Diary of Interrupted Days (16 page)

“What is that?” Boris said.

He was not talking about the ingredient. He was trying to hear the sound seeping through the door. Sara, too, now heard laughter in the corridor. But there was no knocking at their door. Boris waved his hand and poured some wine.

“I read an article this morning in the
Star,”
Boris said.

“It said that inflation in Belgrade is now over seventy million per cent.”

“You were in the library?”

“I was trying to find something about arts funding in Canada. There’s a book about it, but it was out, so I took something about writing résumés.”

“Why would you need advice—?”

Sounds in the corridor again. Boris went to the door, looked through the peephole, then returned to his chair.

“They recommend one page if possible, two maximum.”

They now ate in silence. The footsteps in the corridor came and went, muffled by the sound of the news. There was no knocking at the door. A short report about the siege of Sarajevo.

“What do they think they’re doing?” Sara said.

“Maybe we should put a pumpkin in front of our door,” Boris said.

“What is the purpose of cutting people off?”

“Of course, they don’t know that we want them to visit.”

A loud commercial came on and Boris stood up to find the remote. He zapped until he found a
Seinfeld
repeat. Sara removed her plate, took a bunch of grapes, and sat on the sofa, folding her legs to the side. Boris rummaged through the fridge.

“What are you looking for?” she said, picking at the grapes.

“I’m trying to find something that we might use instead of a pumpkin. You haven’t heard of anything, have you?”

“No, the girls at work are mostly immigrants, they don’t know much about Halloween either.”

Boris came and sat next to her. He decided to light a cigarette and stood up again to get the ashtray. On his way back, he checked the peephole. When the commercials came on again, Boris muted the TV.

“Strange how I find this show funny, but not to laugh out loud,” Sara said.

“Then it isn’t funny,” Boris said.

“No, it is. But I am laughing on the inside.”

“You mean you’re laughing at internal jokes?”

“No, inside me. Don’t you have that? Laughing inside?”

“Oh. Yes, with Woody Allen.”

“See.”

They watched in silence as father and son fought over a hamburger. A dog appeared behind a garage and stole the food.
Seinfeld
came back on and Boris hit the sound button.

Around ten, he said, “Let’s go to Church Street—they have some sort of carnival.”

In the elevator with them were a skeleton, a Hun, two porno nuns, and something that could have been a woman or a man, wearing an enormous dildo and two rubber breasts the size of watermelons, with long hair that looked natural and large hands tattooed with Portuguese.

By unspoken agreement they sat on the wooden bench next to the entrance to see who else came out. Boris lit a cigarette and jokingly offered it to Sara. She took it.

“Aren’t people supposed to start smoking when they’re nervous?” he said.

“Probably.”

“Are you nervous?”

“I feel good, B. If I smoke it now, I won’t get hooked.”

Boris hugged her, smiling.

Out the front door came a group of sexy female pirates, a shapely leg protruding through the cloak on one, bare arms on another, a very low cut jacket on the third. They laughed and hugged as they turned right towards Church Street. Almost immediately afterwards came a few Brazilian transvestites dressed like sylphs. A staccato of giggling as they followed the first group. A Roman soldier came next, then Robin Hood and his Merry Men with corn and sausages in their pants, then a nun who wore a cross made of two large phalluses. All of them were laughing, everyone hurrying to get to Church, to find their company, to model their night identities.

“Let’s dress up as Canadians and go,” Boris said.

He felt Sara’s shoulders tremble almost imperceptibly. By the light of the street lamp above them he saw that her cheeks were shiny. He opened his mouth to ask, then changed his mind, and hugged her tight.

“But I’m laughing on the inside,” Sara said.

Sara was supposed to come home that day around two, and Boris decided to take a walk to his favourite delicatessen and get something nice for lunch.

He came to the corner of Isabella and Church, then, on a whim, crossed Church Street, walked a few blocks east, then south on Sherbourne, and returned by Wellesley Street to the store. It was a Friday, cold but sunny, and he felt a glow envelop him, making him light and bearable. Watching gay couples around him walking hand in hand, something unimaginable where he came from, he suddenly felt that he really had crossed the ocean, that he had
arrived—whatever that meant—and he could hardly wait to share this feeling with Sara.

He bought a bag of groceries, and took the long way back home. Instead of going north, towards his street, he walked west, towards Yonge.

If he told someone in Belgrade that he was elated by watching men holding hands on the streets, they would think he had become gay. If he wrote a letter, now, to a friend back there, what would he write? He realized it would have to be a group of scenes, not a narrative. A scene of their first encounter with the city. A scene in
IKEA.
Another in a huge supermarket. A Yorkville scene. The Halloween scene, which was maybe even an act. All written as a movie script. Exterior. Day. Busy corner in an upscale neighbourhood. Interior. Night. Thoughts flapping in all directions, searching for ways to keep his head above water.

There is no narrative of exile. There are poems of exile, long successions of short verses, plenty of metaphors, abbreviations, aberrations, abeyances. Exile is not transferable. It is a chopped-up existence. Exiles live their days as a series of small coloured stones whose final order is never fully revealed to them. The mosaic they create in the end will be visible only to their descendants.

Against the wall of a clothing boutique, a rectangular bundle of paper caught his attention. He picked it up. He was still not entirely familiar with Canadian banknotes, but it does not take much to recognize money on the street.

Judging by the colour, these banknotes were not small denominations. To his surprise, he was not happy. Why did it have to be him to find the money when so many people
had passed by? Because he kept staring at the sidewalk in front of him like an old man. Immigrants and the old: exiles from life. Frail, vulnerable, futureless. All his life he had looked people straight in the eyes, but here he had suddenly stopped. You don’t have to carry hellos with you. But hellos are anchors. They keep you glued to the ground. With nobody who was familiar to greet, he had cut off all eye contact, hacking through faces straight to the asphalt beneath him. The asphalt was the same in Belgrade, Amsterdam, London, Prague, Barcelona. Sometimes more spittle, sometimes less, sometimes more trash, sometimes less ammonia—it was the same map of the same dance steps. The same silent music.

This was his present—when you do not look at faces but at sidewalks, when you are searching for a recognizable sound, when people are around you but you are not among them. This was why he was excited about finding the money, but not happy.

He went into a store that sold art materials to buy a few sheets of drawing paper. At the cashier, he took out the money and unfolded it. Three bills of twenty dollars each. He paid, took his paper, and walked out. As he was putting the money back in his pocket, he let a fiver fall on the sidewalk. He crossed the street to a coffee shop, bought himself an espresso, and found a chair in the window facing the art store.

After almost an hour, a man picked up the money. Boris hurried after him.

“Excuse me, do you have a minute? I saw you find that money, and I thought you must be a newcomer like me, and—”

“Fuck off, faggot,” the man said, raising his middle finger.

Sara stood by the store window, looking out. It was Tuesday, mid-November. The air was crisp. The low sun shone on the buildings across the street, and Yonge was already filling up with the rush-hour crowd, although it was only several minutes past three. Tucked away behind several cameras on display and cardboard ads for new models, she was studying the faces of the passersby. From time to time she recognized Slavic features, and a few people, she thought, might even be Serbs.

A customer entered, but she judged him to be a browser and let another clerk take over. She had already sold a few expensive cameras that afternoon, mostly to American tourists, and she was content with her earnings for the day.

The man left and the two other clerks started chatting. Sara continued to watch the street. One or two faces, she thought, were types easily found here and everywhere, but some were not. She remembered the doppelgänger legend, but that was too ominous, too scary for her taste. This was something else: perhaps everyone had their twin somewhere far away, and between them there was a balance of pleasure, an equilibrium of success, of riches, of health. Sitting on the same see-saw, on opposite sides of the world, the twins go up and down, down and up, one feeling good, the other one miserable with the flu, one struggling to buy
food, the other renovating a villa in Tuscany. One losing a loved one, the other discovering that she is pregnant. With someone who was never there, a total stranger, past before ever becoming present.

Luz entered the store like a moving shadow, in a long black coat, a dark hat, and black boots. She nodded to the other girls, who nodded back, and went straight upstairs to her husband’s office. Sara left her position by the window and went to the cage. She filled the electric kettle with fresh water and pressed the button.

Luz came in.

“Are you in here all the time, or do you work sometimes?”

“I’m making you some tea,” Sara said.

Luz took off her coat and hat and threw them towards the coat rack in the corner. She missed and they ended up in a heap on the floor. Sara hung them up. When she turned around, Luz was on the couch, her hands covering her face. Sara poured the tea into two cups and sat by Luz, holding them. For a minute or two, nothing happened. Then, slowly, Luz extended her hand and took a cup. She did not try to hide the tears.

“Not a good day?”

They drank tea in silence.

“What happened?”

“I went to the doctor. He increased my dose.”

Silence, again.

“Have you ever fainted?” Luz asked.

“Once, when I was sixteen. I forgot to have breakfast. And lunch. I was in love.”

“Did the world spin around you?”

“It did. It went fast.”

“You are lucky, then. It never spun around me. I was always in the wrong place, never in the centre. I am a moon, Sara. I orbit this world. When you find me on the couch, that’s what it is: I will fall off if I do not lie down.”

Pause.

“How long have you been here?” Sara asked.

“Sixteen years. Some people emigrate and are fine in a year, some are never fine. You don’t fit. You’re bent and the new space was made for straight, for upright.”

“I feel bent,” Sara said.

“All new immigrants do. Look at them. They have fear in their eyes. They are trying to keep their balance. They think they will fall if they straighten up. Even when they faint, the world does not revolve around them.”

Luz started crying again in complete silence, without sobbing, without sighs, without covering her face. Sara put her cup on the floor and hugged her without thinking.

She is an expert at crying, Sara thought. A tear rolled down Sara’s cheek, too, stealthily. Another followed. Is she crying because of Luz? Impossible. Another tear.

“Are you afraid of returning home?” Luz asked quietly.

“I just came here, I’m not even thinking about returning.”

“That fear—that is your prison. Once you emigrate, you start thinking that returning home would mean defeat. But if you become locked inside that, you will accept anything that life throws your way.”

“When you fly across half the world,” Sara said, “you expect your troubles to stay behind to dry up and die. But
they arrive before you, they make your bed, they await you in your mirror.”

“I used to be a writer back in Brazil,” Luz said. “I published two books before I came to Canada. Two good books. And then my mind just snapped. As if the move was just too much. You know—when too much happens to you, you can’t write anymore. Your drain is plugged—your dirty water is drowning you. If I don’t take my pills, I have horrible visions. People are dying in my head, my closest friends, people are being disfigured, I do it to them. I can’t write about what I see, Sara, because I don’t want to pass it on to anyone. And I can’t go back to Brazil like this. It would feel like a defeat.”