Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.
This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.
Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race.
So the streets change swiftly, the skyscrapers climb into silhouettes against the St. Lawrence, but it is somehow unreal and no one believes it, because in Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.
Breavman fled the city.
His mother was phoning him daily. She was alone, did he know what that meant? Her back was sore, her legs were swollen. People asked about her son and she had to tell them he was a factory worker.
Breavman laid the phone on the bed and let her talk. He had no strength or skill to comfort her. He sat beside the receiver, unable to speak or think, aware only of the monotonous rasp of her voice.
“I looked in the mirror today, I didn’t recognize myself, wrinkles from aggravation, from nights thinking about my son, do I deserve this, fifteen years with a sick man, a son who doesn’t care whether his mother lies like a stone, like a dog, a mother, an only mother should lie like a stone, a prostitute wouldn’t stand from her son what I stand, do I have so much, do I eat chocolate all day, have I got diamonds for all that I gave away, fifteen years, did I ever ask anything for myself, two broken legs from Russia, swollen ankles that the doctor was surprised, but my son is too busy to hear the truth, night after night I lie in front of the TV, does anybody care what I do, I was such a happy person, I was a beauty, now I’m ugly, people on the street don’t recognize me, I gave my life for what, I was so good to everyone, a mother, once in a lifetime you have a mother, do we live forever, a mother is a fragile thing, your best friend, in the whole world does anyone else care what happens to you, you can fall down on the street and people pass you by, and I lie like a stone, all over the world people are running to see their mothers, but to my son it doesn’t matter, he can get another mother, one life we have, everything is a dream, it’s luck …”
And when she was through he said, “I hope you’re feeling better, Mother,” and good-bye.
She was seeing a psychiatrist now. He didn’t seem to be helping her. Was she taking the pills he prescribed? Her voice sounded more hysterical.
He fled his mother and his family.
He had thought that his tall uncles in their dark clothes were princes of an élite brotherhood. He had thought the synagogue was their house of purification. He had thought their businesses were realms of feudal benevolence. But he had grown to understand that none of them even pretended to these things. They were proud of their financial and communal success. They liked to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren’t pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated. Where had he got the notion that they did?
When he saw the rabbi and cantor move in their white robes, the light on the brocaded letters of their prayer shawls, when he stood among his uncles and bowed with them and joined his voice to theirs in the responses; when he followed in the prayer book the catalogue of magnificence —
No, his uncles were not grave enough. They were strict, not grave. They did not seem to realize how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. They did not seem to realize how important they were, not self-important, but important to the incantation, the altar, the ritual. They were ignorant of the craft of devotion. They were merely devoted. They never thought how close the ceremony was to chaos. Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.
In the most solemn or joyous part of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation. The cantor, the rabbi, the chosen laymen stood before the open Ark, cradling the Torah scrolls, which looked like stiff-necked royal children, and returned them one by one to their golden stall. The beautiful melody soared, which proclaimed that the Law was a tree of life and a path of peace. Couldn’t they see how it had to be nourished? And all these men who bowed, who performed the customary motions, they were unaware that other men had written the sacred tune, other men had developed the seemingly eternal gestures out of clumsy confusion. They took for granted what was dying in their hands.
But why should he care? He wasn’t Isaiah, and the people claimed nothing. He didn’t even like the people or the god of their cult. He had no rights in the matter.
He didn’t want to blame anyone. Why should he feel that they had bred him to a disappointment? He was bitter because he couldn’t inherit the glory they unwittingly advertised. He couldn’t be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them. A nostalgia for solidarity. Why was his father’s pain involved?
He turned away from the city. He had abused the streets with praise. He had expected too much from certain cast-iron fences, special absurd turrets, staircases to the mountain, early-morning views of bridges on the St. Lawrence. He was tired of the mystery he had tried to impute to public squares and gardens. He was tired of the atmosphere in which he tried to involve Peel Street and boarding-house mansions. The city refused to rest quietly under the gauze of melancholy he had draped over the buildings. It reasserted its indifference.
He stood very still.
New York City. He lived in the tower of World Student House. His window overlooked the Hudson River. He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will. Everybody spoke a kind of English, no resentment, he could talk to people everywhere. He wandered in the early-morning markets. He asked the names of the fish, stiff and silver in boxes of ice. He attended more of his seminars.
He saw the most beautiful person and pursued her. Shell.