Sanctuary Line (25 page)

We walked along the beach to the spot where Teo and I had sailed our paper boats and I pointed out the shelves of limestone and we talked about how the fossils came to be. You asked if you were keeping me from anything and I said you were not and took you inside and made some sandwiches for lunch. We sat on the veranda, ate, and looked at the lake. You smiled when I told you about Mandy and all the swimming, how she would stay in the water until her lips turned blue and her shoulders shook.

“She was like that on the ground, over there, as well,” you said, “always staying in. Once she had taken something on, she would never give it up.” You paused. “Even me,” you said. “She wouldn’t give up – even on me.”

We both became very quiet then, you with your face averted.

“She was the one who was going to shine,” I told you. “We all thought nothing was ever going to interfere with her steady intelligence, her full engagement.” Nothing, I thought, but the love that blindsided her and left her breathless in the midst of combat duty. “Even the idea of battle itself intrigued her, the strategy, the team spirit. She talked to me about that.”

You nodded. “But over there, there are no clearly defined battles. Nothing is the way you think it will be. There are no teams. Just people, and all of them being hurt in some way or another. Physically, emotionally.”

“Yes, she used to talk about that as well.”

You pulled your wallet from your pocket then and showed me a picture of a kind-looking woman and two boys, their bright faces aware of the camera, anxious to please an invisible photographer. I didn’t even ask you where that photograph was taken, where you lived, but I knew that you lived there, wherever it was. The woman was wearing a hijab and her arms, long like yours, encircled the two children.

“So you
are
married after all.”

You laughed in surprise and told me that your father had
taken the picture when you and your brother were children. As you returned the wallet to your pocket, you became serious again. “No, not married.” You paused. “Muslim.”

“Mandy never said anything about that.”

“No,” you said, “it was too complicated. Even
we
could barely talk about it. She tried, but there was this conflict in me, all the time, and my family … I asked her not to say anything. I wasn’t the only Canadian Muslim there, of course. And not the only Muslim in Petawawa either. One of my cousins” – you looked at me and smiled – “and a couple of others, only acquaintances really, from the Ottawa mosque. But if they had known … it is a small community.”

They wanted Canadian Muslims to join the Armed Forces, you explained, especially those who spoke Arabic, which you did, you do, a bit. You paused after telling me this, ran your hand over the surface of the old table that sat between the two chairs on the veranda, and picked up one white stone from the collection I had made there. “I joined as a peacekeeper. I was a high-school math teacher before.” You smiled, and I thought, Here is Mister Military: a Muslim, a teacher. “And then, six months later,” you said, “we entered the war.” You told me that, in Kandahar, you had arranged informal prayers for the Muslims on the base. I was intrigued by this.

You were not yet an imam, you explained. “I never would have thought that it was in me,” you said. “I wasn’t even very religious before.” You looked out over the lake. “But there
was something about being over there.” You ran your hand back and forth along the arm of the chair. “It wasn’t long before I knew what I wanted, what I had to become.”

“And Mandy knew too … that you were moving toward a decision.”

“Yes.”

“She went to military college because of the peacekeeping,” I said. All that searching and rescuing, I thought.

“I know,” you said. “I loved that about her. That, and the poetry.”

I showed you the twisted trees in the orchard, pointed to the wood lot, explained how the land had been sold to developers of estate housing. You asked about the monarchs, and I told you about them as well. You said you already knew about the butterfly tree, and for the first time I thought about Mandy lying in your arms, painting a picture of this farm, the summers of our childhood, and wondered how should would have painted it. Would the palette have been bright or dark, or that combination of shadow and light she wrote about. Chiaroscuro.

Back inside the kitchen as I made tea, you mentioned the prayers again. “Over there,” you began, “we … the North American Muslims on the base … needed something, some connection to our own world.” The desire to tighten that connection kept coming to you, you said, over and over when you were leading those prayers, or in the midst of manoeuvres, or, sometimes, even when you were with Mandy. It grew larger as you walked up and down the Middle Eastern streets through the unimaginable heat, acknowledging the quiet devotion of people caught in the teeth of chaos.

Yes, I said, knowing that Mandy could only have stood outside that world, that desire.

And you said, as if sensing my thoughts, “Our worlds could only have intersected there, you know, Mandy’s and mine, on some base or another. It didn’t really matter where that base might be … Petawawa, Kandahar. But, oddly, it was Kandahar that cracked me open spiritually.”

I wondered why you said
oddly
and asked.

“Because I am a Muslim and there I was in a Muslim country. It wasn’t until I was in the Middle East that I discovered that no matter where I went, I would always be a displaced Muslim.” And yet you told me, in the midst of that displacement, there was this music of communion. The call to prayer.

“And Mandy wasn’t like you.”

“How could she be?” You looked around the room, then outside the window. “This is what made her.”

“So you couldn’t love her.” Mandy was vivid in my mind.
He has never once told me he loves me
.

You were silent, but your distress was visible on your face. “Of course I loved her,” you said, “but we were never going to be able to enter each other’s lives once our tours of duty were over.” There were no tears now that made what you were saying even more desperate. “How could I talk to her about that love and at the same time know that I would never bring her fully into my life? This stone house, these meadows, orchards full of flowering trees created her. That, and growing up without ever once having to ask yourself where you belonged.” Your elbows were resting on the kitchen table and your hands were raised. You held them, palm inwards, about ten inches apart, as if you were indicating the measurement of something.

“I wish – and you don’t know how much I wish – you had told Mandy that.”

“Liz,” you said, looking away from me, your voice soft, “I didn’t have to tell Mandy that. She already knew.”

I stood up and crossed to your side of the table. I took your hand, and you rose to your feet. “Look out the window, Vahil,” I said. “The cultivated landscape of this farm has decayed so completely now it is difficult to believe that the fields and orchards ever existed outside of my own memories, my own imagination.”

You turned and walked with me toward the kitchen window. You stood in front of the glass with me slightly
behind you. You looked out, glanced back in my direction, and looked out again. “Yes,” you said. “Mandy told me that after her father had left …”

And then I told you everything else, long into the night.

It is almost three weeks since you were here and I have been busy measuring wings, an activity that might seem to be exotic but that is in fact rather tedious. I’m ashamed to say that one monarch can seem much like another once a hundred or so have passed through my hands. Still, I know that the tags we use, which only very infrequently furnish the information we want, could prevent the butterfly from reaching its destination if that butterfly is too small or too frail to carry one, so these measurements are important. Chance, after all, is more powerful than destiny, or so it seems, and we scientists want to do everything we can to thwart risk.

A pileated woodpecker has taken up residence in the woods behind the research station, and during the day he spends his time not far from the window of my lab, doggedly and noisily demolishing the logs along the shore, searching for ants. Whenever a jet airliner flies far overhead, or if a small plane buzzes by, the bird stops working, looks up, and follows its path across the sky, as if he believes
that he and the aircraft are part of the same species. With the exception of the ants in the logs, nothing moving at ground level catches his attention, only these noisy airborne machines.

The first phase of a monarch’s mating behaviour is entirely airborne and makes up that lilting dance we have all seen in early summer, the two specimens circling each other, their wings astir, their movements so cadenced it is possible to believe that what we are watching is music made visible. They are caught in the enchantment of courtship and the spell is as beautiful and as transient as youth. The next stage occurs when the male brings the female down to the ground level, where the pair remain locked together for up to an hour. After that, the female causes the astonishing metamorphoses to begin. She lays her eggs on a milkweed leaf and a caterpillar is born, an uncomfortable organism that will struggle out of its own skin several times before beginning to spin the cloth in which it will enclose itself, entering the smooth, green, and gradually hardening season of the pupa. Each of these small, firm caskets is so seeded with genetic memory, the emerging monarch will, even as its wings are stiffening in the sun, know the tree where it must congregate with its fellows and the route of the migration it must make.

The butterfly tree on the edge of Sanctuary Line was empty of wings when I woke up this morning. In spite of my profession, the enormous number of monarchs had
taken me by surprise a few days previously. As if some ancient god had passed by in the night, lighting ten thousand small orange tapers before disappearing once again into antiquity, all of earth’s vitality was confined to that one tree. Everything else was filled with the kind of stillness that follows an early September sunrise, the great lake reflecting the sky, the birds strangely silent.

I returned to the house to find the camera, but what you will see in the photograph I am sending may look to you only like the turning of the leaves, the arrival of autumn. There seems to be no way to capture and hold on to that evidence of the perfect communion among these creatures of like mind and similar purpose. Perhaps all this is not unlike the Hage you told me about, the tree a mosque, and that one particular mountain in Mexico a kind of Mecca. The monarchs who have just left my shore will only take their journey once, but all through their development, perhaps from the moment of conception, their cells have known that they must make the effort required to reach that holy ground. The Mexicans who watch their arrival, I’ve been told, believe that they are witnessing the annual return of the souls of their beloved dead.

It is another clear morning. I have just returned from the wood lot, which is almost impenetrable because no animals, wild or otherwise, are able to graze there anymore. Nevertheless, it is somewhat accessible at the northeast corner where the stream enters it. So I took off my shoes
and socks and walked in the water between the bank of what Teo and I called our river, just as we used to do so many years ago. There aren’t as many small brown trout now, but I did spot one or two, darting away from my ankles, and once I swore I saw one of Teo’s temporary islands, but it turned out to be merely a spot where a fallen branch had caused the stream to silt up to such an extent that the soil was visible above the waterline. I had no paper with me, could make no boats, but of course I remembered the boats.

I have found that it is almost impossible to read
A Child’s Garden of Verses
more than once without unconsciously memorizing a poem or two. This is also true of me and Emily Dickinson. As I walked in that water, then, approaching the bright openness of the lake that glittered in the sun beyond the trees, these two nineteenth-century voices were, side by side, debating in my mind, neither wanting to win their argument. Stevenson said: