Ragged Company (27 page)

“When I’m in the library, surrounded by all those volumes, all the stacks, I feel like I’m in the company of a great many friends. Friends who never leave and friends who are always there when you need them to offer comfort and warmth. I feel anchored there,” she said.

She’d read about the Romany gypsies. Her mother had suggested that somewhere along her lineage there had been a gypsy and the culture had always attracted her. “But this fiddler is the most alive gypsy I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Is he for sale?”

“Well, it’s not finished.”

“When it is, will you sell it to me?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“How long?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Fine. I’ll come back then. Say, five?”

“Yes. Five is good. But don’t you want to know the price?”

She looked at me and I felt myself falling into those deep blue eyes. “No,” she said quietly. “No. See the way you’ve done the hands? See how they caress the bow and the neck? That’s love, my friend. That’s love. There’s no room in love for cost. I’ll be back tomorrow at five. I’ll buy you dinner.”

And she was gone.

All that day and all through the next I laboured on that gypsy fiddler. I put everything I had into it. Milosz just nodded his head and left me alone. I didn’t tell him it was sold. I just bent to my work, coaxing life into that wood and thinking of the smile it would bring to that beautiful face and the sparkle it would bring to those magnificent eyes. When I applied the thin lacquer at noon the next day, it seemed to glow on its stand like it was waiting too.

She was right on time. When she saw it she put both hands to her face and breathed deeply though her fingers. Then she cried. Thick beautiful tears slid from the corners of her eyes and I could
feel my heart breaking in my chest as I watched her. She bent forward at the waist and looked closely at the face of that old fiddler.

“The eyes,” she said. “What you did with his eyes since yesterday is amazing. You put love there, love and agony and joy, like the music itself. It’s like you can hear it now. It’s an evocative piece.”

“Evocative?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It means to call forth, to summon, to bring out. You’ve called forth the spirit of Romany. The spirit of the gypsies. I love it.”

We walked to a tiny restaurant near the shop. She ordered for us because I was simply too lost to make a decision. She laughed at that and her laughter was like spring rain: quiet, regal almost. We drank some red wine while we waited for our food and she talked about her work and the world of books. I spoke about the farm, about how I felt among the trees, their vibration, their energy, their life, and how I came to be a carver and a furniture maker. I talked about my family and the generations of farmers that I came from. When the food came I was amazed that I had talked for so long.

“Do you hear that?” she asked halfway through our meal.

“What?”

“The music. Listen.”

A song was playing over the sound system in the restaurant. It was a music I had never heard before played on instrument foreign to my ears. But the sound it made wasn’t strange to me. It rubbed against something I’d carried in me for a long time, and that something recognized itself in the music.

“Dvořák,” she said quietly. “
The Cello Concerto.
”

“Dvořák?”

“A Czech,” she said. “A Romany too, I think. At least his music sounds that way to me. I have this at home.”

“It reminds me of Milosz,” I said. “He’s a Czech.”

She placed her fork on the table and looked at me with those wonderful eyes. I looked back, unafraid and open. “You are a wonder,” she said. “Milosz. A Czech. And you’ve been around him and picked up the influences he carries without even knowing it.
Picking them up and turning them into something magical through wood. Do you know how special that is?”

She spoke for a long time about the people she’d read about. Writers, painters, musicians, architects, all of the great builders of the world, and as I listened I felt my world getting larger through her words. I found myself wanting to meet these people too. The meal passed almost without my knowing.

“May I see you again?” I asked as we stood outside the restaurant.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that, Jonas. I’d really like that.”

And my world became more. Every night we met at the shop and she’d look at what I was working on, then we’d head off into that great city by the sea and she showed me the world. I discovered Gustav Klimt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston all in one splendid evening of browsing. I found Winslow Homer, Jelly Roll Morton, and Auguste Rodin one Saturday afternoon. I heard Dvořák’s
Slavonic Dances
while learning to cook machanka, a tangy mushroom soup from Czechoslovakia. It was a drizzly, foggy evening and I thought it the most sublime moment I’d ever had. Together we visited restaurants, galleries, nightclubs for jazz and blues, museums, and the great stretches of oceanside where she’d tell me invented histories about the people we passed. She brought me forward into a shining new world.

Some evenings we’d read aloud to each other and I learned the why and how of words and books and fell in love with them too. Or if there was a project I was working on, she’d sit quietly in the shop and watch me as I shaped the wood, remaining motionless for hours while the slim shavings fell and the form of the piece emerged. Other nights, we’d walk. Just walk and feel the city breathe around us, down the length of bright avenues into the gloom of rundown neighbourhoods and shadowed parks, watching the changing face of the city until each of those nights became another kind of entrance we made together, another move deeper into the world we discovered together.

When I fell in love, I don’t know. Only that when she kissed me one night in my small, shabby room with Chopin’s
études
playing in the background, I felt the rarefied air of heights I’d
never imagined. In candlelight, we loved each other. She showed my rough, worn fingers how to trace the clefts and canyons of her, to follow the grain and texture of her skin, to carve her in long flowing lines with my palms. When I entered her it was like the vibrato of a great orchestra emitting a long, tremulous note into the void of the universe, a music unheard and spontaneous that changed the fabric of everything. We lay there, drenched in our passions, watching the candles melt away to nothingness while the light of another morning broke over the bare sill of my window.

We were married a month later. She wanted a small, elegant ceremony without family or fanfare and we spent a glorious week in a cabin in the mountains of the interior before coming back to our work. With her urging and direction I sold more and more work and earned more commissions, so that within a year we’d moved into a small house with a garage in the back that became my private workshop. She’d come home at night and find me there and we’d walk together into the house that was our home.

We had a cat named Cheever and a jade plant called Eudora, after the great comic writer of the American South. She spent a lot of time and love on the interior of our home and it was, in the end, a shelter, a haven, an eclectic, subtle extension of her, and I loved it. There was a veranda at its front and we sat there deep into the night, drinking tea and talking, listening to the great music of the ages pouring through the open window. She had sculpted my world so effortlessly that it became the line of her back in the morning light, the shine of her eyes in moonlight, and the swish of sunflower stalks against the veranda rails. We were happy.

Then came Cameron Gracey.

Cam Gracey was a railroad engineer. Or at least he had been for thirty years. He’d been pensioned off after one too many bouts with liquor on the job and he lived a block away from us. He was one of those drinkers everyone knows about, and he was avoided as much as possible. Cam spent most of his time watching soccer and rugby matches at the Beachcomber bar, where
he’d parlay his pension cheques into wagers that surprisingly kept him in liquor and escort agency girls the neighbours reported seeing arrive at all hours of the night.

He won big on a soccer match one afternoon and was headed home in his old red truck to celebrate his victory. He was drunk enough to overshoot his block and the neighbours who saw it say the turn he made onto our street was fast enough to take the truck onto two wheels before it levelled out and struck my Sylvan, who was crossing the street with a bag of groceries in her arms. The impact threw her fifty feet. When our next-door neighbour came to get me and I walked out of my workshop and into the hard glint of sun, I felt that great and glorious world closing in on itself. When I knelt beside her broken body, the only music I heard was a drone—heavy, onerous, and flat—from somewhere in the middle of my chest.

She went into a coma. The doctors were able to mend her bones but they couldn’t coax her back to the light. I sat there by her bedside waiting. I read to her. I played her favourite music for her. I told her about our home and the woman I’d hired to care for it while she got better. For weeks on end I sat there, only leaving long enough to shower, shave, and return. I carved nothing. She didn’t wake.

After four months they moved her to a private unit. The medical costs were high and I sold all of my work to maintain her care. I sold my car and began taking the bus to the hospital each day. The longer she stayed under, the more difficult it got to keep things going. Eventually I had to sell the things she’d decorated our home with, and as I stood there and watched the things she had loved so dearly being toted out to another home somewhere, I felt like the greatest traitor in the world. Pieces of her, leaving. After two months, the house was empty except for Eudora, the jade plant I slept beside on the pale wooden floors under the window facing the veranda where the music had once flowed.

And then she woke up. I was shaving in her small washroom with the door to her room open.

“What day is it?” she said in a small, dry voice I barely heard.

I almost fell getting to the door. I towelled the shaving cream from my face and walked toward her bed with huge silent tears rolling down my face. I could hardly breathe. She lay there small and scared under the sheets, and she turned her head and looked at me. Those magnificent blue eyes were still the clearest blue I’d ever seen, and when she looked at me I felt the wellspring of hope rise in my chest like a crescendo.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Because you came back,” I said.

Then I heard the words that took all remaining light from my world.

“Do I know you?”

Amygdala.
That’s the word.
Amygdala.
It sounded like the name of a great and final battle, and for me it was. The accident had damaged the amygdala in her brain—the area responsible for emotional memory. Along with other significant memory loss, Sylvan could not remember who I was or the tremendous love we had shared. To her I became a kind stranger who entered her room each day and told her stories about a life she had lost all touch with. She just sat there while I told her how we met, how we fell in love, and about the home we’d built together. Just sat there looking at me with those beautiful eyes that no longer held the gloss of love within them. Merely confusion. Blankness, like a slab of wood.

Her brain damage was such that she could not retain memory of anything. The doctors had to tell her every day who they were, who she was, where she was, and who I was. But I went there every day. Went there with the hope that this day would be the day that the sun broke through the clouds and she’d turn to me with the squinting look that always said she saw me and be my girl again. But it never happened. Each night I’d ride the bus back across the city, saddened and empty, until I couldn’t afford the cost of the extended care facility she was moved to and had to sell the house in order to keep her there.

I moved to a small room in the Astoria Hotel. A welfare room where my veranda was the fire escape. I’d sit there long into those
empty nights watching the grey and drizzled streets, smoking and drinking until I was dull enough to sleep. My bus trips to the facility became less and less frequent. I couldn’t bear seeing the face that had once looked into mine so lovingly now so empty of emotion, so closed to possibility and so lost to experience. I couldn’t stand being so close to the heart that had beat against my chest, filling me with the warm, languid flow of belonging, and feel its hopeless distance, its oceanic impossibility. It haunted me. Her face haunted me and I couldn’t stand having the depth of my love go unanswered, be so unrecognized, so unremembered.

Drinking helped. The booze cut through everything and made it go away. I’d sit in my room and drink and drink until I would lean out into the darkness and emptiness of the night, vomiting and sick, yelling, cursing Cameron Gracey, amygdala, and Jonas Hohnstein, the great carver, the artist who could not create a bridge to close the gap between us. I drank. Eventually, it’s all I did. It’s all I could do because I didn’t want to surface to the blankness, the emptiness of my life. I drank until, finally, even the Astoria kicked me out and I landed on the street.

I left then. I took what money I had, caught a bus, and landed here so many years ago I can’t recall. I became a rounder, and until Amelia approached me in the park that day I didn’t want another person near me. Near enough to know how much I hated myself for not being able to save her and, in the end, for deserting her, leaving her behind like she’d never mattered, like she’d never existed, like she’d never given me the world.

Fucking movies. Who’d have guessed? It was the first time in forever that I’d seen light, and it touched me, filled the empty, filled the coldness. This one. This
Affair to Remember?
I wanted her to stand up too. I wanted her to toss that blanket covering her legs into the corner and stand up strongly, walk over to that man and kiss him with all the passion in her. I wanted her to do that. Not because it would make the story better. Not because it would be more romantic. But for me. For me. Just for me. So I could see that sometimes stories end the way they should and love remains as it should: undefined, unrestricted, and open like a pair of arms.