AFTER MY RETURN from Leuven in 1975, I attended a French Catholic church near my parents’ home with a man named Ernie Lonergan, where the liturgy was delivered in the broken French of Maillardville, a town of displaced French-Canadian workers from Eastern Canada. We were an odd couple, he well into his eighties, and me just twenty, but both of us on the linguistic fringe of New Westminster’s mainstream Wasp society.
I learned over the course of the summer that Mr. Lonergan was once the owner of a textile factory in St. Petersburg, and that he had an outstanding claim against the Soviets going back to the revolution. He spoke nine languages and yet the only one I ever conversed with him in was French. For many years, prior to coming to Canada, he had lived with his family in Reading in south-east England, where I used to visit Thomas Cowper Johnson, a direct descendant of Edward the Confessor and of the poet John Cowper Powys.
I was introduced to Mr. Lonergan, because his daughter Gabrielle had married my father’s oldest brother Joe, Distinguished Flying Cross and bar (shot down over Dover after dumping a load on the Germans, saved his crew and then bailed). Joe was later Canadian Forces Exchange officer to the Pentagon and Military Aide to three BC Lieutenant Governors.
Gabrielle, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, was born Gabrielle Josephine Sophia Dagmar Mousley Lonergan — in 1925 in Danzig, Free State of Danzig. Gabrielle’s godmother was the Dowager Empress of Russia, in exile in Danzig. Her mother was brought up with the Tsar and Tsarina’s children, and fled Russia in a hay cart in 1925, quite possibly with the knowledge that the Tsar’s family had been murdered by Lenin’s thugs in Ekaterinburg.
Looking at an old map of the Soviet Union, I imagine the trajectory. A young woman climbs onto a hay cart, and the horses plod forward. The year is 1925. First due west, following Napoleon’s march into Russia, but in reverse. Napoleon, who had proposed to a MacKinnon in the highlands and was declined, yet retained the bond of friendship with the clan. The hay cart moves then south-southeast to Smolensk, then onwards to Polotsk. From there, they opt for a less-travelled road, one of three choices at the fork, and then to Vitevsk, through Desna, Drissa, Dunaburg. They are passing along the right bank of the Duna, onwards to Riga, and then back through Miga, Couland, Tilsit, before on to Wehlau where the road joins. They are tired and dressed in black, like a funeral cortège. In 1812, only a century earlier, Napoleon’s advance bases were on the Vistula, right at Danzig and Warsaw. Now, in another century, I look from the canals of Amsterdam at this journey that would lead Aunt Gabrielle to Vancouver, the place of my birth.
Would they have gone west, towards Talinn in Estonia, and the Baltic Sea? Mr. Lonergan had mentioned something about Estonia in our conversations. In 1975, the Soviet Union was still shut off from the world. The thuggish oligarchs born of glasnost were not yet in the ascendancy. It was Brezhnev, et voilà. The Central Committee. Borderless travel yet to become the rule, and, entertainment-wise, only Solzhenitsyn’s dreary annals of life in the Gulag Archipelago to break the monotony. Russia was then, as it is today, a mystery, still locked in its eternal mind-split as to whether it is European or Slavonic. As if Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, rather than liberating them, paralyzed the entire nation in a gyre of division as to its identity.
What with borders, and iron curtains, and people coming out of the closet, we’ve forgotten to look behind what was hidden behind in earlier times. But, gazing backwards, there must have been fear, because if that hay cart contained the jewels of the family of the Dowager Empress during that ride, the first plundering wayfarer coming by might just hit the lottery. Since Gabrielle was born on January 15, she was less than a year old, not that that would have protected them.
I’m not interested as much in the free city of Danzig as in the restless drift that governs our family, for it seems that we never find our rest. In any event, I had some decisions to make quickly, and looking back, it must have been my friendship with Ernest Lonergan that led me to reorient my studies, and take on a double course load in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Like anything else, my decision appeared to be a mad impulse to my family, but of course, none of them had even noticed that, as a twelveyear-old, while they frolicked in the sea, playing water sports, I read Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. It would be another seven years before I discovered Solzhenitsyn, but he is not of the same class, while Nabokov is of another stripe. So, for me there was no break, no leisure as I constructed my own gulag with tools of my own confection. I would get to the bottom of these Russians in one year, and so it was that I enrolled in the following curriculum at UBC:
Geography of the Soviet Union
Slavonic Studies
History of the Soviet Union
History of the Tsars
Europe — twentieth century
Russian language
It seemed to make sense, and it posted another stake onto my mental map. But I had no knowledge whatsoever of the immensity of the task at hand, and I had elected to take only fourth-year courses, certain on the day that I could pull anything off.
For one year, I planned to douse myself in everything Russian, but then, as September approached and the reality of having imposed an impossible programme, I began having a series of headaches, and fearing the worst, I sought to cover it up by drinking, as heavily as possible. But, in the solitude of my thoughts, I was presuming that my time was up and that God had broken his bargain with me. Clearly, I had no choice but to leave town as soon as possible. The academic term had yet to start and I could already sense a churning within, and the imp of the perverse gnawing at my existential innards, refusing to let me free.
It was just as Haemish had said — wherever I went, things just tended to happen. This would all have amounted to nothing more than idle rumination, had a random event not intervened and placed me in clear and present danger. From a most unexpected cause, it would drive me right out of the country, unable to explain why to anyone of my entourage without risking utter shame and humiliation.