The Sky Is Falling (20 page)

When Timo rode up on his bike, Pete finally got out and slammed the door. “Will you look at that?” he said, pointing. He must have noticed the gnome before, when it first sprang up with the snowdrops. It was merely the first available object on which to vent. “Is that or is that not,” he said, rounding the car and heading for it, “the
second
-most-offensive lawn ornament you've ever seen?”

“Pete,” Sonia bleated. “Don't.”

“Sizism!” Pete bellowed. “I call that sizism! And here we've got a short person living next door! We've got Sonia! How's she going to feel looking at that every time she leaves the house?” Sonia grabbed his arm to hold him back but he jerked free and cupped his hands around his mouth. “SIZISTS!”

We all went in then, Pete upstairs to his boom box; Sonia and I debriefed with Timo in her room. I was glad Timo was there. Because of the kiss. I felt embarrassed now. Embarrassed by the kiss and embarrassed that I was still thinking about it and feeling its peppermint tingle, like Staff-Captain Ryabovitch with his lynx-like sidewhiskers. As soon as I thought of Ryabovitch, a different feeling overtook me, a nervous, trapped-bird fluttering.

Now that I knew it wasn't an affectation, I loved how Timo kept his pant leg rolled. It was the kind of detail Chekhov would put in a story. Panaurov lighting cigarettes off icon lamps; Timo Brandt, yellow curls damp and flattened by the helmet, going around with one pant leg calf-height. It summed up his character, his practicality, his enviable indifference to how he looked. Timo was soft. He was lazy. His feet were size sixteen. When he lay on the bed, the mattress roiled under his weight and the stuffed toys toppled. Sonia nestled beside him, her head on his chest. He looked right at me and patted his stomach so I crawled over too. We were like two children curled up with a damp, docile St. Bernard.

Sonia: “Do you think he put the leaflets in the rack?”

“What are you ttttalking about?” Timo asked.

“The security guard who caught us. He was going to put the leaflets out for us. What are the chances, Jane, of running into the two nicest people in the whole hotel?”

“You were the nicest person in the hotel,” I said.

“Then Pete—” She sighed. “Now Jock probably hates us. He probably thinks we're the Squamish Five.”

The trial of the Squamish Five was well under way now. Pete and Dieter were following it, talking about it every night at supper. Pete disagreed with their use of violence, but as he didn't believe in the court system or punitive justice, he was against the trial too. Dieter supported the group's goals but not their means, though he understood what had driven them to use force. By coincidence, the Squamish Five's most notorious bombing had taken place in Ontario, at the headquarters of the very company whose presence we had been protesting that day.

Timo stroked Sonia's hair. “You don't know what he was thinking.”

“Look.” She pulled up her sleeve to show us an arm mottled with what seemed like dirty fingerprints. Jock had changed back into his old self in the end—worse than his old self. He'd handled us quite roughly and I felt a delayed outrage now. How could Jock, or anyone, hurt Sonia? The marks were so blue against her skin.

“He seemed so nice,” Sonia moaned.

“I know what you need,” said Timo. “You need Chchchipits.”

“No Chipits.”

“Yes Chipits. They're in my pack, Jane.”

I was beginning to feel sick anyway, my head rising and falling on the swell of Timo's belly. I got up and found the Chipits in his bag. Timo propped himself against the headboard and opened the package with his teeth. When he poured some into Sonia's hand, she gave me a look that said she would eat them, but only because of me.

I knew Timo was studying psychology so I asked his advice. “I'm worried about Sonia. She takes everything so hard.”

“She's displaying a genuinely appppropriate response. We're sitting on six hundred thousand Hiroshimas.”

“I'm burning out,” she said. “I'm a falling star.”

“She doesn't sleep,” I said.

“Of course not,” Timo said. “Listen. I've got an idea about renaming the streets. Can I tell you? The leaders of famous nonviolent campaigns. So, Rosa Ppparks Street. Mahatma Gandhi Street. Nelson Mandela Street.”

“We should name a street after Sonia,” I said.

“Sonia Parker Street!” Timo cried. “Flowers everywhere! Free rides for children!”

Me: “Ice cream!”

“Isn't Timo wonderful?” Sonia asked me.

“Yes,” I said. Except now, when she praised him, I felt a little rush of jealousy.

Not until Sunday's meeting did we learn the whole story of what went wrong. Instead of leafleting with Timo according to the plan, Pete had joined up with Belinda and Carla, following behind them, getting between them. This had enraged the women. They felt harassed. Finally, Pete gave up and went down to the lobby, where he started handing out leaflets to everyone in “fascist dress.”

Meetings. Meetings to debrief the fiasco. Meetings to debrief the debriefing. Meetings to reaffirm our commitment to peace and non-violence. Accusations (aimed at Pete—I was relieved Dieter never brought up how I, too, had abandoned the plan), weeping (Belinda, Sonia), then reconciling hugs (everyone) and (finally, finally) we moved on without ever extracting an apology from Pete, though that was what everyone seemed secretly to want.

“People? What I meant was ‘go ahead and die
if you want
.' That's what it amounts to. That's the choice they're making. I didn't mean I personally wanted them dead. That's ludicrous. I'm an anarcho-
pacifist
.”

As soon as we began planning the next action, it became obvious that a coolness had developed between everyone and Pete. Physically it manifested in the way, during these meetings, he drifted off alone on the ice floe of the beanbag chair while the rest of us stuck to the shore on the other side of the room. I felt differently toward him too, warier, though I believed his explanation. Certainly relations froze over between him and Belinda because, after that, she was never at the Trutch house except for meetings.

All this internal strife affected Sonia. If the group was fighting, we weren't working for peace. If we weren't working for peace, we were slipping perilously closer to the apocalypse. The downing of Korean Airlines Flight
007
. The stationing of cruise missiles in West Germany. Now Andropov was dead. She resumed her visits to the stove, something she hadn't done since the night she brought me to
If You Love This Planet
. But I found a way to stop her. I began reading through the grate.

“
The appearance on the front of a new arrival—a lady with a lap
dog—became the topic of general conversation.
”

“Stop!” she called up.

I changed books and began again. “
On
20
May, at eight
o'clock in the evening, all six batteries of a reserve artillery brigade,
on their way back to headquarters, stopped for the night in the village
of Mestechki.
”

“Not that either!”

They were too sad. Instead of “Lady with a Lapdog” or “The Kiss,” she preferred “A Case History” and “The Fiancée” with their idealistic heroines, Liza and Nadya, both of them insomniacs, like Sonia. I read to her until she fell asleep and, afterward, I read on silently, now and then pausing to underscore something else that seemed written expressly to me.

Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and stars shine
in it, on returning home I always look up and think that I shall soon
be dead.

What we learned from the Hyatt action was that we needed more than a plan. We needed to rehearse, so for the next action, renaming the streets, we conducted practice runs and for part of every meeting acted out scenarios that Belinda devised and directed. Since we couldn't realistically change all the signs in the city, we settled on a single neighbourhood, our own, Kitsilano. In a single night we would turn it back into the peaceful haven it had been in the sixties when hippies instead of yuppies lived there. Getting arrested wasn't part of the plan. This time we aimed for something nobler: that the morning after, everyone living on those streets previously named for slaughter would wake and find themselves at peace. So Trafalgar Street became Caldicott Street and Balaclava, M. L. King Jr. Street. Blenheim changed to Gandhi Street and Waterloo to Mandela Street. People on Dunbar now resided on Chomsky Street. Alma became
Kropotkinskaya Ulitsa
.

During the preparatory weeks I found myself wondering if words alone could really make a difference. I knew from studying Russian that they sometimes did.
Morozhenoye
is so difficult to pronounce that Russian children aren't allowed to eat it until they can say it. It was not ice cream as I knew it in a plastic tub from the store, but a hand-churned nineteenth-century confection jewelled with wild strawberries. The strawberries were mandatory.
Chay
was drunk in a glass with a saucer of jam on the side. And I wondered, if we lived a few blocks east, where the streets were named after trees instead of battles—Larch, Balsam, Yew—would we quarrel so much?

We had to wait for a clear night. They weren't that common in late February, but finally one arrived and we set off after midnight on bicycles. Pete and I were the vanguard. “Imagine if we lived here in the sixties, Zed? In the sixties
student
was synonymous with
radical
. Now it's synonymous with
polo shirt
.” As the vanguard, we blacked out the original names while the others followed with the stencils.

It was the first time I'd been out all night. It was also the first time I'd drunk beer, which I didn't like even when Sonia diluted it with lemonade, the way she preferred it. Yet the little I drank had an exhilarating effect, as did the lot everyone else drank. Pete brought down his boom box and we pushed aside the furniture and danced in a circle to Janis Joplin and The Doors. With Timo jogging on the spot, curls bouncing, and Belinda whipping the floor with her hair, “
Come on, come on, come on,
come on!
” no one knew, or noticed, or probably cared, that I'd never danced before.

When it started to get light, we stepped out of the house holding hands.
It was the first time in his life he had seen the sunrise.
Rechristened, the streets were indeed peaceful at that hour. People were only starting to leave for work. As we broke the flesh and blood chain of our clasp to let each car through, everyone waved. “Excuse me?” Belinda called to a paperboy flinging lies onto porches. “Do you know the way to Gandhi Street?” He grinned and returned the peace sign that we flashed. I don't think I imagined the perfumed air. The only disappointment this time was how quickly the status quo was restored. Two days later, all the signs had been changed back.

Because of this action, as well as the more ambitious one we started planning for next, my studies began to suffer. I felt distracted in tutorials and barely scored
70
percent on my Russian quiz on irregular past tenses. I couldn't blame this entirely on my desire to save the world. Filling Sonia's shoes with Russian words, drinking tea with her ( Japanese style if we went to her room, Russian style in mine), rearranging my room so that my futon was next to the grate, reading to her through it—for me, these were the real actions. After she dozed off, it would take me an hour or more to calm myself because, near her, even if there was a floor between us, I felt jittery with happiness. I couldn't forget the kiss any more than I could forget its literary antecedent.

Still, I wouldn't name the feeling, couldn't admit to love, not even to
lyubov
.

For the subject of my final term paper in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation I chose
Anna Karenina
. I wanted to write something about Levin's second proposal to Kitty, whom he asks to marry early in the book, only to be refused because Kitty expects an offer from the dashing Count Vronsky. It takes Levin another three hundred and sixty pages to get over his wounded pride and ask for her hand again, which he finally does while Kitty is sitting at a card table doodling with a piece of chalk. Fear of a second rejection renders him mute. Levin takes the chalk and writes the letters w-y-t-m-
i-c-n-b
-d-y-m-n-o-t? He means,
When you told me
it could not be—
did that
mean never or then?
He hands her the chalk and she writes: T-I-c-n-a-d.
Then I could not answer differently.
They continue like this, writing on the felt top of the table, declaring their love in code.

I was intrigued by the scene. In one way their reserve seemed anti-romantic, a contrast to Anna and Vronsky, who have no difficulty communicating their passion. Yet as the novel progresses, Anna and Vronsky's ideal romance flags while Kitty and Levin's marriage, portrayed with all its flaws, grows more delightful. I hadn't begun to formulate my thesis. All I knew was that it had to do with language and that I wanted to write a paper that would please Professor Kopanyev and make up for my stuporous performance of late.

In the chapter where Kitty first meets Anna, I read this sentence:
It was obvious that Anna admired her beauty and youth, and
before Kitty knew where she was she felt herself not only under Anna's
sway but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with married
women older than themselves.