The Prison Book Club (32 page)

Later that afternoon on Amherst Island, the mercury climbed to twenty-eight degrees Celsius in the rare March heat wave and Carol and I brought our pre-dinner drinks outside. Hers looked like a martini, mine was a cold pilsner. A summer haze hung over water that would normally have sheets of ice, and grass was greening where normally a foot or two of snow would lie. Carol was surprised to see dark pink rhubarb shoots breaking through and made plans to weed the asparagus bed in the coming week. We breathed deeply and could smell earth. Dozens of pairs of mergansers floated in the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, like couples promenading. The males roughed up their rakish crests and bobbed their chests impressively into the water in their annual courtship ritual, while the females barked and cronked appreciatively. American robins pecked without success at the still-frozen earth, not far from the month-early scilla and crocus that were opening their throats to the warmth. The scene was soothing after a day in the prison. I couldn't help thinking that the scene would have delighted Antonina, the zookeeper's wife.

With the weirdly early spring, birds were already nesting willynilly around the garden. Carol had found a mourning dove nesting in her bird feeder, meaning that she and Bryan would have to avoid that area until the hatchlings fledged.

But that afternoon the surrounding chaotic birdlife failed to distract Carol. She was preoccupied with thoughts of recruiting new book club ambassadors from among the Collins Bay Book Club members to help bolster attendance and encourage the slower readers to get through the books. She'd been disappointed that only nine of the twenty-three members had shown up for book club. Her comments revealed again what I had learned about Carol: partial success was never enough. It was not enough that she had founded a book club in a prison. It had to be a
good
book club and the members had better bloody well show up.

I agreed that it was discouraging that only Peter and Parvat, and perhaps Michael, had finished the book. I mostly understood why Gaston only managed to get to page 100. He'd had his parole hearing to prepare for, college courses to finish and classics to read, as well as the book club book.And also, he told me after the meeting that, lately, he'd been more eager to read “positive spiritual books” because the themes of war and domestic violence were depressing. I told Carol we should keep that in mind for book selection. But what about Dread, who hadn't cracked the spine? He had offered no excuse. I said to Carol that perhaps with the departure of Ben, his buddy and foil, Dread no longer had an enthusiastic reader on his unit to encourage him along. I also reminded her of Albert's stunning excuse at the meeting for why he'd come without his book read, and, in fact, without his book: “We got flooded in 4A Block,” he said. “When I woke up there was a couple of inches of feces and urine water in my cell.” And floating on top was his copy of
The Zookeeper's Wife
. Derek had remarked that that was better than ‘The dog ate my homework,' and we all laughed.

And what about the empathy that I'd hoped the book would elicit? It was there in Peter's remarks, and sometimes Michael's and Parvat's. But it was less evident among the others that day. How different from the unrestrained empathy that the members of our women's book club often expressed.

Within a week Carol had wrangled a meeting to deputize new ambassadors: Peter, and also Michael. She coached them on using their intuition to identify likely readers. Some might already be readers, she said, but others might just be desperate for something to counter the loneliness of prison. She wanted ten to fifteen men to show up every time. She reminded them that one inmate had had a good outcome at a parole hearing in which he and one of the parole board members discussed at length a book he had read in the book club.

Dread, a veteran ambassador, shared his philosophy with the new appointees on how to encourage readers who were having difficulty getting into a book. “The book is not a predator. It's a prey. You have to go after it. It's not like a Sidney Sheldon read. Sidney Sheldon books are predators that go after you.”
Predator and prey
. It was the second time in a month that an inmate had made that observation, making me think that some inmates saw the world that way in prison, and possibly even outside it.

After the meeting with the ambassadors, I sat down for individual visits with Gaston and Peter. Gaston arrived with the news that he'd been granted day parole and would be out as soon as a halfway house could find him a bed. Of the classics prescribed by Professor Duffy, he'd finished
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
Treasure Island
,
The Red Badge of Courage
and Timothy Findley's novel
The Wars
. Dread announced that he had a parole hearing the following month. Two of Carol's ambassadors were already moving on.

Peter had proudly brought his journal along to our meeting. In the two months since I'd given it to him, he'd written ninety-three pages. His entry about
The Zookeeper's Wife
on March 11 in particular was notable: “The zoo, the animals, their influence, need of care, played a huge role in the family's resilience, determination and logistical operation,” he wrote. “I found the animals' respect for each other really quite remarkable and something I would have never imagined.” He then turned his attention to the animals that appeared at the prison:

The geese, that sometimes come in the hundreds, eat the grass, shit the grass and go on their way. The grass is so similar to the way it goes in, it may very well just keep on growing after it comes out. Seagulls. Pigeons. And crows that are sometimes large enough to prey on the pigeons. These crows have a calculating look to them. In the summer of 2010 we had a hawk on the premises. Its behaviour and the behaviour of everything else in reaction to it, was simply awesome to watch. I came to realize that the resident bird population here is not unlike the resident and employed human population here. Predator, preyed upon, and scavenger. But, among the human element it is difficult to discern which is which.

I read that passage several times, noting yet another reference to predators and prey. Here was a man who was becoming more aware of the natural world through his journaling. Also, he was thinking like a writer. With my encouragement, he had even begun paying attention to the smells of the prison and writing about them. And he seemed to have absorbed some of Diane Ackerman's descriptive powers. On March 29 he wrote:

Ann brought up the “prison smell.” Jails and prisons all smell the same, not unlike hospitals in that manner. It's very difficult to describe. The cleaning chemicals most certainly contribute. The floors, every square foot, are cleaned every single day and the vapors of such over the years likely linger in unseen crevices and no doubt permeate the concrete itself. The lack of sensuous stimulation is in fact what the prison smell is—an absence of other scents. No breeze with smells of trees, flowers or gardens. No scented candles or potpourri. No ashtrays, empties or leftovers. No perfume. No rubber, asphalt or exhaust. There is not even a whiff of your meal before it arrives. No smells of spring with earth's exhalation after winter. No wind off the water in the summer and no thick lingering aroma that accompanies autumn's dropped leaves or its unmistakable departure when the cold air seals it down.

Unlike nearby Millhaven, a maximum-security prison, which had wire fencing through which the inmates could often see deer and other wildlife, Collins Bay's high walls blocked the view of the outside world. From Peter's perspective, that meant the inmates' awareness of what lay beyond the walls was perceived mainly through sound: traffic, train horns, the occasional police siren and even what he described as “the high-pitched revolutions of speed bikes.” He concluded that the deprivation of the senses reduced him and the other men to animals.

He also wrote in depth about
Les Misérables
, which he'd borrowed from the library. How had he had time to do that, while reading the classics
and
the book club book? He thought Victor Hugo's writing had a peculiar rhythm, which he initially attributed to translation, then realized it was the author's narrative style. He wrote in his journal:

Instead of reading, it was more akin to having been read to. The narrator is gently authoritative, like a benevolent grandfather insinuating what is good, and what is questionable.The ultimate message may be that no person has the right to condemn another and that every person does have the right to not only give, but also to receive goodness and love from another.

These were the very themes we were exploring in
The Zookeeper's Wife
.

Our women's book club met four days before Easter at Evelyn's condo, and her fireplace mantel was festive with decorative eggs and tiny rabbit figures. We settled into her comfortable sofa and chairs to talk about
The Zookeeper's Wife
. After some initial quibbles from two members about the author's occasional digressions from the main story to elaborate on points of research, Ruth warmly championed the book for finding a radically different way to talk about war. “I found it incredibly personal,” she said. “I think it was because my house was a zoo.” During the years when Ruth's five children were young, she and her husband had a menagerie of pets—two dogs, a cat, a raccoon, an iguana and a rabbit—while simultaneously taking in one or two troubled teens at a time and providing them and their families with counselling. She was a family counsellor who had founded an organization in the 1980s for families with wayward adolescents. Some of the kids were involved with prostitution or drugs, were robbing their parents, had come out of juvenile detention centres or their parents had just given up on them. “Our house became a safe place for them for a little while and I would work with the parents,” said Ruth. If her own kids weren't comfortable with a particular guest, the visitor was invited to use the family's Arctic sleeping bag to sleep outside in the back seat of their car. In the summer months, the whole human and animal menagerie would move to the family's lakeside cottage. “I thought, Antonina is a kindred sister,” said Ruth, still beautiful in her seventies.

We talked about the book's description of how Poles helped Jewish citizens disguise their faces with bandages and dye their hair blond to evade detection, and I told them about how Peter said the penis re-skinning was what caught his eye.

“Can I just read you one thing because I found it profoundly moving?” asked Deborah, who was wearing a rustic necklace of Indian silver and rough stones. She read from chapter 20, the passages where Ackerman describes the heroic actions of the zookeepers' neighbour, pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (who wrote children's books under the pen name Janusz Korczak). Goldszmit ran an orphanage for Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he invented plays and other distractions to soothe them. He repeatedly turned down invitations to escape because it would have meant abandoning the children. The men at Collins Bay had talked about the same passage. Deborah tried to read the sentence about how Goldszmit anticipated the fear of the children on deportation day, and then joined them on the train to Treblinka—all two hundred or so of them. “Because—” Her voice quavered and she stopped, then restarted with tears in her eyes, explaining that the doctor had gone along because he felt he could help them stay calm. She read aloud Ackerman's quote from Goldszmit's writings describing his belief that just as you would sit with a sick child through the night, you stay with children during an ordeal like deportation. Her hand moved to her throat, and she sat looking down at the page. She managed to read on, to where it describes him at the Transshipment Square marching hand in hand with some of the children, while the other children and ten other staff members walked behind, all under German guard and how none of the children cried or cowered because he was with them. After that, she was unable to read further.

I reflected on Henryk Goldszmit and the Zabinskis and the difference between their sacrifices. Goldszmit was a Jewish man protecting dozens of children from suffering, but unable to deliver them from their fate. As non-Jews, the Zabinskis' odds of survival were greater and their opportunity to save lives was greater, but their actions risked endangering more lives, including their own. The risk calculations were very different in each case but both involved a level of heroism that I had difficulty imagining.

The women's book club gathering was often more emotional than the men's. Now the women were eager to hear what the men had said about the book, and I passed around the men's comments. Lillian-Rose read aloud Parvat's observations about how, thanks to the book, he now knew that the Nazis' Aryan breeding program extended to animals as well. They admired Peter's comment about the zoo as a natural place to mount a defence against Nazi programs to extinguish life. So I told them about what Peter had said in the meeting: that the zoo was a place where goodness could reside, and that goodness was more contagious than evil. The women looked at me with slightly dazed expressions, absorbing the beauty of Peter's thought. No one spoke.

We closed up our books, sampled a Quebec-made blue cheese called La Roche Noire that Evelyn had set out and laughed as Carol told us about the time she babysat a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig in their house. The pig toileted on newspaper in the corner of the living room, rather like Antonina's badger, who used her son's training potty. “Vietnamese pigs love to have their bellies scratched and to watch TV,” Carol informed us.

“Rather like some husbands we know,” joked Betty.

We air-kissed one another good night and drove or walked home. When I opened the front door of our house, our elderly Maine Coon cat, John Small, staggered sideways as he came to greet me. He was eighteen years old and declining, but still dignified and kind. He bore the name of my ancestor, a minor official in the first government of Upper Canada who had shot and killed its first attorney general in a duel. The original John Small was tried for murder and acquitted. I gathered my cat into my arms. He smelled of urine and age. I carried him to a chair and sat and stroked him so that he would know he was cherished. He looked up into my eyes and the darkness of them told me he was in pain. I would have to make a decision soon about when the pain should stop, and I couldn't bear to contemplate that.