Pig: A Thriller (39 page)

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
fawning half-men for him to play with.

The whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

             
             
             
             
-- Osip Mandelstam,
Stalin
Epigram

             
Magda had taken to spending her free time sitting beside the unconscious Snow and talking to him. Talking, not crying, just talking, because she had shed too many tears watching too many friends die to have any left. She just wasn’t ready to see this one go yet and thought she had to let him know. Beside him, Schrödinger dozed lightly. Anything dangerous came by, he was ready to put it in his mouth and eat it.

             
Did Snow consider her a friend? She didn’t know. Didn’t care, because it didn’t matter. Depressives did not have friends: they had family, colleagues, acquaintances, subordinates, bosses and responsibilities. But not friends. Friends took too much effort. So it didn’t matter if Snow considered her a friend, if he would have done the same thing for her. What mattered was that she had chosen him to be her friend. One thing you learned in the camps was how to choose your friends, In the
gulag
, it was not possible to survive alone. It needed collective strength to haul each woman through, so you were careful who you shared your strength with. Get stuck with a shirker, thief or lazybones and you were done for. Anyone who stole your strength, stole your life.

             
“We live in an age where it’s possible to live anywhere,” Magda said to the silent Snow. “Especially with a job like yours. But that's not necessarily good for you, being here. Being away from where you’re supposed to be, home. That’s where you belong, you know: home. What you don't realize is that you are Canadian. It's not something you can escape from. To divorce yourself from your roots is spiritual suicide. It's like having blue eyes. Accept it. Canada demands a great deal from its people and isn’t quick to offer a lot in return, unlike some countries. France demands a lot, too, but France offers gifts: food, wine, history, architecture. Russia? Shit, forget about Russia. Canada … well, let’s just say Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures. You’re supposed to bash each other over the heads with hockey sticks. Or wrap leather straps around bull testicles, then time how long you can stay sitting on one. So you weren’t ready for what happened to you up on the Castle ridge. When the tree fell. It left you with an empty feeling. Kind of like when the popcorn bowl has nothing left but hard kernels. You’re left wondering what it would be like if only they had popped, what would it be like if you had that life with the cowgirl you were planning on. But they didn’t pop. And they won’t. And you won’t have that life with her, either. But that’s okay. Life doesn’t end with popcorn. There’s pistachios. And pork. And papayas. You can learn to enjoy them all.

             
“You know why I love living in Siberia so much? Because nothing interesting ever happens at the centre. Everything interesting is out at the edges. Sparks kick up when opposing edges meet. Sometimes hot edges fuse, creating something wild and new. I imagine it’s the same out there where you are from, the foothills, the edge of where the prairies meet the mountains. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up way too much space.”

             
Magda had to make do with the men’s room while visiting the clinic. There was a sign on the woman’s lavatory saying it was undergoing renovations and would be unavailable until it was repaired. The sign was dated several years before. Not to worry, the sign went on to reassure every one, this was just a temporal inconvenience. As if in confirmation, the clock on Snow’s bedside table mysteriously disappeared.

             
Unbeknownst to herself, Magda was right; a spark was there -- faint, barely glowing, in danger of going out altogether -- but alive nevertheless. It resided deep, far down in the depths, almost smothered in the murky, muddled whorls it was trapped in, but it was there, there in a world strange and unknown to those on the surface, creatures  bizarre and mysterious ruling there. Comfortable as it was nestled undisturbed in the dark murky depths, Magda’s words were acting as a bellows to shape and help it grow, her words, her tone, her feelings, fanning the spark, keeping it alive. It came slowly, pausing every twenty meters or so, accustoming itself again to the new depths, almost as if it were decompressing, like a diver trying to avoid the bends by not ascending too quickly. There, at the next intermediary level, it would spend weeks, days, until the spark glowed a little stronger, and it would ascend one small level higher only to rest again, fanned and kept alive by the Aeon.

             
Faintly, slowly, the spark glowed and climbed. But, still, it rose.

             
“There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from.”

             
             
             
             
             
             
             
-- Margaret Atwood,
The
Handmaid’s
Tale

             
“I see what you’re doing,” Magda told the comatose Snow, lathering his face and shaving off the latest growth of beard, the hands connected to her black, misshapen nails working just as well as any that were not deformed.  His own fingers were as black and misshapen as her own now, from the frostbite. Perhaps keeping him shaved and groomed was in compensation for letting her own hair grow wild. As her sweatered arm brushed against the rough hospital blanket, static electricity set off sparks in the dry winter air. A clock was back on this bedside table, not the one she’d placed there, but a clock nonetheless.

             
“Don’t think I don’t. Know. Cutting yourself off. Hiding in the room. Self-medicating with the vodka. It only makes sense. You think you’re giving yourself freedom. Freedom from. Freedom from responsibility, freedom from personal relationships. But what you’re forgetting is that while you’re doing that, you’re stopping yourself from freedom to. Freedom to love, to hurt, to reach out and grow. What you forgot is freedom isn’t like being hungry. You can’t be a little bit free. It’s like being pregnant. You can be a little bit hungry but you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. In order to be truly free, you have to have both freedom to and freedom from.

             
“Some people say the camps were hell. Well, they were. Some of us survived by fooling ourselves we had freedom. Freedom to pay for our sins, to pay off our crimes. Redemption. Freedom from starvation, from the temptation to cheat the State again. But we weren’t. Weren’t free. Because when it comes to freedom, you’ve got to want it all. That’s what you have to do. To let yourself out of your prison.  To want more.”

             
“Here,” Magda said, turning on an IPod she’d picked up at the Deficit Exchange Club. “Listen to this. Maybe music is what you need. Music. Corb Lund. Johnny Cash. Some tunes an Alberta country boy can appreciate. Freedom from worrying about here. Freedom to remember what makes the foothills home. Listen. Listen to the music.”

             
“You know what I think you’ve got to do?” Magda told Snow after the music was finished. “Find your own perogy. You know, the dumpling where you take some dough and wrap it around a treat like some potatoes or sauerkraut or cottage cheese.” Schrödinger woke up long enough to look at her the way George Bush looked at broccoli. It didn’t sound like anything he’d want to put in his mouth and eat. “I’m just saying he needs to find something to wrap himself around and make it his own,” Magda told the cat. “Swallow it whole and ingest it until it’s a part of you. You?” she said, turning to Snow. “Your perogy is there, in Canada, not here. Near where you lost it. Up on that mountain ridge with the cow girl. Playing hockey and making love and getting fat. Go back there and find your world with beginner’s eyes: expect nothing, look at life without pre-suppositions, fresh and full of excitement like the first time. If I lose you, so what? Heisenberg always said that information in the quantum world is gained somewhere only by losing it someplace else. Gaining something in one world, impoverishes it in a parallel universe.