Black Bird (21 page)

Although Woland had taken out ads in the papers, invited all the anglo critics, phoned and faxed all the media, and tried to drum up as much publicity as possible, as usual only a handful of people showed up for the premiere. The play got mixed but unenthusiastic reviews, and it seemed as if they’d all go home at the end of the week and forget all about it. For Jean-Baptiste it was a disappointment, but he wasn’t happy with the final script anyway and felt the production had been uninspired. He consoled himself with feeling that at least he’d started. At least one production was done. He’d been written up in the papers even if only lukewarmly, and from now on he could refer to this experience as granting him some kind of entree into the world of the arts. An item on the resumé, if nothing else.

He did get invited, on the strength of it, to read some poetry at a monthly gathering in a bar on St-Laurent; and that was all the gravy he could really expect, he told himself. The play had led to something else. This second item, no matter how insignificant, also counted. He saw before him an endless succession of small steps leading off into a murky and ill-defined distance. But at least there was a path.

And then, on a slow week, noticing that the author’s name was in fact French, the drama critic of the French-language daily
L’Obligation
came to see the Thursday evening show. His review was printed in the Friday edition and that evening the crowd was doubled. Woland was pleased; if this meant they could expect even a half-house on Saturday,
anything at all on the Sunday shows would come near the mark of at least covering expenses. He was jubilant before the performance that night, springing around backstage and waving his walking stick in the air.

The cast was tired, had been disillusioned all week before near empty houses. They were fed up with the moody, irritable Woland himself, and they were weary of a play which through its failure with the public had let them down.

But something happened that night. The audience was charged; many had come not because the latest review pronounced it good, but because it hinted at something scandalous. Throughout the first act there was a smattering of laughter, and the cast was energized: they were being liked. Act two began to sing on its own, and the entrances and exits were crisp and sharp. The audience leaned forward with a new appreciation. There was a tension onstage, something happening between those people up there, and what were they going to do?

For the first time, the lines were delivered in the passion with which they had been written. The actors began to hear the words coming from their own mouths. Suddenly an offhand sarcastic remark took on a new significance, and when the protagonist turned away from the other actors to look out over the audience, the gesture was now full of import, the play was carried off in a new direction.

When the curtain rang down on act two, the audience realized with a start they were sitting in a
theatre, and they had been enthralled. Their hands came together in true appreciation, and behind the curtain, the flushed actors could hear a woman in the first row say to her companion, “My God, what do you think’s going to happen?”

The audience waited nervously for the denouement; the actors breathlessly changed costumes and shifted some furniture about onstage. Woland was jubilant. “This is the night. This is it.”

The curtain rose on a hushed expectation. The protagonist entered, but then ran off left. No one cleared their throat; no one shifted in their seat. The actors began a slow dance towards the climax of the play, and though the words were coming from their throats by rote, they shared the physical tension of the audience and told themselves, under the lines they were delivering, Breathe slowly, relax your muscles. And even they began to wonder where exactly the play was going. Was this a tragedy they were performing? Yes, there was a heightened emotion present. But was it mere melodrama, would it all be burst by some unexpected comedy lurking somewhere in the wings? An actor heard his cue and moved about the stage in a predefined sequence, speaking his lines all the while, and wondered: have I just said that?

Suddenly, a wailing broke out. The noises offstage rose to a thunderous crescendo. The protagonist lowered her gaze from the heavens. Her face took on a look of dread as a horrible certainty gripped her, like a blow from an uncertain and frightening world. A turd fell to the stage. Another, beside her. As the
lights faded, more fell, in increasing numbers as the final curtain rang down.

Half the audience rose spontaneously and began the applause.

But then, as the curtain rose again for the cast to take their bows, began a lowing as if of cattle. By the time the star of the show stepped to the centre of the stage, it was clearly booing.

It grew. Nervously the cast took their bows, looking with puzzlement into the stalls. What had happened?

The chorus of booing increased. A few brave souls were still applauding, trying to win the day for their approval, but it was no use. The disaffected had won the field. Many were leaning forward into their disparagement, cupping their hands around their mouths like funnels for the noise: BOOOO!

They began to throw their programs back up to the stage; some were torn and merely thrown in the air. An argument broke out in the lobby, but the critics were stronger, louder, more vehement than the supporters.

Distraught, the cast sat backstage and wondered: What went wrong? But Woland was still happy. In fact, he was ecstatic, for now, once word of this got around, they’d surely sell out the remaining performances.

And they did. They sold out the theatre for Saturday, Sunday matinee and evening. And each time, nothing but booing and catcalling, with garbage of all sorts thrown to the stage. Which of course only disrupted the actors, who naturally turned in terrible performances. There was still laughter, but it was no longer innocent: it was the punishing laughter of derision.

“Don’t look so glum, Jean-Baptiste,” said Woland. “Your name is made!”

Who began the booing? Marie.

Marie had been impressed with the reaction her brother’s play had generated in their family. When they returned that first evening none of them would really tell her much of what they’d seen. Father seemed struggling to contain his anger, his face red and pursed when he thought of the play, and could only bring himself to erupt with, “He’s betrayed us.”

Aline was still puffy-eyed and began weeping anew as she climbed the stairs. “It’s not that he said these things,” she said. “It’s that they’re true.” And she blew her nose.

Grandfather shrugged and said, “The little bastard used us. I hope he makes some money.” And he strode down the hall to the kitchen, lighting a cigarette.

Mother was the single remaining member of his family with whom Jean-Baptiste was on speaking terms—and she slept.

What, Marie thought, could be in this play?

She laughed at the destruction of the cross in act one; she assented to the reality of the coming physical struggle in act two; she was offended by the existential epiphany, the realization that the struggle for ideals was as corrupt, hollow and egotistical as any revolution—Russian, French, American; but she was enraged, furious, livid, by the denouement: the FLQ betrayed their own ancestors and sold their souls to the devil.

Marie booed.

She informed her colleagues. Incredulous upon seeing that what she’d told them was true, it was they who’d instigated the booing that first night.

And the placard-carrying protests the second.

On that Sunday morning, his birthday, Jean-Baptiste sat waiting in silence with his mother. As one by one the family moved about the house without making any overture to him, he gave up anticipating any presents. He was no happier than the audiences had been about his play, but he went to the theatre anyway, since he was not welcome at home. Sent to Coventry.

Still, “This is your day, my boy,” announced Woland. “Your name day. It’s your birthday as well, isn’t it? Well, I have a present for you: I’m extending the run. Today’s performance will not be the last.”

“But the crowd boos every night. They throw things at the actors.”

“Awh, the actors can take it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“The theatre has been full for days. Packed. We’re sold out both shows today, and the phone keeps ringing. Tomorrow we’ll be dark, but we’ll do at least another full week. Maybe longer.”

Jean-Baptiste was angry. “But they’re only coming to boo.”

“Let them. If they’re paying for the tickets, let them boo. Remember, Molière was booed. Jarry,
Cocteau, Sartre. You’re in good company. We’d be crazy to close the show. What a splendid day.”

St-Jean-Baptiste Day was always a time of high nationalist sentiment. During the bright afternoon’s cheery parade, members of Marie’s cell worked the crowds thronging the parade route on rue St-Denis, handing out denunciations of her brother’s play—and pointing out how conveniently located the dilapidated theatre was, mere blocks away on St-Laurent.

And so with enough heat, enough beer and enough bravado generated by a flag-waving agent provocateur, a small delegation of louts spontaneously dispatched itself from the main route, detoured to the Sunday matinee and stormed the theatre in the middle of act two.

They broke windows out front and burst through the door shouting and spilling beer. A puzzled audience looked from the stage, where a bastion was being stormed by a single crawling anglophone with a white flag, to these boisterous intruders and wondered if this were all part of the performance.

But when the gatecrashers dealt some unlucky audience members a few quick and painful blows, fights began to break out, and the actors all fled in terror. Woland called the police and the sirens sent the Patriotes running. But by this time a few were laid out with injuries sustained in the attack, and others were drunk enough to be easy even for Montreal police to run down.

Only Marie escaped.

The ugliness and humiliation of having her friends arrested on their own national holiday, while celebrating their ideals and dreams, was simply too great an irritation for Marie to endure. To have been chastised and put down by their own police force, their own brothers! It was unspeakable. They were being suppressed openly now, for the crime of clamouring for their own freedoms, for their own rights.

It was a bitter pill for Marie to swallow, that her brother was so firmly lined up on the other side—les autres—even though he denied it. It was infuriating that it was her real brothers—her brothers-in-arms—who’d been arrested.

She was furious; she doubled over in a cramp; she bled into the toilet. Our blood is being flushed away, into the toilet, she thought. Something must be done.

“It’s clearly a fantasy,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Can’t anyone see that?”

“Ah, you’ve touched a nerve, my boy,” said Woland. “Stick with me and I’ll make you famous.”

“God, you’re making me infamous. Half of what my family objects to wasn’t even in my play when I wrote it. If this is fame, you can have it.”

“How about wealth?” asked Woland.

Hubert lay in a private operating theatre surrounded by machines to which he was connected by tubing and wiring. His chest rose and fell. Now he had a new set
of lungs which breathed by themselves. His left hand grasped the rail of the hospital bed like a baby’s.

Just how does the heart connect to the brain? wondered Dr. Cameron Hyde. Is it a real, physical connection? Does this connection get stronger or weaker with age? Is this connection itself the answer to the search, the seat of the soul?

Could there be a soul at all? Does it need to occupy a space? If you lose, say, a finger, do you lose a part of your soul?

He carried the shuddering lump of meat in gloved hands to the operating table. Hubert’s chest was held open by a device like an animal trap in reverse: a rib spreader. Hubert was breathing but he knew it not. And he was thinking, after a fashion, but with so much of his original brain gone, his synapses pulsed at the ends of broken chains like water pouring from the exposed pipes of a ruined building after an earthquake: pointlessly, wastefully.

Never again would he be able to close an argument, to wrap up a discussion, to come full circle and conclude a thesis, even to himself. But if the life of the mind was no longer to be his, he would have something perhaps more important. Soon he would smile at children, be generous to the elderly and frail, be patient with the lonely and comforting to the distressed.

Hubert was getting a new heart.

Angus felt scattered. It wasn’t right to be bodiless: he couldn’t
do
anything.

He suspected Grace knew he was there. She kept looking at him, clacking her beak and flying right at him. And out the other side, it seemed. Somehow it felt as if she were trying to get his attention, but when he responded she’d just ignore him, like the others. He tried to follow her down the hall but she sailed away as if she were trying to outrun him. If only he had wings, like hers; it must be nice to fly. He should have flown when he had the chance, he should have taken a vacation in some other country just for the excuse. He’d never get a chance now. The closest he’d ever got to flying was a vague memory, almost a dream, of a split second in which, as his head sailed into the sky, his torso tumbled into the street and his arms and legs ran off in four directions. He shook it off. He wanted to run that one in reverse, collect up those scattered parts of himself and take control once more, be able to act, wake his daughter, do anything at all.

The debacle at the theatre raised the controversy over the play from a sidelight on the entertainment pages to a major news story. “New Meaning to Jean-Baptiste Day,” went the headline. As a result, Jean-Baptiste’s poetry reading in a small café was mobbed. Nationalists came out in force to continue the denunciations, and Anglos flocked in to support their shrinking culture.

Although he was nervous and decidedly did not like the kind of attention he was getting, still Jean-Baptiste had the foresight to bring along some of his
backlog of poetry chapbooks, in the unlikely event that he might sell a few. Originally he was to be only one of several people reading, but as the crowd refused to be silent for the other poets, they all skulked from the stage one by one and stood fuming by as Jean-Baptiste, formerly a totally unknown element in their coterie, commanded all the attention. At the bar they nursed their wounded egos and whispered to each other their scathing criticisms of this juvenile’s infantile poetry.