The Sky Is Falling (3 page)

“Hector! Hold it!”

They manoeuvred the heavy frame down the stairs, further distressing the walls, out the front door and down the steps with Belinda directing them like an air traffic controller. “Jane and I will take the mattress,” she said when they dropped it in the long grass. “You guys take the bed.”

Pete turned to me. “What do you think of that, Zed?” I didn't know what he meant. He was the one who had recruited me. “A real fair-weather feminist,” he said, pointing his chin at Belinda. “All for equality until there's something heavy to carry.”

Hector squatted, ready. “Come on, Peeete.”

“Oh no. We'll
all
carry it.”

“God,” said Belinda, rolling her eyes.

Single-handedly Pete threw the mattress on the frame, then we each took a corner of the bed. It was heavy. We shuffled down the walk and straight into the middle of the street. When a car came up behind us, we moved to the side to let it pass.

“How far?” Hector asked.

“Blenheim Street,” Belinda said.

Hector looked across the bed at me. “I'm forgetting your name.”

“Jane.”

“I'm Ector.”

“Yes,” I said.

At the corner we set our burden down and breathed collectively for a moment before struggling on another block. By then my hands were screaming. I wanted to stop, but didn't. Hector voiced my feelings. He said carrying the bed was killing him. Belinda said that if we died, it would not be in vain, she would erect a plaque.

“To the Glorious Committee of the Bed-Carrying International!” Hector cried.

Another car came up behind us. “Keep going,” Pete told us. “Move to the side,” Belinda said. “God.”

The car honked. We were panting now.

“Why?” asked Pete. “Why should cars have the right of way and not beds? If beds had the right of way—do not let go, people!—this world wouldn't be so fucked up!”

The driver craned out the window. “Excuse me?”

“Get a bed!” Pete yelled. “Make love instead of polluting the world!”

I dropped my corner. Everyone stumbled forward, and Pete, using the momentum, tackled Belinda on the bed. It seemed he couldn't let her go after all. She shrieked, then succumbed, letting him twine his body around hers, squid tight, as they necked, demonstrating for her, or us, their interconnection. He flipped onto his back so she was on top, her astonishing hair falling around them, a privacy curtain. Hector burst into applause. When the driver got out of the car, I turned and ran.

My main occupation that first day was putting together the futon I'd bought as a kit and alternately dragged and carried on my back like a peddler all the way from Fourth Avenue without any help from anyone. I found the broom and swept, opened the window to uncloy the air of sandalwood, piled my books against the wall in alphabetical order. Now I lay on the futon trying to read
Anna Karenina
, but mostly fretting as suppertime approached. I didn't know why they had picked me. Were there so few vegetarians around? When I went downstairs, would I be accused of letting them down when I let go of the bed? I truly couldn't have held on a moment longer. Then why did I run away, they would want to know. Because I was scandalized. Was that how people really acted?

“Supper!” one of the men called.

I was first to arrive except for Dieter, who was at the sink dumping the contents of a pot into a colander, the lenses of his glasses opaque with fog. Maybe he really didn't see me this time. “Supper!” he screamed.

Sonia appeared next, pretty and unbrushed, fingering her cross, then Pete, who skated across the floor in socks. As soon as Dieter thumped the pot of spaghetti down in the middle of the table, Pete lunged for it while Dieter waited, poised to get the tongs next. It surprised me, the carnivorous way vegetarians ate; Sonia and I had yet to serve ourselves. She gestured for me to go first. I took half of what remained, she a few tangled strands. The moment the tongs were returned to the pot, Pete snatched them and claimed the rest.

No one spoke—because of me, I presumed. Because I'd dropped the bed. I fixed my self-conscious gaze on the flayed face of Ronald Reagan on the opposite wall, the nail jutting from his empty eye socket. The men seemed intent on their food, Sonia too, but while they ate with gusto, she was a baby bird grappling open-throated with a very long worm. I suspected, though, that if I got up and left the room they would probably start twittering like birds at the precise crack of dawn. Twittering:
She dropped the bed! She dropped the bed!

Dieter inflicted a goofy smile on Sonia, who grimaced and turned her tired eyes to me. “Are you all moved in?”

I gulped some water so I could speak. “Yes. There wasn't much to move.”

Pete had already cleaned his plate! He went to the fridge for a loaf of bread and a tub of margarine, slapped a nubbled slice down, painted it with the spread. There was a jar on the table full of yellow powder, which he dumped on his bread. Only now did he and Dieter begin to talk, heatedly, as though they were picking up an argument they'd called a truce on before supper. When Dieter called, I'd been reading that scene in
Anna Karenina
where two prominent Moscow intellectuals come to Oblon-sky's for dinner.
They respected each other, but upon almost every
subject were in complete and hopeless disagreement, not because they
belonged to opposite schools of thought but for the reason they belonged
to the same camp.
Dieter was defensive, emphatic, offended, Pete aloof. “You agree?” Dieter asked. “Don't you?” He would glance over at Sonia every time he made a point, to see the effect it had on her.

When Sonia pushed away her plate, Pete used the excuse of scooping the remaining noodles off it to end his conversation with Dieter and go out on the deck, the strands hanging from his mouth, like hay. Dieter began stacking the dirty dishes. He paused to tug Sonia's hair and say, “Ding dong, Avon calling!” which drove her immediately from the room. That left just me sitting at the table. It was over, the agony of my first supper, with no one mentioning the bed. I'd hardly been required to speak at all. “Thank you,” I said to Dieter before slinking out, relieved. He looked blankly at me through his big plastic frames.

Back upstairs, in my near-empty room with
Anna Karenina
, I thought that if it was going to be like that every night I would probably survive, which was, anyway, all I ever expected.

The year before, I'd come to Vancouver with only a general idea of what I wanted to study. I'd made a shopping list of possible courses, but when I showed up to register I discovered it really was like shopping, my least favourite thing, the gym a marketplace crowded with hundreds of students. For every course you had to stand in line to receive a computer card, first-come, first-served. It was a hot day and I was perspiring madly in the crush. At the Slavonic Studies table the line was negligible. I'd always wanted to read
War and Peace
.

Later in the year Professor Kopanyev told me he'd assumed I'd enrolled in his survey course because of my Polish background, but this was not the case. My father had come to Canada when he was my age, eighteen, so had lived most of his life here. He never talked about his childhood. When I came to stay with my aunt, she told me cabbage rolls were his favourite dish, but we always ate Canadian—pork chops with Minute Rice, Sloppy Joes, McCain frozen pizza. Other than an unpronounceable last name, nothing remotely Polish could be said about me.

In the first semester of Slavonic Studies we covered the history, geography, and economy of the Soviet Union. I wrote a paper on the emancipation of the serfs. We turned to literature in the second semester with Kopanyev presenting a biographical lecture on the greatest writer who ever lived—Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn—depending on the week. We read a sample work by these authors, discussed them in tutorials, then selected one as a subject for a paper. At the end of the year someone put up his hand and asked, “How can they all be the greatest?” It seemed obvious to me by then.

Kopanyev was tall and bearded, always tweedily dressed in shades of brown. One day he asked me to stay after class, which was when he commented on my surname. He said that my paper on Chekhov was both entertaining and insightful and he hoped I would continue in the department the following year. Ours was a small class, not even a dozen students, so I knew not to take his praise too much to heart. But I did. All year I had slunk from lecture to lecture praying that no one would notice me but now I was both thrilled and grateful that someone had.

My paper was titled “Boredom and Sadness in the Short Stories of Anton Chekhov.” I'd chosen a collection of eleven of his stories in a popular translation and counted how many times he used words associated with these emotions.
Bored
appeared sixteen times,
bore
three times,
boringly
once.
Not interesting, uninteresting
, and
uninterestingly
once each. People, society, life—these were described four times as
dull
, and a further seven as
monotonous
.
Monotony
was used three times,
dissatisfaction
twice,
dissatisfied
once. One character gazed
apathetically
at her empty yard. I didn't count the condition of the yard, but I did include her later feeling of
emptiness
. Also the fact that on first impression Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks there is something
pathetic
about Anna Sergeyevna, “The Lady with a Lapdog,” soon to be the great love of his life. I interpreted
pathetic
as
sad
, an emotion referred to ten other times in the collection.
Sadly
(
3
).
Sadness
(
2
).
Unhappy
(
2
).
Sorrow
(
1
). “Were these
depressed
(
3
) characters full of
melancholy
(
3
) and
despair
(
3
) because life was
boring
(
5
), or does perpetual
boredom
(
3
) lead to a
mournfully
(
1
)
depressing
(
1
) and
despondent
(
1
) life?”

Kopanyev flipped through my handwritten pages. “I read some out to my wife. We had good laugh.”

“Really?” I said.

“This word
skuchno
. It implies boredom, of course. But also sadness, desolation, gloom, yearning. Russians are always sad and it's boring. Aren't you?”

I stared at him.

“No?” He rolled my paper into a tube and poked me with it. “Come back next year. Take Russian.”

And so I did.

Kopanyev assured us learning Russian would be easy because, he claimed, it was a phonetic language. But right from hello, from
zdrastvuytye
, I realized this wasn't always the case. There was the matter of stress, too, how an unstressed
O
will convert to an
A
, for example. If you stressed the wrong syllable, the meaning of the word would change. “Like with
pismo
.
PisMO
. Letter.
PISma
. Letters.”

He seemed even more ursine this year as he handed out the alphabet. Cyrillic, he explained, was named for the Byzantine monk who gave the Slavs a written language. He'd had to draw on Greek, Hebrew, and old Latin. Three full alphabets plundered to represent all the Russian sounds. My eye went straight to the familiar letters, but only five of these actually corresponded to their English equivalents. An
M
might have sounded like an
M
, but
B
was
V
,
P
was
R
with a roll,
X
a truncated gargle. A gargle!
A
and
O
were ostensibly the same, but then Kopanyev was shouting at us, “They are long! Long! Open your mouths! Open them!”

There were two special symbols, sort of lower-case
b
s, that were not letters per se, but signs meaning
soft
or
hard
. “You must soften preceding consonant. Like so.” And he showed us what was happening in his mouth, his tongue cozying up against his palate. He drew a picture on the board.

“Okay. First letter: A. Repeat: A like fAther. Like I am doctor looking down your throat.”

We recited the alphabet. That was all we did until, walking out of the room at the end of the fifty minutes, I felt like I was drowning in unutterable sounds.

Now everything had a different name.
Dom
. (House.)
Spalnya
. (Bedroom.)
Kniga
. (Book.) I took over Belinda's chore, vacuuming upstairs and down, practising my Russian as I worked. In the living room, the
gastinaya
, Hector was playing the guitar. He didn't live there, but he often stayed over, and when I came in with the vacuum he perched on the chesterfield, like a crow on a power line, so his feet wouldn't be in my way.

I was still wrangling the machine, the
pylesos
(I'd stopped vacuuming to look it up), when Sonia burst in the front door. The way she looked at me, I thought of Anna Sergeyevna without her Pomeranian. Anna Sergeyevna, uncombed. But how could Sonia be pathetic? If I'd been her, of course, I would have been the happiest girl in the world.