Sanctuary Line (18 page)

“At least tell me his name,” I’d say to her in exasperation during phone calls in the middle of the day or the night, or here at the house in the room we had shared since childhood.

She told me she couldn’t do that. When I asked her why, she said she had promised that she wouldn’t. I concluded he was married but couldn’t bring myself to ask her.

What she did tell me was that they were rarely together, unless they were together in a darkened space. The intimacy was so intense it could only unfold within the parameters of a rented and utterly neutral room. Dozens of these meetings took place across the Middle East, inside the walls of American hotel chains, which resembled to a fault the rooms of the same American hotel chains they had visited when she was still at the Canadian Forces Base in Petawawa, where they’d first met. Nothing ever changed, she said, presenting this, to my astonishment, as a positive thing. There could be an ancient city under aerial bombardment or a snow-filled meadow in serene Ontario outside the window, but it was still the same room, the same relationship. It neither advanced nor retreated, so any time they met could have been the previous time or the next time. Except, I suspected, when she demanded more from him, and then it would have become a bad time. He would have closed completely, I imagined. This man
who minutes before had been holding her and touching her with great tenderness would no doubt gather up his things and leave the room as if there was nothing at all between them. She told me that with the exception of one significant time, he made certain that their leaves did not overlap so there would be no question as to whether he and Mandy might have two days or even a meal together. He didn’t believe in love tokens. You’re not a child, he told her. You’re an adult and an officer, insinuating that she had chosen this as much as he had, which was of course true and therefore would be more humiliating than an unfair accusation. But Mandy admired his candour. I want him to be brutally honest with me, she said. Sounds like he’s just being brutal, I replied.

He made it clear that she could talk about this with no one, not knowing how much she talked about it with me. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that I existed. This was a secret, apparently, that made all military and state secrets pale in comparison, a piece of information so volatile, according to him, that it defied classification. None of Mandy’s fellow officers and no one in the lower ranks knew anything about it, though I suspected, in spite of the rules, a not insignificant percentage of them were likely involved in affairs of their own. But not with a senior officer, she said when I pointed this out.

I told her I didn’t care who he was or how far he was up the food chain, he was using her.

For the past year, since Mandy’s death, whenever I see a military spokesman on the television – they are always men – I’ve wondered if it was him. I’ve scrutinized the features of man after man on the screen, uniform after uniform, searching for the kind of coldness of purpose that would override any kind of personal relationship: a single-mindedness that would rule out warmth, connection.

“So, he’s married,” I finally said. “Mister superior officer is married.”

“If only it were that uncomplicated,” she told me, ignoring my obvious disdain for rank. “If he were married, or if I knew for certain he was using me, I could live with it, or maybe without it. As it is …” She didn’t continue the sentence. She would never define what it was.

And yet, in spite of all this, in spite of the uncertainty, Mandy clearly believed he was a saint. Both men and women were mesmerized by him, she told me, and obeyed his orders without question or complaint. And they talked about him, she told me. They talked about him all the time while she stood in their midst. I pictured her, clothed in regulation camouflage khaki, appearing to be as prurient and detached as anyone else. So she would hear the gossip about what he might or might not be doing with other women, about who among the young officers had become his latest discoveries, who was the best new strategist, engineer, or warrior. He knew who would go far because he was part of the decision-making process that
determined who would go far, and she came to feel she would never be among the chosen. But standing in close proximity to the chosen, eating and drinking with them in the Officers Mess, she watched them grow and blossom under the warmth of his attention. And his affection, she added, defending him.

When someone, anyone died, his empathy and stalwart grief unified the whole corps, and when he spoke about the particular death it would be as if no one had ever died before. His reaction was utterly personal and heartfelt, a crack in his voice, the large heart of him remarkably visible. It was impossible, Mandy said, not to be moved by his words, his demeanour, the sudden humility in him. It was impossible not to want to throw oneself back into the fray. And, I suspected, impossible not to want to die so that he would talk about you with his voice broken and his heart exposed.

She told me that they did take one unofficial journey together. He wanted to visit the Canadian battle sites in Italy where their company, the Seaforth Highlanders, had served in the Second World War. Their leaves had somehow overlapped, and she had flown to Rome and taken a train from there to some village or another, far enough from Canadian war graveyards that there was scant likelihood that anyone from home would be there, though, as she told me he had said, there was always a chance. It wasn’t perfect, she confessed. It had rained the whole time, and the place itself, bombed in the Second World War, though interesting in
spots, was so filled with cement apartment houses, she said it had the feel of an ancient town being eaten alive by the present. That was the poet in Mandy speaking, and I wondered whether she had conveyed this observation to him.

He had become increasingly tense as the two days passed, although, as always, she said, smiling, there had been some moments of authentic connection. Mandy described the church filled with reliquaries they found, some on intricately worked silver pedestals, and some even fashioned in the form of ships, hanging from the ceiling. The finger bones and shards of skulls contained in these works of art intrigued him, and some of the fading, damaged wall frescoes as well, which, according to Mandy, showed vestiges of the last judgment. He became absorbed by the wall paintings apparently and told her he would return alone some day to study them more closely when he could.

Was it simply carelessness that made him tell Mandy he would go back without her to what she was trying to think of as “their” village – a place far from the celebrated monuments and therefore singular in its own, prosaic way? Or was he as intentionally cruel as I was beginning to believe? Alone, she’d wept on the trains and planes that returned her to Kandahar, carrying with her not the intimate moments of the trip but that one small remark across thousands of miles back to the theatre of war.

An official military letter addressed to my aunt arrived in the mail the week after Mandy was killed. I feared
that because he was a “superior officer,” the man I was increasingly thinking of as Mister Military might have been required to write it, and I despised him more for the idea that he would agree to do so. I hated even more that the military hadn’t taken the trouble to know that her mother was dead, had died, in fact, during Mandy’s tour of duty. I threw the letter into the fire unopened, but when I cleared the ashes from the grate the following morning I saw the bottom quarter of the page was unburned. Only the words “my deepest sympathy” and a signature remained. I remembered then that all through our talks, not only had Mandy refused to reveal the name of her lover, she had never once even described his face.

But the name was unimportant, really, as was the face, the rank. He would always be Mister Military to me. As far as I was concerned, he was the whole operation, the whole war, the camaraderie and the fear, the abject gratitude for the good days in the face of the arbitrariness of the bad, the seductiveness of all that. The way she had wanted to please him, to demonstrate her courage, self-control, and discretion, broke my heart. She was so accomplished, such a good soldier. In spite of what she believed, she could have achieved all that and more even had he never existed. Instead, she was forced to endure an emotional life where he appeared and disappeared, reappeared and disappeared again, while the improvised explosive device with her name on it was waiting in the shadows to become the
eventual resolution. How did he react to the news of her death? Would he have run from that as well? At the time, I couldn’t help but think so because, whenever I pictured him, this man whom I had never met and whose name I firmly believed I would never know, he looked exactly like my uncle.

There had been only one tale of love among my uncle’s stories. It involved one of the great-greats: a great-great-uncle to us, a son to others, a brother to some, but a husband and father to no one. He had fallen in love with his schoolteacher, a woman my uncle described as tall and thin with a high-necked collar and a head full of ideas surmounting that collar. It was the ideas that he fell in love with, though her long neck and willowy body, admittedly, may have played some role in the attraction he felt. Still there were other long necks and willowy bodies in the neighbourhood, my uncle said, but none with access to the ancient history, classical mythology, and poetry that the schoolteacher brought into this farm boy’s life for the very brief season when he had the time to go to school.

She was older than he was, of course, but not by as much as you might think because in the rural schools in those days, the teacher herself was often just seventeen or eighteen, having only to graduate from high school to be eligible for the job. Our young ancestor’s farm work was so
all-consuming and his school attendance so sporadic that he was sixteen years old when the new teacher arrived. He was determined to finish grade school in spite of his age and the fact that his height made him feel uncomfortable and exaggeratedly out of place. He became even more determined once he had seen the new teacher and heard her recite “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats, an affirmation, my uncle told us, of everything that young great-great instantly felt about the woman who was standing at the front of the room.

That focus: a beautifully formed female monument placed against the dark, horizontal emptiness of the blackboard, the grace of her arm, making sentences like white fences on a landscape of slate, or holding a book out in front of her as she read. “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering?” A potent mixture. Young Great-great never would have heard anything like the story that poem tells. Yet something in that narrative would be weirdly familiar to him once he saw the teacher. Like his lighthouse-keeping, bifurcating relatives, an interest in literature would take root in him, an interest that would forever be connected to the teacher, and he would begin to borrow books, first from the two small shelves at the back of the schoolroom and later, when he had finished grade school, from the lady herself. He read all of Keats this way, and a not insignificant amount of Shelley and Byron. And he thought about that poetry and that young
woman all the time he was hauling stumps through rough pasture to make a fence or when he was felling timber. He would be all wrapped up in thought on the one hand, and concealment on the other, for she was engaged and about to be married to someone else. And even if she not been, this love he had would have been, according to my uncle, a private possession – something that set him apart from his brothers – and he never would have dared, or perhaps never even have wanted, to confess it.

This privacy, however, did not prevent him from brooding at great length when she married and also did not prevent him from continuing to borrow books from her once she was someone else’s wife. But it did prevent him from moving forward when she became a childless widow – the perfect moment, my uncle said, for the young man to have approached her as, by then, he had his own a farm, and one that was doing fairly well.

Men, our uncle told us, are not good at expressing their feelings. And the stronger the feelings, he assured us, the worse they are at expressing them. Hardly an original observation but interesting in that my uncle expressed it. Instead, as the years went by, when certain strong thoughts about the woman haunted Young Great-great, he would ask to borrow a particular book from her, one that he hoped might echo those thoughts. Maybe this was a peculiar language between them, though more than likely the lady, now in her thirties, would have assumed that he wanted
only the books. The important thing, however, was that he wanted the books given to him by her, even though by now there was a perfectly good library in the town where they lived. He could have just as easily pulled Coleridge or Robert Browning from the library’s shelves, but it seemed that unless the teacher had herself turned the pages of a volume, he did not feel compelled to read it.

After her husband died, the woman – her name was Alice Simmonds – had not gone back to teaching in the little schoolhouse. Instead she developed a curious talent, that of writing poetry for greeting cards. This was ironic in and of itself, my uncle said, because often she was required to write verses about relationships she (beyond her short marriage) had no real connection to. Her speciality was the sort of cards exchanged by courting couples.
To My Sweetheart on Her Birthday
, or
A Valentine’s Greeting to the One I Love
, and a number of poems meant to be from a secret admirer.

To him your hand is like a dove
Your face is like a star
He will not tell you of his love
But worships from afar.

And things of that nature.

Young Great-great did not know about the greeting cards for several years until one day, purchasing a card for
his mother at Christmas, he was startled by the storekeeper musing aloud as to whether the verses contained therein had been written by Alice. Alice Simmonds? he asked. Yes, the storekeeper said, and let on that this was how she made a living now, writing up these cards for a company in Toronto.