip to the left, as if she’d caught the plane in the act of tumbling over. Tumble. Drop. She’d gone through this so many times in her mind, for so many years, she knew the sequence.

It had been bad enough getting herself across the Atlantic. An act of faith she did not believe she could raise each time she flew across an ocean. Acts of innocence and faith to believe, as the plane drifted away from one continent and entered the abyss over cold bottomless Atlantic, that it could and would reach the opposite shore. Always night flights. Flying out over darkness. Hard cold ocean with creatures great and small, lurking below. Never, when she set foot on a plane, did she have a single expectation of arriving at destination. If it happened, it was a gift, a blessing, a miracle.

Between Frankfurt and Zagreb, the Croatian attendant presented a meal heavy with meat, a layer of cold grease visible. Marta rejected the food, turned away, wondering how, why, she had entered this new set of risks and possibilities. War. Warriors. She was married to a man who’d been away from home for almost a year. That was why she had left Frankfurt in a windstorm, and was headed for Zagreb.

She phoned her friend Marion before leaving.

“Marion? I’ve got my ticket.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Want has nothing to do with it. I have to do this. He’s out of Bosnia now. He’s living in Croatia. But he goes back just about every week. The last time I talked to him, a Serb had held a gun to his head.”

“What did he do?”

“He said to the Serb’s companion—another Serb—’Ask him if it’s because he has such poor aim that he has to stand this close to shoot me.’ ”

“Was Geoff armed?”

“No. He hates wearing a gun. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he’s not afraid. He believes that
right
not
might
will have its way. He truly believes that. Despite what his eyes are seeing.”

“He doesn’t think about death the way we do,” said Marion.

“How is that?”

“I don’t know. Fear, I guess.”

“He doesn’t think about it at all. He says if he were to think about death in the middle of a war, he’d already be dead.”

“He’s probably right,” said Marion.

A week earlier, a UN soldier’s face had been carved with a knife, at gunpoint. And snipers, there were always snipers. They picked off whomever they could—their own civilian population, UN peacekeepers, aid workers. In downtown Sarajevo, old women out for firewood or water were shot at for target practice. Cowards. Cowardly men hiding behind guns, shooting at their own elderly, their own children. She hated, detested Geoff being there. Last year, his arm had been broken when a Croat had tried to kidnap him. Geoff had not been shot, nor had he been kidnapped. But he’d walked away from a cocked machine gun. He believed in his work. He didn’t see Muslims, Croats, Serbs. He saw humans needing help. Children—many children. Orphans. Women. Some men. The old. He knew individuals. Friends. Teenagers. Victims. All of them victims of their own war. There were days, nights, when she regretted loving him.

Days and nights were all alike in the hotel. They lived in the countryside, outside Zagreb, a rural stretch of four-lane dusty highway. The hotel had been taken over by the United Nations; from the outside, it was baby blue, a long flat building, concrete and glass. She felt like Rapunzel, alone all day on the second floor. Croatian police guarded her from outside. They swaggered into the bar in the morning where she, the only customer, sipped bitter coffee and kept watch over knives and guns strapped to their waists. The waiters wore blousy shirts and in halting English spoke with her about
gut Geld
in Toronto and Frankfurt. Every one of them had a brother, an uncle or a daughter in Canada or Germany. No one, it seemed, wanted to stay in Croatia.

In the evening, the warriors came back from headquarters, lining up their white vehicles like cardboard jeeps in the parking lot below. They were from many nations, European and African. Geoff was the first to leave in the morning and last to return at night. He flew in and out of Bosnia by helicopter, by small jet, continuing his journeys in open jeeps or armoured personnel carriers for the final leg. One morning, a bullet ripped through the cockpit of the plane as the pilot landed. Geoff was sitting behind the navigator. The bullet exited inches from his ear. In their hotel room, he painted his blood group on the back of his blue helmet—large permanent felt tip letters, so there’d be no mistake.

Some part of him, she knew, had been drawn to the danger. He talked with resignation and inevitability about the violence. He told her of thugs who’d emerged from the deepest crevices of the earth when war began. Territories had been drawn; the slime-balls, as he called them, would stop at nothing to keep their guns, their endless supply of liquor, women, money, drugs. Their power. War would not end, not with signed agreements in Geneva, London, Sarajevo. No, it was already far beyond three political parties lining up continual complaints to make one another look bad.

She could not speak to him of home, of their children. She watched, waited, trying to learn what he was dealing with. Sometimes he stayed in Bosnia several days at a time. He left his gun locked in a trunk in their room. His friends were in Sarajevo. He’d left them behind. He could get out. He was alive. Word of the killings always reached him. Another soldier, another interpreter, horrible, intentional murders. He shook his head, talked to her as if the dead were still alive. Some, a few, had got out. He’d helped. He received letters at the hotel, passed through many hands, filled with tears, with kisses, with love. When he returned each time from Bosnia, his back was soaked through under the armour he wore. The equipment too heavy to carry. He removed it piece by piece in their room, stacked it in a corner, the blue helmet placed on top with his blood group showing, reminding them of what was necessary, of what might be.

During daylight, she walked for hours along an open four-lane highway where she would be safe. Past dusty cornfields, flat and plain. Men looked at her with anger, knowing she was a foreigner. She wore old clothes for walking. Found paths through the field gardens, greeted women bent double over small patches of earth. No one ever returned her greeting. The women were hostile, suspicious. She returned to the highway, ignored the horns of trucks. She sat at the window and watched the Croatian police below. Wrote long letters to Marion, who wrote back to what she called the land of Godforsake. Marion was her thread, joining her to Canada, to home.

Geoff brought food to the room. Bottled water. She went into the city and sat in cafés. She walked everywhere. The faces in the city were the same: sullen, silent, grim. Grim described everything, everyone.

She had spoken to Geoff by telephone the night he’d moved from Sarajevo to Zagreb. He’d been sitting on the steps of
the Residency
, he said, waiting for his driver to take him to the airport. Branches were snapping off trees above him in the garden. Bullets.

“Didn’t you think to go inside to wait for the driver?” she said. She’d held her breath in their kitchen, in Canada.

“No.” His voice was thin. “The bullets were higher; they were over my head.”

The two of them were invited to dinner in the old city, on one of the wooded hills of Zagreb. The general and his entire staff. The French were polite, tugging sideways at their blue berets when they saw her, shaking hands each time they met in the lobby or the bar. The general jogged each morning, accompanied by his four bodyguards, guns strapped to pouches on their backs. The dinner party was pre-arranged; several days earlier, the bodyguards had driven to the ancient hill to inspect the premises. She said to Geoff, “Isn’t it rather a giveaway, to let people know we’re coming?” But he shook his head, no. This was Zagreb, not Sarajevo, after all. Still, precautions had to be taken.

They drove into the wooded area on a Saturday night. When they stepped from the Land Rover, she heard Greek music, Theodorakis, from the front of the restaurant, the public part. Their dining room was behind: a private closed veranda, partially screened, up three wooden steps. Separate entrance. She and Geoff were last to arrive. The party, seated around a long narrow table, rose to its feet. Only a few had known she was there, living among them at the hotel. The interpreters were there, too, and office clerks, French and Belgian and Canadian officers, bodyguards and drivers. Eighteen at the table. Several languages spoken. Croatian waiters carried in tray after tray of brandy, slivovitz, red wine. Creamy cottage cheese and plates of ham and dry bread. Before the main course.

The general laughed and parried. His eyes dark. All conversation centred around him. He was used to command and control. Expected nothing else, nor did anyone, at the table. She spoke to the UN interpreters, learned their backgrounds, asked questions. Several hours had gone by when she noticed two empty chairs at the far end of the table, to her right. Moments later, the general stood, a small man. The table rose to its feet. Armed bodyguards surrounded him; two white cars with black lettering waited at the screen door. The general slipped into his vehicle; the car roared off into the night. The Land Rover followed; more bodyguards. The party was over, instantly.

“What,” she said to Geoff, “what have we just been a part of?”

The remaining few drifted towards their own white vehicles, parked along the shoulder. A soft fall night. The air was good here, in the woods. “Why were the chairs empty, at the end of the table?” she asked Geoff. “Two of the bodyguards slipped out,” he said. “Half hour earlier than everyone else. They had to check the general’s car, every inch, above and below, with mirrors, for bombs.”

She tried to think of home, of her giant shadow legs striding in the sea at sunset, of the undulating lines of migrating cormorants and geese along the shore of Prince Edward Island. If she ever got home, she would give thanks for being, for belonging in that wondrous place.