Radio Belly Page 11

  LENA DRIVES THROUGH the night listening to a tribute show for a maritime folk legend on the CBC. Normally she wouldn’t tolerate this sort of thing but she’s trying to behave like a Great Canadian. Plus, all these ballads about lonely lighthouses and widows left ashore seem appropriate somehow. She too feels shipwrecked and motherless. Come to think of it, she feels downright seasick—nauseous and woozy in the knees.

  Interspersed with the songs are interviews. Oh, but he sure did know a song for every occasion, the man’s friends say. They sound almost Irish with their swollen vowels and pointy Ts. Oh, but there wasn’t time to write ’em all down, he was gone so fast.

  This idea of missed moments and lost songs seems to Lena like the saddest thing in the world and soon she is having one of those good, hearty CBC cries—the kind of cry that doesn’t really count because it’s wholesome and patriotic, and besides she’s in her car where no one can see. She changes the station again and then again, but because of Canadian Content Rules, it seems they’re all playing Neil Young at this late hour: sad songs about Northern Ontario, about low moons and the endless search for a heart of gold. She knows it’s dangerous to think about one’s mother while driving down the highway listening to Neil Young, so she snaps the radio off. But in that special silence that comes after Neil Young, she can’t stop thinking that she too has lived her whole life in pursuit—not of golden hearts, but of the old country, her own lost song.

  Lena has only ever been able to remember the past as a kind of fever dream—a smear of heat and colour at the outer edges of thought. She knows they escaped a war and were chased through the mountains. She remembers trudging through the night and fear as a feeling in the knees, but as soon as she tries to latch onto facts—who was chasing them and why—her memory yawns, dark and wide.

  Lena longed for the old country the way any child would long for something half remembered. She spent years begging Ama to talk about it, but there was only one story she was ever willing to share. Even then, it wasn’t really intended for Lena, but was a kind of performance piece Ama liked to put on for her Canadian friends.

  “My Lena was born in a cave, in mountains, in middle of war,” Ama would begin.

  Lena was born fist-first and all at once, the story went, and when she landed on the cave floor she opened her eyes and smiled. The women in the cave crowded around, declaring her a “perfect April potato,” which in that part of the world was the highest compliment for both people and potatoes. But then, a moment later, Lena roared and the women had to reinterpret the signs.

  “Two things they saw,” Ama would say, holding up her fingers for effect. “One: she would be stubborn, always. And two: we would live through war.” Here her friends would nod—Yes, yes, Lena the stubborn. Lena the potato.

  “She was perfect war baby,” Ama would continue, “but heavy like bowling ball.” According to the story, she’d had to venture down into the nearest town to get a special carrier made by a man who normally made horse saddles. She’d had to give two eggs, a lump of bread and her last scrap of decency for that carrier but it was worth it because it meant she could walk through the night with Lena sleeping on her back.

  “We walked straight out of war,” Ama would finish up cheerfully, “and into brand new life.”

  At this point whoever Ama was telling the story to would sigh and fold their hands in their lap. Canadians loved stories of distant wars and narrow escapes. But Lena was never satisfied.

  “You missed the best part,” she would interrupt. “How long did we walk for? And to where? And why was I so heavy?” She imagined the worst—milk heavy with mercury, shrapnel-laden potatoes, herself as an infant teething on rocks.

  “Stubborn, no?” Ama would say to her friends and then they’d laugh and move off to another part of the house.

  CROSSING INTO QUEBEC at dawn, Lena feels queasy and hungry at once. Is this grief, she wonders, or denial? Her tires tha-wump, tha-wump over the rutted highway. Good old Quebec, she thinks, Canada’s collective dream of another time and place. Here was a part of Canada that longed for the old world, a place that didn’t fix its roads and wasn’t afraid to look back. The province’s motto, Je me souviens, stares out at her from every licence plate. It occurs to her that Quebec is the mother she always wanted: one foot in the future, one foot in the past. Not like Ama. If Ama had a motto it would be Forget, Forget, Forget.

  Old world, new world: it was a constant source of tension between Lena and Ama. As a kid, when Lena brought home war documentaries and maps of Eastern Europe, when she asked where they were from and why they had left and who they had left behind, Ama would say, “Never mind old country.” She would clench her fists and turn red in the face. Then, like a switch being flipped, she would glom onto the future. “Tell me, when is senior prom?” she would say, brightly. “What will you wear?”

  “This is Canada,” Lena would explain. “We don’t do prom here.”

  “But how do the girls meet the boys?” Ama would ask. “You must have Canadian cheerleading? You must have Canadian frat party?” Everything Ama knew about Canadian life, she’d learned from American TV.

  Lena was never Canadian or American enough for Ama. In grade school, Ama started pressuring her to hang out with the Jennifers and Susans and Christines from her class, but Lena refused. She always felt on the wrong side of something vast and whooshing around these girls, something she couldn’t quite place: History? Mystery? Pain?

  She dressed like an immigrant and had dinner-smelling clothes. They had sisters and fathers, pierced ears, pink bedrooms.

  She liked world news and war documentaries. They liked boys.

  She had a heavyweight past full of shrapnel and vague trauma. They were jazz dancers and gymnasts, bird-boned, with hearts like kites.

  By high school it was all-out war. “How you find Canadian boyfriend looking like that?” Ama would say over breakfast. Then she would stand guard at the front door shouting, “More makeup!” and “Stuff bra!” and “Make bigger your hair!” When Ama started reading the fortunes of all the popular girls from Lena’s school, Lena took an after-school job at the local museum. When Ama refused to speak the old language, Lena refused to speak English. When Ama dressed like a teenager, wearing dangly earrings and shiny shirts, Lena dressed like Ama, wearing her old skirts and clogs. They moved through the apartment in icy silence. That is, until the day Lena decided to follow Ama room to room, singing questions about her father to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” That was when Ama finally decided she’d had enough. She turned on Lena and smacked her halfway across the room, hissing, “Past is past,” in such a way that Lena finally got the message: with Ama the past was—would always be—off limits.

  For two years after Lena moved away to university she avoided Ama’s calls. It wasn’t until her third year, when she started volunteering at a refugee centre and met so many others who were desperate to forget the past that she started speaking to Ama again. But by then Ama had grown soft and confused, occasionally mistaking Lena for her clients or for television characters. By then it was too late.

  Lena bites her lip, turns the radio on and up. It’s Canadian Content again: Neil singing: “Old man look at my life...” She turns it off.

  No, she thinks, looking out at all the marshmallowy drifts of snow lit up pink and gold in the morning light, there is absolutely no way Ama—or anyone in her position—would go back. It’s a code among refugees: no back, only forward.

  She spends a few minutes trying to think of all the friendly places Ama might have wandered off to—a spa? the circus? The bedding department at the Bay?—then calls Mrs. Winnow to explain the code of refugees, and to make a few suggestions about where else she might look.

  LENA IS SOMEWHERE outside of Montreal, sitting at a diner known for its upside-down hamburgers when she gets the call.

  “And where are you now?” Ama starts.


  Lena is so excited she nearly drops the phone. “Montreal,” she says. She is about to describe the concept of the upside-down burger, when she catches herself. She should be hurling questions, demanding answers. No, she should be soft. No, firm.

  “No, Ama,” she says, settling on stern. “Where are you?” She is yelling, just a little.

  “Djurdjevik,” Ama says. “Can you believe?” The line is full of loud air, as if she’s calling from a distant planet.

  “Durda-what?” Lena searches her purse for a pen, then stops. “What is that, a mall? How do you spell that?”

  “Is hot here,” Ama says. She is giddy, like a little girl using a tin-can phone. “And my old friends are here.”

  “You must be mistaken, Ama,” Lena says. “Are you inside? Are you at a rec centre or a bus station? Tell me what you see.”

  “I see chickens,” Ama says. “And donkeys. I see the woman setting up for market and the old man spitting—”

  Everyone must be right about the dementia, Lena thinks. Ama must be in a mall. She must be seeing reindeer and Santa and his elves.

  “No, Ama,” Lena interrupts, speaking in a tone usually reserved for toddlers and bad puppies. “None of that’s real. Now, I need you to focus and tell me where you are.”

  A long echoey silence in which Lena tries to decipher the background noises on Ama’s end of the line. She hears what could be a rooster, or a cell phone, what could be a cowbell or an ATM machine, distant music or possibly muzak. Then, much closer, a soft pop like a dropped egg—something fragile burst open—and, for the first time Lena can remember, Ama is speaking the old language. Suddenly she is eloquent, and Lena is struggling to keep up.

  In a low, bluesy growl Ama starts to tell a story of a day, long ago, when soldiers were spotted coming down the village road, how the women had to rush around hiding the children up trees and under beds and in the chicken coop.

  Lena is briefly elated until she remembers this is no time for stories, even if she has waited her whole life. “Ama,” she interrupts, “do you see that friendly man with the red suit and the white beard? Can you hand him the phone?” But Ama pushes on. When the soldiers got to town, she says, they gathered all the women, tied them to the trees and shot their guns until, one by one, the children emerged.

  Lena feels an old familiar fluttering in the knees—fear, alive in the body. “What did they do with them?” she asks. The question flies from her mouth, a bat from a cave.

  Another long pause. Ama says something about running in circles, about guns and dust, but in the middle she breaks into a rumbling cough. Something swells in Lena—a memory of how, those first weeks in Canada, Ama would curl up with her at night, whispering fairy tales. There was one about a woman who waited so long for her husband to come back from the war, she turned to stone—or was it a statue? And there was another about children—a whole village of them—who vanished one day in a puff of smoke.

  “The children. All dead,” Ama says, still wheezy from coughing.

  “And the women?” Lena asks. Another dark, flying question.

  They were tied to the trees for days, Ama says. And then, finally, the men made them crawl back to their houses on all fours, with ropes around their necks.

  “Like dogs,” Ama says, switching to English and then the line breaks up and dies.

  Lena closes her phone, looks down at her upside-down burger, which must have arrived at some point during the conversation and is, it turns out, just a regular burger with the top and bottom buns reversed. Whatever swelled in her a moment ago now bursts. She turns quickly and vomits into her purse.

  LENA DRIVES INTO Ontario searching her memory for the day Ama spoke of, but it’s no use. She remembers the long walks at night, huddling around low fires, hiding beneath Ama’s skirts, but no soldiers, no guns. She searches her soul for a village of ghosts, but comes up empty. Not one.

  Still, she must’ve been in the village that day, she thinks. Why else would Ama tell the story now? Why else would her body feel like wet concrete, her skin like rubber, her joints like they’ve made a secret deal with old age? Her body must know what her mind can’t comprehend. Maybe she hid under the floorboards the way children are always doing in the movies. Maybe she and Ama were the only two to escape and that’s why Ama never wanted to talk about it. Maybe she really did eat shrapnel-laden potatoes.

  She thinks of the village from Ama’s story and wonders what happened to the women once they were taken back to their houses. Then all the small hairs of her arms stand at attention as she recalls another fairy tale Ama told about a village of women who turned into a pack of rabid dogs overnight.

  She switches on the radio. On the CBC, a program about a native tribe up north. There’s nothing written down, no alphabet, and the youngest person to speak the language is eighty-six. An old woman speaks in a clucking accent: “When I die, the language will be lost.”

  Lena turns the radio off. What is it with the CBC and these stories of loss? What is it with Canadians and history? They hunger for it but, in the end, it’s never glamorous enough. They want the Alamo and Graceland, not burls and Indians.

  When she was new to this country, Lena was constantly asking herself, “Is this what it means to be Canadian? Is this?” She would pick the most Canadian girl in the room and study her, memorizing how to be: friendly but distant; jokey but sad; humble on the outside, proud on the inside. Was it as easy as acting like a boy but dressing like a girl? Was it a combination of talking a lot and apologizing often? Years later, when she still couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that made these girls more Canadian than her, she decided it didn’t have anything to do with anything. She decided you just had to be born here and pretend it mattered.

  But now, having spent the day driving through the pretty lake-view parts of Ontario and the crusty moonscape parts and the car lot/strip mall parts; having seen so much Ontario she has had to re-evaluate her concept of the universe, her place in it, the meaning of things, she’s starting to think maybe this place does affect people. All that driving and yet, when she finally pulls over at a motel next to the highway she finds she is still—still!—in Ontario.

  IT’S ONLY ONCE she’s paid for her room that Lena notices the hotel has been taken over by some sort of youth leadership summit. Everywhere she looks, future leaders are roaming the hallways in neon shirts. In the lobby she comes across a group trying to build an elaborate bridge using toothpicks and bubble gum. By the elevator another group is lisping softly about physics and schisms and time-space continuums.

  Lena is plodding down the hall, feeling like the woman from Ama’s story, like a thousand-pound statue of herself, when she gets stopped by two adults with clipboards and headsets.

  “Say now, aren’t you that museum lady?” the woman asks.

  “Actually, there is no more ‘Museum—’” Lena starts.

  “It is!” the man points. “It’s you!”

  Ben and Jill introduce themselves as fifth-grade teachers, but Lena can already tell. They’re all amped up like fifth-grade teachers and are wondering if she would be willing to give her “Shoebox Museum” talk. They practically beg so Lena does what any Great Canadian would.

  “DID YOU KNOW that long ago the first museums were started by kings and queens?” Lena asks a room full of fifth-graders later that evening.

  The students don’t respond but Ben and Jill give her a pair of perfectly synchronized thumbs-up from the back of the room.

  “Back then you either had to be very wealthy or very lucky to enter a museum,” Lena continues. “But nowadays we can all go to museums and for a very reasonable price too!”

  The students stare blankly at her or past her, it’s hard to say.

  She tells them museums were once called Cabinets of Curiosity! Cabinets of Wonder! Memory Theatres! “Think about
that,” she says, “Memory! Theatre!” Here she uses something like jazz hands to generate excitement.

  But these future leaders are impervious to jazz hands. They don’t even flinch.

  Lena tells them that museums are humanity’s best defence against grief and loss and the cruel passage of time, that without museums we can’t have a truly tactile experience of our past, and without experiencing our past we can’t possibly know who we are, we can’t possibly build a future. Her voice wobbles, just a little.

  The kids hang their heads in shame or boredom, she can’t say.

  “Even a website is a kind of museum!” she says, brightening. “Even Facebook, in a way!”

  Here, finally, the kids look up.

  Lena quickly pulls out the “specialty” items she’s ex-cavated from the back of her trunk for this, her final appearance as the “Museum Lady.” First, an assortment of kidney stones in a velvet case—some smooth as beach rock, some bumpy as coral, some brightly swirled like a glass marble, or with intricate floral patterns. Next, she brings out a collection of monkey skulls, one inside another, smaller and smaller, like nesting dolls, and says that there’s no explanation for how they got that way. She pulls out the jaw of a shark, a brain in a bottle and an unidentifiable petrified sea creature—half turtle, half seahorse.

  Just like Lena suspected, the kids are fascinated. They’re up out of their seats to gawk at the kidney stones. They rattle the monkey skulls and shake the brain in the bottle. They take turns placing the shark jaw over their heads.

  Ben and Jill look at each other with alarm.

  Standing at their centre, Lena gestures for the kids to pull into a tight huddle and then asks how many have visited a museum this year. She gets the usual spray of hands. She asks which museums and gets the usual answers: the Wax Museum, Science World, Miniature World, Butterfly World. She instructs them that wax can’t teach us anything about the past, that butterflies belong in parks and that they should be deeply suspicious of any place claiming to be a “World.” She bangs her fist on the table top, but not in a frightening way.