1984

A grey quilt thrown across December. I glanced up and, remembering the missiles, quickly hoisted my umbrella. As though a bit of nylon stretched over some flimsy metal ribs could save me! Then the Reliant, so motley, so cheerful, pulled into the bus stop and honked. Dieter unrolled the passenger window so Pete could call out from the driver’s side. “Get in, Zed!” To Dieter, Pete said, “Let Zed sit in front.”

Dieter: “What?”

“You heard me. Don’t be such a creature. Mix it up.”

Dieter, lips rosebudded, got out of the car and slammed the door before getting in the back. “Oh, thanks,” I said.

“I’m not going to hold it open for you, Jane. That’s sexist.”

I got in. The sticker on the glove compartment read Military Intelligence is an Oxymoron. Dangling from the rear-view mirror, a plastic Virgin Mary with a man’s bearded face cut from a book and pasted over hers. Pete saw me staring at it. “That’s Kropotkin.” A jab started the figure pirouetting on its string.

“She doesn’t know who Kropotkin is,” Dieter said from the back.

“Did you before I told you?”

I felt for the seat belt but the buckle had been cut off. Only one windshield wiper worked, luckily the one on Pete’s side. It was raining seriously now and my side was all smears. He turned in the direction of Fourth Avenue, then immediately into the alley. “Where are you going?” Dieter said. “I have an exam.”

Pete: “I forgot something.”

We drove down our own alley, past the pristine back yards, then the moss farm that was ours, around the corner and onto our street, circuit complete when Pete pulled into his original parking spot. “Unroll your window, Zed.” I did and he looked out at the house next door where the drapes were fully open now. The neighbour, usually in melancholy vigil in the morning, was gone. Pete stepped out of the car into the rain and, keys jangling, went around to unlock the trunk.

“What’s he doing?” Dieter asked me.

Strolling toward the house. Then he veered off the path and cut through our long grass, which lay down for him. When he reached the neighbour’s emerald turf, he suddenly bolted for the garden statue, the black man in livery, twin to the one on our living room hearth. “Fuck,” Dieter said, which summed up what I felt, though in different words. After a brief struggle, Pete wrested the statue free. It had been wired to something; I saw metal feelers protruding from the base as he ran with it CFL-style back to the car. A thud, then the trunk slammed and Pete slid into the driver’s seat with a single bead of rain hanging off his nose, just above the smile. I shrank down in the seat.

“Great,” Dieter said. “I’m officially late.”

Pete turned to me and placed a hand carefully on my forehead. I pulled away from his touch. “Stick out your tongue,” he said.

“Are you nuts?”

He caught my wrist in a tight clasp and took my pulse. “Still depressed” was his diagnosis when he finally let me go. “I’ll check on you later, Zed.”

My parents wrote me every week I was away at university. To save postage, my father always included his letter with my mother’s, versions of My dear Jane, I am glad to hear your studies are going so well. He would cut off the unused portion of the page for his next letter until all that was left was a strip like you’d pluck out of a hat for charades.

That Christmas they waited for me to come home before putting up the tree. My father did the man’s work, bringing the box up from the basement, grappling with the assembly, swearing, while my mother and I unpacked the ornaments. Last year I’d been so happy to come home to the only people in the world I could be myself with, but this year I was different, wiser I thought, older than my years.

“How did exams go?”

“All right, I guess.” In my hand was the innocent toilet paper angel I had made a thousand years ago, before I knew I’d be dead at nineteen.

My father paused in his cursing to say, “All A’s, I bet.”

“Not necessarily. I won’t find out for sure until I get back. I’m going back earlier than I said.” They both looked at me. “I’ve got things to do,” I told them.

“What things?” my father asked.

“I have to buy a desk.”

They were hurt. I shouldn’t have mentioned leaving so soon, but it was all I wanted to do. During the bus trip home I’d been amazed at how quickly we entered winter. Just past Hope, the season had been lying in wait. It made Vancouver seem all the more vulnerable, ever draped in the fragility of spring, never donning winter’s frozen armour. I felt an urgency to get back and somehow guard it.

A few days before, Sonia had invited me to go downtown. I’d finished my exams and felt like being with other people before the world came to an end. I felt like being with Sonia. At the bus stop, we met up with Belinda and Carla from the “Women Only” house, Carla who seemed colourless next to Belinda in her padded Mao jacket and bright pink harem pants. Sonia hugged Carla and Carla hugged Sonia and, to my dismay, Carla, whom I didn’t even know and had only seen once, the night they found out I was studying Russian, hugged me too. Belinda was swinging on the pole; we had to stand back to avoid the red lash of her hair. She twirled over to Sonia and hugged her. Then she saw me and cried, “Ho ho, Jane! Congratulations! Sonia finally got you!”

I turned to Sonia, who was beaming. “It’s how we’ll save the world, Jane. One person at a time.”

Then Belinda, of course, hugged me, breathing in my ear, “I hear Sonia gets little Russian notes in her shoes.” She pulled back and looked at me. “I want a note.”

Carla husked, “Me too.”

We were going to The Bay to put stickers on war toys. They’d already been to Eaton’s and Woodward’s, Sonia told me on the bus, smiling and leaning over the seat ahead of where I sat with Carla. “We got kicked out of Woodward’s,” Carla boasted. My shock must have shown because she hastened to add, “Don’t worry. They can’t arrest us.”

Never in my life had I intentionally done wrong. I hadn’t even handed in an assignment late. I had, of course, given my parents the usual teenage grief, but I didn’t count that. “I don’t want to get in trouble,” I said.

Belinda and Carla exchanged glances. Carla said, “You can be support. Are you okay with that?”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll be the lookout and if anything happens to us—”

“Nothing will happen,” Sonia assured me.

“You let the others know.”

“Who?”

Belinda: “Call Pete.”

“All right,” I said.

The plan when we got off the bus was to fan out and enter separately, then meet up again in the third-floor bathroom. “The handicapped stall,” Carla said.

“What if someone has to use it?” I asked and Belinda spread her arms and pulled me to her again. She smelled of patchouli and B.O. “Jane,” she cooed. “Everything will be fine.”

“It’s her first time,” said Sonia. “It’s normal to be nervous.”

I felt her little hand pet me.

Inside, the store was shiny with Christmas, tinkly with piped-in carols. A harried clerk looked up from her register as I passed. There would be security guards, too, posing as Christmas shoppers on the watch for shoplifters. I insinuated myself into the crowd on the escalator and was the first to reach the bathroom. Please Do Not Throw Sanitary Products in the Toilet read a notice on the back of the stall door. A tap. I unlocked the door for Carla, who immediately crouched to unzip her backpack and hand me a sheet of stickers.

Warning: This is a war toy.

Studies show violent games

make violent children.

This Christmas, think peace.

She took a black marker from her backpack and wrote under the sanitary products notice: Ronald Reagan is a criminal! Throw HIM in the toilet! Then the door handle rattled and Belinda bellowed on the other side, “Hey! What’s going on in there?”

“Are you okay, Jane?” Sonia asked when we were all crowded in the stall together. “You can bail if you want.”

I shook my head.

Carla distributed the sheets of stickers to the others. “Toys are at the top. Pretend you’re shopping. If a clerk gets suspicious, employ distraction. We’ll meet up afterward.”

“Where?”

“The cafeteria.”

“No. It’s on the same floor.”

Belinda suggested Santa’s Workshop. Then she dropped her harem pants and peed in front of us. After they left, I stayed behind for a minute dashing cold water on my face and wiping it with paper towels.

The escalator delivered me up in Furniture and Appliances. I had to stagger around looking for Toys. When I found it, Carla was working independently, Sonia and Belinda together. I passed behind them, nonchalantly I hoped, and heard Belinda ask in her stage voice, “God. What do you think? Will he like this?”

“Nope,” said Sonia, slapping a sticker on the box.

“This?”

“Nope.” Slap.

“This then?”

“Nope.” Slap. Giggle.

I looked around for a clerk but there wasn’t anyone except an elderly woman in a knitted beanie hobbling toward me. She seemed exhausted. “Where are the Cabbage Patch Kids?”

“Sorry. I don’t work here.”

“They have squashy faces.”

“Are these them?” I asked, pointing to some nearby dolls.

“That’s not squashy.”

I suggested she talk to a clerk and, as she limped off, I hissed to the others to clear out. Belinda and Sonia separated at once, heading in different directions. I had to go over to Carla with a second warning before she took off. It would look suspicious if I left then too, so I picked up a box and pretended to be interested in model building. The picture on the lid showed a green army airplane raining down bombs.

The old woman came back. “No luck,” she told me. “They’re sold out.” Then she thanked me for helping her.

“I didn’t do anything.”

As soon as I said it I knew I didn’t want those to be my last words.

Living on the West Coast had softened me. I couldn’t tolerate the Prairie cold any more. When my mother insisted on taking me to the West Edmonton Mall for clothes I didn’t want, I dashed from car to store and, even in that short time, sprang a nosebleed. My mother yearned for me to feel pretty. She urged me to try on frilly tops and skirts, even though she didn’t dress that way herself. (She was the slacks and sweaters type.) When I was in high school she seemed to think that if I dressed differently my problems would be solved, I would make friends, when what I’d really needed was to be inconspicuous, not to make enemies. Anyway, all of that was in the past. It was trite. There were enough missiles pointed in my direction to kill me twenty times. It didn’t matter what I wore. Sonia didn’t care about clothes either.

Faced with my mounting sullenness, my mother finally gave up and we ran the frigid gauntlet back to the car with a new pair of runners. I vowed not to step outside the house again for the rest of the visit.

She turned on the heater and, while we waited for the engine to warm up, she studied me. “Don’t,” I said, bringing my mittens to my face.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you have a fight with your aunt?”

“No.”

“Then why aren’t you going to see her any more?”

“I was busy with exams,” I said.

“She was kind to you last year,” my mother said. “I’ll just remind you of that.” Then, tentatively, she asked, “What about those girls you’re living with?”

Worried, fretful little Sonia with her sudden bursts of joy. I had one too, at the thought of her. “Remember I wrote you about Sonia? We’ve started doing things together.”

My mother pounced on this. “You’ve made a friend?”

What a freak she’d given birth to! She never said that, of course, but I intuited it every time she tried to help me. The heater pumped out its chinook, but I answered coldly, “She’s really nice. That’s all I’m saying.”

“So what’s wrong then, sweetheart? What’s bothering you?”

I winced and drew a circle on the window.

“What?” she asked.

“Do you ever think about dying?”

“Not if I can help it. What are you nursing morbid thoughts for? It’s Christmas.”

A line to bisect the circle, then two drooping arms. Peace. “Mom? We’re on the very brink of a nuclear war.”

I wasn’t expecting her to be relieved, especially not to laugh. “My goodness! Is that it?”

“Yes!” I told her.

“Why waste your time worrying about problems you can’t fix?”

“Maybe we can fix it!”

“Jane. That’s silly.” She put the car in reverse and began to inch out of the parking spot. “And don’t mention this to your father. You know how he feels about Communists.”

“Not wanting the world to blow up has nothing to do with Communism! That’s just so ridiculous! The nuclear clock? It’s at three minutes to midnight. There’s a fifty-fifty chance of a nuclear war occurring by 1985. That’s not me talking. That’s the generals. The scientists. Nobel Prize winners.”

We were halfway out of the parking stall. My mother had braked for my outburst and now she sighed. “They’re always talking about it on the news. But, please. We haven’t seen you in four months. It will ruin the holiday, Jane. Just ruin it.”

Barely three weeks before I’d felt exactly the same way. I knew the threat was there but somehow it lacked imperative. It was hard to understand now how I could have been so blasé about my own annihilation. If someone had held a gun to my head, I would have run screaming, but twenty thousand guns had had no effect. Were we all hypnotized? Was there something in the water? Yet if not for Sonia and Dr. Caldicott, I would still be carrying on like my mother was. “Don’t you get it?” I said. “Holidays don’t matter any more! There might never be another Christmas!”

The way she looked at me I wondered if I’d actually gotten through to her.

On Christmas Eve we played Scrabble. My father joined us in a game and, according to tradition, stormed off in a huff when we laughed at his spelling. Later he always crept back asking, “Who’s the smartest girl on Earth?” Being smart wasn’t enough now. I would need to be brave. I thought of Sonia practising bravery at the stove; so would I, in my own way. Mummied in outerwear, I went out to run a hurried loop around our cul-desac. The street lights cast their sequins on the shovelled driveways and the fresh snow crackled under my boots. In Russian the vocabulary for winter is immense. There are three words for blizzard, two for a hole in the ice. Single words that mean a thin layer of slippery ice, or newly fallen snow, or a frozen snow crust. It was minus thirty-one degrees and every painful breath I took asked me if I seriously wished to live. Yes, I exhaled. Yes!

Two days later, at the bus depot, my father gave his spiel. The horse, the dog, the gun. My mother cried and so did I.

I was sure I’d never see them again.

I thought I would have the house to myself when I returned, but as it happened Dieter had come back early from Saskatchewan to fill the sink with unwashed dishes and the compost bowl with rotting matter. Reagan hung flaccidly from his eye socket, face to the wall, disgusted by the sight. I knew Dieter was responsible because when I went upstairs I heard him laughing with a girl behind his closed bedroom door. Given his tireless pursuit of Sonia, I decided he was more of a Marxist-pacifist-hypocrite than anything else he claimed to be.

I hadn’t slept a minute of the overnight bus trip so, as soon as I got in, I went to bed for the rest of the day. When I woke, it was to darkness and voices and music downstairs. I would have preferred to avoid Dieter and his paramour, but hunger made our meeting inevitable.

Only the girl was there when I went down, looking through the cupboards, a patterned scarf turbaned around her head. The music was Pete’s, CCR. It was his boom box, too, on the counter. The girl gasped when she saw me. “Where did you come from?”

“Upstairs,” I said.

“Have you been here all along?”

I nodded, pulling a bag of perogies from the freezer. She opened another cupboard and spoke hollowly into it. “I’m making a stir-fry. Do you want to eat with us?”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t you remember me? We met at the film.” I turned and the pale blue guilt in her eyes washed over me. “Ruth,” she said.

At that moment Pete walked in from the deck. After not seeing him for a week, I was freshly struck by the oxymoron. He was a commanding anarchist. “Zed! You’re back!”

“She’s been here all along,” Ruth said.

“Where’s Dieter?” I asked, though it was obvious now that he was still in Saskatchewan.

“How should I know?” Pete turned to Ruth. “Bye-bye.”

“I’m making a stir-fry,” Ruth said.

“No, no. Time to go. Zed’s here now.”

“Don’t mind me,” I said.

“I bought all the stuff,” Ruth said, moistening.

“Take it with you.”

Pete opened the fridge and started shoving bags at her. It took some cajoling to get her out of the house; she was sobbing by the time she left. Meanwhile, I cooked my perogies and sat down to eat them in the kitchen, unable to get to my room because of the drama playing out in the hall. Before Pete closed the front door, I heard Ruth ask, “Are you doing it with her too?” I couldn’t believe it. As if I would fall in love with someone like Pete. I’d never fall in love, period.

“What’s for supper?” he asked, coming into the kitchen.

“Stir-fry, I hear.”

“Zed, is this really you? You didn’t talk like this before.” He checked the fridge—“Oh look. She left something”—and sat down across from me, tossing his long hair back. I wasn’t going to say a word about him betraying Belinda, but I felt sorry for Ruth. I told him he was mean.

He bit into the forgotten pepper, shook the seeds into his palm, and pressed them with his tongue. “Why?”

“You hurt her feelings.”

“I did not. I’m not in charge of how she feels. I didn’t make her come here. She came of her own free will.”

“Does Dieter know you used his room?”

“You’re not going to get started on that, are you?”

“You said you were going home.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I asked you if you were going home for Christmas and you said yes.”

“You asked where I was spending Christmas. I live here, Zed. This is my home. Here. With you.” He waited for me to redden before adding, “And the others.” Then he tossed the stem of the pepper across the room, basketting the compost perfectly.

I continued eating, watched by Pete, until I couldn’t stand his canine gaze another minute. “Get a plate then,” I said. “If you can find a clean one.”

After supper I went out to buy more food. I checked the kitty while Pete was at the sink singing along to his boom box, well into the dishes, for which I was unreasonably grateful. Pennies. I didn’t want to ask him to contribute. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was prepared to eat with him every night.

Later, when I returned from the store, not only had he finished the dishes, he’d emptied the compost. I went up to my room and, as I was passing the bathroom, Pete called to me. “Zed?” I stopped in the doorway. He was lying in the tub, reclining in its clawfoot embrace, a veil of steam hanging around him, concealing nothing. “What?” I quavered.

“Bring my boom box up from the kitchen?”

I did that for him. I went downstairs, unplugged it, and brought it up.

“Great. Can you plug it in?” A long, dripping arm pointed to the outlet. I sidled in, keeping my back to him.

“Do you want me to turn it on?”

“Can you get another tape? In my room. There’s a box.”

I crossed the hall. His books were still homeless, walls bare, sleeping bag balled up on his foamie, the cassettes in yet another milk crate. “Which one?” I called.

“I don’t know. Read them to me.”

They were all dubs with handwritten labels, mostly music from the sixties and early seventies. He was always lamenting he’d been born too late, that his prime was wasted on the eighties. The surprise was that he had Mozart. He settled on Hendrix.

“Jimi lived here, did you know that?”

“No.” I fed the cassette to the machine, snapped closed its plastic mouth.

“His father was born here. Imagine. A black person in Vancouver.”

“There are Chinese,” I said in defence of my adopted city.

“Fuck the Chinese. I’m moving to Seattle when I graduate.”

Crouched over the box, my back turned, I awaited further instructions. “Should I turn it on?”

“What do you know about Kropotkin?”

I glanced over my shoulder.

“I take that to mean nothing. You’re studying Russian and they don’t teach you about Peter Kropotkin? What about Bakunin? He was Russian too. What? No Bakunin either?” Pete slid down the sloped back of the tub and disappeared from view. While he was underwater releasing his intermittent glubs, I could have escaped, but I felt compelled to stay and see what he would do next, which was burst through the surface, gasping, the smooth planes of his face streaming. He tossed his head, splattering droplets across the wall. “UBC sucks. Sit down.”

If I stayed low on the floor, he’d be higher and all I would see of him would be his head and arms and shoulders above the tub’s rim. I could pretend he wasn’t naked. What did I even know about anarchism, he asked. I’d read what he’d written on the origami cranes. I knew, though roughly (Slavonic Studies 105 had been a survey course), that anarchists were scurrying around nineteenth-century Russia with all those nihilists and revolutionaries. It was a time of social upheaval, of government repression, revolutionary cells, and political assassinations.

Pete said, “That bomb stuff is such a stereotype. Genuine anarchism is peaceful. It’s about community.”

“But there aren’t any rules, right?”

“In the sense that I’m not going to tell you how to act, that’s correct.”

“But if everybody just acts however he wants?”

“What business is it of anybody else’s how I act? I’m accountable to my personal conscience, that’s all.”

It struck me that he might be talking about Ruth, and I blushed. “What if a person doesn’t have a conscience?” I asked.

He ran a disdainful hand down his face, as though he expected a more sophisticated argument from me. “Obviously that’s not going to work. You have to constantly balance your own desires with the good of the community. That’s just common sense. More than common sense. It’s survival. Kropotkin had a theory. Social animals engaging in mutual protection, not competition, maintain the species. What are humans? Social animals. What does this say about us? That we are doomed unless we organize ourselves into harmonious, decentralized, voluntary associations. In other words, anarchism is our natural state and we are fallen creatures, Zed.”

“Were you named after him?”

“Who?”

“Kropotkin. You said his name was Peter.”

He looked truly shocked. “Oh, sure. My father thought, ‘After whom shall I name my first-born son? I know. An anarchist.’”

He spoke so venomously I had to ask what his father did. “He rapes the earth,” Pete said. Then he just sat there in the water staring straight ahead for a full minute before he thought to ask what mine did.

“He fixes appliances.”

“That’s noble.”

Pete lay back. A pink foot rose out of the water and started snuffling blindly for the faucet. I made a move to leave but he held up a hand until he had shut the water off. I couldn’t help thinking of a chimpanzee or a raccoon—other social animals that perform tasks with their feet.

“You’re nice to talk to, Zed.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s a compliment. Most people are full of shit.”

I went to the university to study the next day. We’d received a surprise visitation by the sun that week and, though I was tempted to stay above ground and enjoy it, I descended to the stacks where I felt safe. If the bomb fell and I survived (unlikely, but anyway), at least I’d have something to read. At lunch I resurfaced to eat my sandwich in the pruned-back rose garden and, as happened when I occasionally lifted my face out from behind a book, I was startled to find myself in so beautiful a place—Bowen Island, West Vancouver, the North Shore Mountains laid out before me in so breathtaking a panorama I imagined some deity arranging landforms over breakfast, the way you might toy with the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl. Along came Kopanyev, probably on his way from his office in Buchanan Tower to the Faculty Club for lunch, wearing a trench coat and a hat, maybe even a fedora. I wasn’t sure. I just liked the word. I hoped he wouldn’t see me, but as I was the only one around, he did. He came right over and, standing hugely before me, asked, “What do you think? Do I look like KGB agent?”

I was hideously shy in his presence though when I wrote a paper I actually pictured him reading it. I wrote it to him, like a letter, a pismo, hoping for his approval. Now he threw himself down on the bench beside me. “Look!” The view sat in the palm of his outstretched hand. “That makes it all worthwhile, ya? Rain. Grey. Depression. Poof! I read your paper.”

I blushed.

“Were you implying he had fetish?”

“No!”

“I didn’t think so. I actually never noticed these feet references, but you are quite right. In ‘Duel’ it’s practically reason they fight.”

I quoted von Koren’s scathing summary of Layevsky’s “moral framework.” “. . . slippers, bathing and coffee early in the morning, then slippers, exercise and conversation; at two, slippers, lunch and booze . . .”

Kopanyev laughed and laughed.

“And von Koren wears yellow shoes!” I said. “I think that’s worse.”

“I do too! I am completely in accord! I would shoot any man first for wearing yellow shoes, second for wearing slippers in street. Then in ‘Three Years,’ like you said, it is heartbreaking, devastating, that he imagines Julia limping on foot he’s kissed. But sometimes it’s just detail. I’m not convinced galoshes have special significance. Half year Russia’s covered in snow, other half in mud.”

“In ‘Man in a Case’ Belikov’s ‘great claim to fame’ was going around in galoshes.”

“Yes.” He stroked his beard. “Anyway, I enjoyed reading it very much.” He bowed forward to peer at my new runners, then lifted his own foot clad in an expensive-looking dress shoe. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say about it so I said nothing.

“How’s Russian coming along?”

“It’s hard.”

“Stick out your tongue.”

“What?”

“Stick out your tongue. Just little. Come on.”

I poked the tip out and retracted it.

“As I thought. It’s much easier if it’s forked.”

When I returned home later in the afternoon, I saw that the next-door neighbour had replaced the stolen statue of the black servant with a vaguely malevolent gnome. When it had actually appeared, I couldn’t say, but this was the first time I’d noticed his red-hatted presence, his pursed, painted lips, and—unbelievable!—yellow shoes. Pete’s car was gone. He didn’t come home that night. Sonia wasn’t coming back until New Year’s Day. While I certainly didn’t miss Dieter, it was depressing to be alone in the house with a menacing plaster figure lurking on the lawn next door.

The Chekhov story I read that night seemed strangely coincidental. “My Life—A Provincial’s Story” is about a young man in conflict with his father over his way of life. The son of a prominent, corrupt architect in a corrupt provincial town, Misail refuses to take the path dictated by his rank. He explains: “The strong should not enslave the weak, the minority must not be parasites on the majority, or leeches forever sucking their blood.” His father despises him for working as a common labourer. Eventually Misail marries the rich daughter of a former employer, and together they move to the country, joining the back-to-the-land-type movement going on in Russia at the time. They set up as farmers but soon the farm and marriage fail. When Misail’s sister, a consumptive whose whole life has been devoted to their tyrannical father, has an affair and becomes pregnant, she too is disowned. Yet Misail goes to see his father and, despite everything, tells him, “I love you and can’t say how sorry I am that we’re so far apart.” The story ends with Misail steadfast in his convictions, raising his orphaned niece alone.

Sad (10), sadly (1), sadness (1); dissatisfied (1); unhappy (1); morose (1), morosely (1); depressed (3), depression (1); despondent (1); miserable (1); gloom (1), gloomy (3); sorrow (2); suffer (1), suffering (2); woe (4); lonely (4), loneliness (1); bore (1), boring (5), boredom (1), bored (6); monotony (1).

Pete showed up the next night and, without explaining his absence, offered to cook me supper. Though I declined (I’d already eaten), I made an effort to sound friendly. I felt I understood him a little better. (Like Misail, he’d gagged on his silver spoon.) I felt I knew something about him. (He secretly loved his father.) It occurred to me, too, that perhaps he didn’t even know this secret thing about himself. From my desk, new that day—a foldable card table—I could hear his noisy preparations. He even cooked like an anarchist. Banging, chopping, crashing, then smoke from the inevitable bomb of burning garlic.

Half an hour later he stomped up the stairs. “Come out with me, Zed,” he called through the door.

I got up and opened it. “Where?”

“I’ve got to do something. Right now. I promise it’ll be fun. Can you drive?”

“Yes.”

“Really? You’re full of surprises, Zed. Here.” He tossed the keys.

I had learned the previous summer, but hadn’t been behind a wheel since. Pete got in the passenger side and helped me move the bench seat forward. I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. “Where are we going?”

“We’ll stick close to home tonight.”

“Why can’t you drive?”

“It’ll be easier if you do. I’m going to keep hopping out.” He began unloading things from his backpack onto the dashboard—Ronald Reagan mask, snaggled towel, a piece of manilla tag with letters cut out.

“You should drive,” I said.

Pete pointed to Kropotkin in his dress dangling from the rear-view mirror, as though that might bolster me. We both laughed and, strangely, I did feel braver. I started the car, turned on the wipers to clear the windshield. I shoulder-checked. Each of these steps I named and ticked off in my mind. Behind us, the wet street shone under the street lights, all our neighbours home, their curtains open, the light from their televisions blueing their living rooms. No sooner had I pulled from the curb when I braked, startled by the feel of the vehicle obeying me. We were tossed forward, and Pete, tucking his hair up under the rubber mask, struck the dashboard.

Then I was driving straight down the middle of the street, slower than a jog. From the corner of my eye I saw him remove an aerosol can from his pack. The little ball rattled as he shook it. “Are you going to deface something?”

His voice came out rubbery. “Zed. What a nasty mind you have.”

“That’s spray paint, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to modify some signage.”

It seemed to take a week to reach the corner. When Pete, or Ronald, called for me to stop, I hit the brake harder than I meant to, sending both of us lurching forward again. He plunged out of the car, towel in one hand, paint and cardboard in the other, leaving the door ajar. In fluid, practised movements, he swabbed the stop sign, slapped the cardboard on it, blasted it with paint.

STOP
the arms race!

By the time the cloud had settled, he was back in the car telling me to drive.

“I start to get this itchy feeling, Zed. It’s unbearable. I have to act. Can you possibly go any faster?”

“No,” I said.

He rocked side to side in the same rhythm as the windshield wipers. “Stop then,” he said the second before he jumped out, arms and legs pumping below the grotesque cartoon head, all the way to the next stop sign. When I pulled up beside him, the job was done. He opened the door, said, “Bayswater,” and took off running again.

Bayswater Street was busier. I had to pull over to let a car pass, which was when I finally noticed the wipers shrieking against the dry glass and shut them off. Two blocks ahead, under the street light on the corner, Pete was lingering at the scene of the crime. He waved, then darted across, forcing me, if I wished to follow, to turn onto Point Grey Road where there was even more traffic. For the whole long block until the fork onto First Avenue, I held my breath. By then I’d lost him. One moment he was streaking ahead of me, then he wasn’t. I drove all the way to Trafalgar Street, but the sign there was intact.

The neighbourhood looked unfamiliar through a windshield. I was lost just blocks from the house. I considered abandoning the car and walking back, but didn’t know how I would face Pete later, so I carried on, trawling the treed streets, avoiding the main arteries, alert in my peripheral vision. Other nocturnal creatures popped up green-eyed in the headlights—a cat, a raccoon. A man with a dog crossed the road and, while I waited, I read the street sign. Balaclava. Not the face mask. The Crimean War. There was a Blenheim, too, a Trafalgar, even a Waterloo. The streets were all named after famous battles. It was the first time that I noticed.

I came to more stop signs that had been changed and, confident I was on his trail, kept driving, a full five minutes before something else occurred to me. He was intentionally evading me. He’d promised fun. Was this what he meant? A game of tag? I pulled over and shut the engine off. Kropotkin revolved slowly in his dervish’s robe while I huddled, thinking of Ruth, how Pete had humiliated her, how he was humiliating me now.

A loud smash, like something had dropped out of a tree and landed on the trunk. I swung around. Nothing. When I faced forward again, I screamed. Ronald Reagan was pressed up against the windshield, doubly grotesque.

Pete got in the passenger side, laughing and breathing hard.

“You scared me!” I said. “Take that off!”

He tossed the mask onto the dash, shook his hair out. He looked elated.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“I was right behind you. Here. Slide over. I’ll drive.”

It was awkward switching places. For a moment, when I was almost in his lap, he seemed to hug me. I could feel the bellows-like movement of his chest. He turned in the seat. “What’s wrong? You seem angry. Are you angry, Zed?”

“Let’s go.”

“Are you angry?”

“Stop it!”

“Are you?”

“Yes!” I said.

When I wouldn’t meet his eye, Pete took my face in both his hands. I was too rattled to pull away. I thought he was going to kiss me. He seemed about to, but then he didn’t. “Sonia wants you in the group,” he said. “She brought it up at the last meeting. Do you want to help save the world, Zed?”

It turned out that the liveried garden statues were more than booty. They were functional too, propping the flip-chart agenda against the fireplace, Warm Up: Sonia the first item of business. Last week, when Sonia returned from Christmas holidays, I’d been shocked by her advancing thinness; now, as she got to her feet, she actually had to hoist her pants. She looked around at our expectant faces—Pete and Dieter, Belinda and Carla, Timo (the facilitator that night), me (spurting sweat)—and began to sing. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands . . .”

Sonia wasn’t the singer I’d heard so often closing their meetings, the one with the shivery voice, but soon the others drowned out her off-key warbling. They clapped and stomped and danced around the living room, taking wild swings at each other with their hips, giving up a rousing Yeehaw! when the song dictated. They were at ease with each other. They knew each other. I knew no one, barely myself. Yet I wanted to be there. I’d been dragging my loneliness around for too long. Also, I didn’t want to die. When it was over, after Belinda had, to my mortification, implicated me in a polka, and everyone had collapsed on the floor, a silence fell, or rather everyone stopped laughing so the only sound was our common struggle, at that particular moment the struggle for oxygen. I lay panting, inhaling everyone’s commingled exhalation, and vice versa, feeling close to these people, at least closer than I had to anyone in years.

We resumed our places, me on the chesterfield buffering Sonia from Dieter, Timo perched on the hearth, a giant baby in overalls, cheeks flushed from the warm-up. He was the only one in NAG!, the only Nagger, I hadn’t been introduced to, the one with the big rubber boots and blond, dessert-like lashings of hair, and that curious affectation—the right pant leg rolled. As he read over the rest of the agenda, some of the words stalled in his mouth. It seemed arbitrary which ones would trip him up. “Does anyone have anything to aaaaadd?”

Hands went up and, while Timo wrote new names on the agenda, Belinda, who was leaning against the beanbag chair Pete sprawled in, gathered her hair from behind her and tossed the scarf of it over her shoulder, striking Pete full in the face. I saw him flinch, then lift the hair that had fallen across his chest. He examined the ends, sniffed them. Then he put them in his mouth and, suddenly, he seemed so vulnerable, like a kitten weaned too young.

My acceptance in the group had been contentious, I was pretty sure of that. Nevertheless, when my name came up on the agenda, Welcome Jane!, they came over and one by one initiated me with a hug. I really hated this part. I didn’t want to die but neither did I want to be hugged all the time. There would be no escaping the hugs. Timo was the softest. Pete crawled across the dirty shag and laid his golden head, heavy with ideology, in my lap. Carla presented me with a Guatemalan peace bracelet she’d woven herself. And here was proof that Sonia had diminished over the holidays; while still in her skeletal embrace, I decided I would be the one to fatten her up.

The main task of the evening was to revise and approve the rough copy of a leaflet we were going to distribute at a technology conference that was taking place in a few weeks at the Hyatt Regency. Some of the participants were involved in arms manufacturing; one in particular made components for the cruise missile. What struck me especially was that the cruise missile was being tested in Alberta, my home province, because the northern terrain there resembled the Russian steppe. The missile flew low, below enemy radar, following the contours of the land and, because it couldn’t be detected, it was considered one of the new “first strike” weapons in the American arsenal, evidence that they had moved away from the old policy of deterrence.

A long discussion followed about whether or not to have contact information on the leaflet. “As if we don’t have phone trouble already. Now we’ll have assholes calling up,” Dieter said.

Sonia put a hand on her heart. “If a hundred assholes call and we reach one of them, it will be worth it.”

Dieter sniffed. “Okay. Fine.”

Sonia volunteered to deal with the assholes, Timo to photocopy the leaflet. Belinda would get the suits. “Help, anyone?” she asked. Sonia and Carla put up their hands, then I did.

“Liaison SPND,” Timo read off the agenda. He was the liaison. “They’re having a rummage and bake sale on campus to raise money for the Walk for Peace. Do we want to get involved?”

Dieter pulled a sock off and threw it into the middle of the room. “They can have that.” Everyone laughed.

Next, Pete gave a report on his stop sign work. Over the Christmas holidays he’d changed thirty-one signs. “Half of those I did with Zed.” Everyone turned congratulatory eyes on me and Sonia squeezed my hand and kept it. Until we finally took a break, it grew clammier and clammier and the only thing I could think about was when she planned on letting me go.

I used the downstairs bathroom, the one with the broken toilet tank lid and the poster about Bolsheviks. I thought of it as Sonia’s bathroom as she was the only one with a bedroom on the main floor. The bottles on the side of the tub were hers, among them, unsurprisingly, No More Tears shampoo.

In the kitchen, Carla and Belinda were picking at what was left in the dirty potluck dishes, their heads together, like conjoined twins. Belinda looked up and said, “Oh, Jane. We were just talking about you,” as Carla edged past me and out of the room. I couldn’t have been more surprised by what Belinda said next. “You didn’t sleep with Pete, did you?”

“What?”

“You were here with him over the holidays, right?”

“For a few days.”

“You seem so friendly now. He didn’t try anything?”

“No!”

“Okay. I’m not accusing.”

She didn’t sound accusing. She was smiling, but I remembered another time her expression hadn’t quite matched her words. After we’d finished putting the stickers on the war toys, we met up again at Santa’s Workshop. It had been Belinda’s idea to get our picture taken. We lined up and, when our turn came, crowded onto Santa’s lap. Santa got quite jolly, his droll little mouth drawn up like in the poem, until Belinda said in a girlie voice that what she most wanted for Christmas was for men to stop staring at her breasts. In a twinkling, he spilled us off. Everyone seemed to agree that she’d really put old Saint Nick in his place.

“You’d be the first to say no,” she told me now.

“Sonia’s slept with Pete?” I asked.

“God, no. Not Saint Sonia. She’s saving herself.”

Carla popped her head in and we both looked at her. Belinda said, “God! He wouldn’t dare! But everyone else has, believe me. SPND is at his feet.”

She was warning me. I stepped away and got my drink of water, drank it down in relieved gulps while Belinda waited. Then, with her freckled arm draped over my shoulder, we went back to the meeting. “My feminism’s in conflict with Pete’s anarchism,” she confided in a low voice.

“He says he’s a feminist.”

“Words aren’t important. Actions are.”

We resettled in the living room to deal with the new business. Pete’s name came up on the agenda again and he repeated what I’d told him about the street signs. “Which ones are battles, Zed?”

“Trafalgar. Balaclava. Blenheim. Waterloo. Dunkirk—”

All around the room heads shook in outraged disbelief.

“—Alma and Dunbar.”

“Dunbar! The food co-op’s on Dunbar!”

“Warmongering in hippy Kitsilano. Shocking, isn’t it?”

“God!”

“We’ve ggggot to rename them.”

A committee was struck.

Sonia got the last word. She rose to her feet. “This has been such a good meeting. I missed you guys at Christmas. I love you all so much.” Then she started to cry. “It’s 1984—”

“Shades of Orwell,” someone whispered.

“I feel like we have one year left. Just one year. If we can’t stop this madness in the next twelve months, we’re doomed. All of us. I know in the past I’ve always been a support person.”

Dieter became defensive. “Support is just as important. We’re all equal.”

“Yes, but I was a support person because I was worried about having a criminal record and not being able to teach when I graduate. Over Christmas it finally sank in. There won’t be any kids to teach if I don’t act. I want you all to know that this year I’m going to do everything I can.”

Everyone formed a silent scrum around Sonia, embracing her in layers of arms and bodies, a swaying mass of love, while Sonia sobbed. Someone began to hum, then they all joined in. Strangely, it was Carla with the husky man’s voice, the beige hair and beige eyelashes and, more often than not, beige clothes, who had all her colours in her throat. “We shall live in peace,” she fluted, “we shall live in peace . . .”

They formed a chorus. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”

Then I, too, overcame my shyness and began to sing. “Deep in my heart, I do believe . . .”

It didn’t matter how I sounded. It mattered that I meant it.

I ran into Dieter in the upstairs hall. During the meeting, during one of the many diversions, people had talked about the holidays. Belinda said she’d fought non-stop with her mother, mostly because she’d wanted to spend Christmas with her dad. “He’s a film director,” she said, tossing her hair. He made cable TV commercials for local businesses. Carla had been as miserable. She was adopted and didn’t fit in. There was a big scene when she wouldn’t eat any turkey. For Dieter, it had been his first Christmas without his father.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I told him now.

He blinked rapidly behind his glasses, “Me too,” and for a moment we stood in embarrassed silence, in the no-man’s land between each other’s room. In Pete’s land, actually, his music leaking out around our feet. Riders on the storm. When I turned to go, Dieter asked, “Can I talk to you?”

We went to his room where the monochrome Che loomed on the wall. I didn’t know anything about Che. I knew a bit about Trotsky, how he’d been stabbed with an ice pick in Mexico. Che was just a black and white stain to me, but he reminded me of Hector, probably because of the beret. Hector hadn’t slept on our chesterfield since before Christmas when he’d got an under-the-table job in Victoria delivering pastries.

Dieter sat on his desk chair, leaving me the bed that Pete had been in with Ruth. I hadn’t told Belinda. It never crossed my mind to tell Dieter. “You’re a good friend of Sonia,” he began.

I smiled. So I was. It was as though I needed someone objective, not my mother, to point it out. When I got back after Christmas, I’d written Sonia a note of welcome, tied it to a piece of yarn, and left it hanging from the grate. Every night and every morning since her return I’d checked the grate, hoping more for her reply than an actual letter from my parents in the mailbox. Now I felt like flying to my room and calling down to her.

Dieter kneaded the back of his neck. “And you get along with Pete.”

I seemed to. I liked him now. I knew he was as vulnerable as anyone, maybe more so, because it was hard to live by your principles. Hardly anyone understood that. They either idolized him or thought he was an asshole, or both. Why? No one thought Misail was an asshole. They thought he was a fool.

Ostensibly Pete and Dieter’s conflict was ideological. Dieter, because of his interest in Central America, leaned toward Marxism and rules and procedure, which naturally irritated the resident anarchist. But theirs was also a conflict of personalities. Dieter was insecure. He wanted Pete’s approval. He didn’t seem to understand as I had early on that Pete respected people who stood up to him. You could call him on anything and he would consider your point of view.

“Sometimes I think he hates me,” Dieter said. “Everything I say, he questions.”

“That’s his anarchism.”

“You make it sound like a disease.” He dropped his head to his chest then slung it over his shoulder and around the back until it cracked audibly. “You’re like me,” he said, not noticing how I recoiled. Dieter was an incurable corrector. He had a single eyebrow like a headband, concealed by the frames of his glasses. “You study hard. School’s important to you. I care about my marks, too, right? And then there’s my family. And what Reagan’s doing in Central America. Not to mention this whole nu-clee-ar situation. Then I come home and Pete’s arguing with me constantly. I’m so fucking tense all the time.” He looked pleadingly at me. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, until he told me.

“I was wondering if you’d put in a word to Sonia for me.”

Finally, in the morning, a reply to my Welcome back! I threaded the yarn up through the fretwork and plucked the twist of paper out.

I have to talk to you.

Fulfilling the promise I’d made to myself at the meeting, I stopped at the store on my way home from university and bought a tiny tub of the most expensive brand of ice cream, the one with the faux German name, happy to squander my meagre allowance on an umlaut. Except that Sonia refused it. She sat on her bed with her head hanging, face curtained by her mournful hair.

“Why not?”

The curtain opened, revealing the earnestness behind it. “I’m trying not to eat so much. There won’t be any food left after a nuclear war.”

“Sonia,” I said.

She sighed and, looking wretched, squeezed shut her eyes. I popped the lid off, dug into the pink with the teaspoon, tapped on her pursed lips; reluctantly, they parted. As the ice cream melted inside her, I read the predicament on her face. She was an ascetic. Pleasure actually hurt her.

“How is it?”

“Delicious,” her anguished answer.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“The meeting,” she said, and I took advantage of her reply to spoon more ice cream in. “What did you think?” she asked, coughing.

I doubted the plan they had—we had—for leafleting the Hyatt would bring us any closer to world peace, yet for those two and a half hours that we talked about it I felt less helpless, as though our death sentence had been temporarily stayed. I admitted to her now, though, that I didn’t want to get arrested. “My parents would kill me,” I said.

“You can be support with Dieter. It’s just as important.”

“How many of you have been arrested?”

“None so far, but it’s going to happen. It might happen at the Hyatt. I’m ready. You’ve heard of the Berrigan brothers? They’re brothers and priests. They broke into a silo and hammered on the nose cone. They poured their own blood on the missiles.”

“We’re just putting the leaflets under the doors, right?”

“Yes.” Then, despite what she’d said at the meeting, she confided that she felt estranged from the group. “How can Dieter make these plans to go to Nicaragua next summer? We don’t even know if we’ll be alive. They have all these other causes. When Belinda and Carla start talking about equality, I want to scream that it’ll happen soon enough. Soon we’ll all be equally dead. We have to focus on peace. Because, without peace, there won’t be anything left.”

She met my eye. “You’re right,” I said.

“Really?”

“Logically, yes.” I held the spoon out again.

“No more.”

“You have to eat or you’ll lose strength.”

Dutifully she opened her mouth. “I’m jealous of you, Jane,” she said and I almost dropped the spoon. “You’ve just found out how things really are. You’re going to get more and more empowered. I’m afraid of burning out.”

“You won’t,” I told her, for which she rewarded me with her most wistful Anna Sergeyevna smile.

A few nights later we went together to the Blenheim house to help work on the radiation suits. From the outside it looked less like student digs than ours, except for the portly papier mâché Venus of Willendorf blown up to four feet standing guard on the porch. Belinda opened the door, brandishing a smile and a slip of paper checkered with creases. “What does it say?”

She’d asked me for a note, so I’d written a word in Cyrillic and slipped it in her shoe. Now that she wanted me to translate it for her, I didn’t know which to say, actor or actress. She’d claimed that words weren’t important, but that was simply untrue. Not just at the Trutch house, but in my classes too, there was often a feminist cabal enforcing correct usage. Kopanyev had a terrible time in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation—not that he didn’t deserve or enjoy the frequent ideological lashings he received. He got all twinkly when voices turned shrill. There was a small, seething faction in our already small seminar that loathed him. In Russian, though, everyone adored him, which seemed odd to me. Was literature inherently more controversial than language? But wasn’t it language itself that feminism sought to reform? Perhaps there wasn’t any point in even trying to remake a gendered language like Russian. In any case, I was as far from mastering—mistressing?—the politically correct English lexicon as I was from speaking Russian, though I was learning fast.

Belinda waited. “Actor?” I hazarded.

Delight! Incensey hugs all around! She waved us inside and in a single glance I understood why she wanted to move from Trutch to Blenheim Street despite its militaristic connotations. A brown tartan behemoth filled half our living room. The shag had alopecia, the walls were a four-sided bulletin board. Here everything was homey and neat. We followed Belinda to the kitchen, where I almost had to shield my eyes from the rare, bright sight of dishes gleaming in the rack. There were curtains, too, and four matching chairs around the table, the radiation suits heaped over the back of one. Then Carla appeared from some other immaculate room for another round of hugs.

At the Trutch house we wouldn’t have been able to work on the kitchen floor. The chore sheet notwithstanding, it simply never got washed. Now we set up an assembly line, Carla using a homemade stencil to draw the radiation symbol on the backs of the suits, the rest of us colouring it in with markers.

“Tell them what Dieter said,” Carla told Belinda.

“God! He asked me to talk to Pete for him. I asked why. ‘You’re his girlfriend,’ he said. I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘What do you mean “what do you mean”?’ So I actually had to tell him. ‘I’m nineteen. I’m not a girl. I menstruate. Are you a boy or a man?’”

She flipped her hair, indignant all over again.

Sonia was surprised. “But he’s good about saying ‘woman.’ He corrects me all the time.”

“So he says”—Belinda thrust out chest and voice—“‘I’m not going to be manipulated by semantics!’”

Sonia: “The poor guy.”

“Why? Someone’s got to tell him he’s sexist. I don’t mind.”

I said, “There are two words in Russian, dyevushka for young woman and dyevochka for girl.” I worried I sounded pretentious until I saw they were in awe.

Belinda said, “This one’s done. Put it on, Jane. Let’s see how it looks.”

I went to the bathroom. As I was climbing into the suit, I noticed pillows of calico fabric hanging on the towel rack. I had no idea what they were for but because in size and shape they resembled menstrual pads, I felt embarrassed, the way I used to last year when my aunt would carry her wooden clothes rack into the back yard and drape it shamelessly with her nylons and underpants and gallon-cup brassieres, the way I had a minute ago when Belinda said menstruate. In the mirror, I adjusted the particle mask over my mouth and nose and drew up the hood. When I opened the door, a girl—a woman!—with cropped hair and a silver charm dangling from one ear was passing by. The charm was an axe, which made me think she must be in Forestry. Without even glancing at the suit she introduced herself as Nellie, Carla and Belinda’s housemate.

I pulled the particle mask under my chin. “Jane.”

“Oh, you’re the Russian! I’ve heard about you.”

I blinked at her. Then I remembered something. My aunt calling the house before Christmas and Sonia whispering, “She’s Russian,” when she passed the phone to me. Pete and Dieter glancing at each other. Even Dieter looked impressed as I toted the phone away. Now I smiled a lie at Nellie and went back to the kitchen where they oohed over me in the suit. I certainly didn’t put them straight about my dull Canadian mother and my cranky, Polish-born, anti-Communist father, and the Sloppy Joes and frozen pizza.

Afterward, as Sonia and I walked the dark streets home, I mentioned how clean the Blenheim house seemed compared to ours. “Our house is gross,” I said.

“Yes but—” Sonia squirmed. “Some things are gross there too.”

It turned out that the calico pillows in the bathroom that I thought could not possibly be menstrual pads were. They laundered and reused them. “And did you see the chart on the fridge?” she asked.

“The chore sheet?”

“It’s not a chore sheet.”

“What is it then?”

“They record their periods.”

“No!”

“I’m still a feminist,” Sonia avowed.

We reached our street, the exact spot where I had let go of the bed last fall. In the corner house a child was practising the piano, the same plunked notes over and over. Televisions strobed in living rooms. “Carla’s a lesbian,” Sonia said.

Confusion. Sonia clogged blithely ahead, hands in pockets, chin high, the flaps of her funny toque like blinders. A few paces on, she stopped to wait and, when I caught up, she acknowledged my distress. “I didn’t know either until Belinda told me. Apparently I’m naive.” Then she changed the subject. “I hope Belinda and Pete don’t break up.”

“Are they fighting?” I asked.

“They’re always fighting. But if two people really love each other? They can work it out. What hope is there for the world otherwise? How can we expect strangers and enemies to get along when people who are actually in love can’t? Also, it would be bad for the group.”

We went up the front steps. On the porch, Sonia turned to me. “Have you ever been in love, Jane?”

“No,” I said.

“Me neither.”

A strange thing happened that week. I opened my book and, as was often the case with Chekhov, I fell right in, tonight into the first story, “The Kiss.”

Off the top Chekhov sets up Staff-Captain Ryabovitch as a poor foil to his superior, Lieutenant Lobytko, a tall, strongly built officer whose ability to sniff a woman out from miles away earns him the nickname the setter. By contrast, Ryabovitch is a short, stooping officer, with spectacles and lynx-like side whiskers. The ladies call him vague. Timid and unsociable Ryabovitch, the most modest and most insignificant officer in the brigade.

The officers are invited to the local manor house. After tea, everyone moves to the ballroom where the grand piano suddenly thundered out. The sounds of a sad waltz drifted through the wide open windows and everyone remembered that outside it was spring, an evening in May, and they smelt the fragrance of the young leaves of the poplars, of roses and lilac. While the other officers flirt and dance, Ryabovitch, filled with sadness, wanders off, soon managing in his bumbling way to get lost in the big house. He enters a darkened room and it is here that an anonymous woman rustles forward and, encircling his neck with her fragrant arms, delivers the eponymous kiss. But when she feels his lynx-like whiskers (Chekhov implies), she shrinks backward in disgust. Ryabovitch flees, but as the shame lifts he begins to give himself up to a totally new kind of sensation. Something strange was happening to him as a result of the misplaced kiss. Feeling almost drunk, he now boldly enters the party. The tingling peppermint drop sensation on his left cheek, just by his moustache, persists so that by the time he arrives back at the barracks that night, he has abandoned himself to an inexplicable, overwhelming feeling of joy.

Sonia called that supper was ready.

I brought the giddy feeling in the story down with me, the high point I had left off at when I tossed the book aside, though I knew for Staff-Captain Ryabovitch disappointment would prevail. “The Kiss” was one of Chekhov’s most banal tragedies.

Pete was just coming in off the deck, pink-eyed, wearing a sarong. “What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Is it my dress?” He started jigging around the kitchen and Sonia and I laughed, Sonia hefting a heavy pot of soup onto the table before going back for cornbread. Pete peered in the pot. “Stuff’s floating in the soup.”

She rushed over. “What?”

“Solids. Potatoes. Carrots. Don’t tell me. The Americans finally ratified SALT II.”

She dropped the two large pans of cornbread on the table so she could assault him with the oven mitts. “Jane says I have to keep my strength up.”

“Zed. Let me kiss your hand.”

“How sexist,” I said and Dieter, taking his place at the table, laughed.

Dieter wasn’t so bad. We had too much in common, were on the same pole, I decided that night as we talked over supper. That was why we repelled each other. Last year Dieter had come to UBC from Saskatchewan and, like me, had been overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. Then the skies had lowered and covered it all like dust sheets over the furniture. He couldn’t get out of bed. He had SAD. His girlfriend at the time (“so-called”) dumped him. One of his dorm mates was in SPND and dragged him out. The scales fell off his eyes, just like mine had, but also plunged him deeper into depression. His involvement in Peace and Justice for Central America was what snapped him out of it. “Latin Americans have passion,” he told us. “Not a common trait in Saskatchewan.”

Each of us could trace the provenance of our commitment like this. For Sonia it was seeing a lamb euthanized when she was a child, for Pete his years at a private boys’ school watching the lone black kid get hazed year after year. In the woods behind the stone walls, they warmed their hash over a lighter. Pete said, “My dad made this.” He meant the little foil bowl, but when he looked into the pink, sorrowful eyes of his black-skinned friend it all came together—aluminium, South Africa, and nasty, brutish prep school boys in faggy blazers.

Pete dredged his bowl with the cornbread and bowed to jam the soggy mess in his mouth. Dieter, too, had entered the race for seconds but when they both reached for the ladle at the same time, the strange thing happened: each insisted the other go ahead. I looked at Sonia and she at me. Could it be true? I gave Chekhov partial credit for my mood. Also, tomorrow I would take part in my first real action. Pete had smoked a joint. Sonia was indulging Dieter with guilty smiles because she felt bad Belinda had been so hard on him. So, yes! Provided there was enough food to go around, we could be the harmonious, decentralized, voluntary association Pete dreamed of.

He said, “We should play Monopoly tonight.”

This, I learned as I helped Sonia clear the table, had been a favourite pastime during the last academic year. Dieter went to get the board.

“The object of the game—” he began pedantically.

“I’ve played before,” I said.

“Not like this.”

Sonia was shuffling the title deeds and divvying them out.

“You divest yourself of everything. Give it all away. So if you land on Park Place, for example, the owner will pay you what it’s worth and give you the first hotel. If she’s out of hotels on that property, you get a house. No houses, you get the deed.”

“What about Chance and Community Chest?”

“They stay the same. Whoever’s the biggest capitalist in the end loses.”

Out of the handful of die-cast tokens of militarism and greed, Sonia chose the thimble, Pete the iron, Dieter the wheelbarrow. Naturally, I took the shoe.

The year before, even the month before, nothing short of a catastrophe would have kept me from the lecture hall. But now that I understood an unimaginable catastrophe, while not yet upon us, was alarmingly imminent, that the time to act to prevent it was now, I did. On an abruptly sunny morning, the elements aiding and abetting our plan, I skipped class for the first time in my life and, with my housemates, piled into Pete’s car.

At the Blenheim house I watched Carla swagger down the walk. She always dressed in cords or jeans and today wore a plaid shirt like my father favoured, buttoned high. As she neared the car, the urge to stare was so great I realized I wouldn’t be able to look at her at all, which was, of course, the same problem I had. People sensed my awkwardness and averted their eyes. But Sonia and Pete, Belinda and Carla—they didn’t. Not even Dieter did any more. I was a Nagger now.

Belinda handed the bundle of suits off to me before getting in the back with Carla and Sonia. Timo was biking down.

Pete said, “Why don’t you sit in the front?”

Belinda closed the car door. “I’m already back here.”

“I see.”

She bristled. “What do you see?”

“I see you’re in the back.” When he started the car, it was the engine that sounded angry. Belinda gathered up her hair, hurled it behind her. “God.”

Carla tapped my shoulder to say hello. My smile felt exaggerated, stretched, but as soon as I faced forward again and started stuffing the radiation suits in my pack, all I felt was nervous. Off we drove, off to save the world in that crazy quilt of a car, a confirmed lesbian in the back.

We parked a few blocks from the hotel and pooled our change to feed the meter. Our group hug blocked the sidewalk. (Let the capitalists walk around us!) Then we split up, Dieter and I, support, going ahead. We had decided to pretend to be a married couple staying in the hotel. “In you go, my darling wifey,” Dieter said, ushering me inside the revolving door. Centrifugal force propelled us into the atrium, where we stood blinking and disoriented, as though we had passed through to another dimension, one shiny with marble, bulwarked by velvet couches, inhabited by suited men with name tags. In that chandeliered world, almost everyone carried a briefcase. There were other guests, obvious tourists, not conference goers, but despite our efforts at dressing up we were out of place among the suits and uniforms.

I was much more nervous than I’d been at The Bay. Surprisingly, though, now that I was actually in the hotel, I discovered getting arrested wasn’t what I really dreaded. Hanging around the lobby, wondering what the others were doing, wondering if they’d been caught yet, seemed worse now that every minute of every day was spent waiting—waiting for the world to end. There was a fifth suit, a spare, in my pack. If they tried to arrest me, I would run.

I pushed on the door to the ladies’ room, slippery with my sweat, and said to Dieter on his way to the men’s, “I’m going up.”

“What?”

“I changed my mind.”

A quick glance up and down the corridor and he came over to where I was still holding open the bathroom door, my pretend husband, so chivalrous a minute ago. “This is the first rule in any action: do not stray from the plan. Maybe nobody explained that, Jane.” All at once I pictured him losing at Monopoly the night before, rubbing his hands together, cackling over the play money. He hadn’t seemed that disappointed. “You’re jeopardizing the whole action,” he told me.

I stepped inside where he couldn’t follow me and, in a stall, put on the extra suit. Carla came in a minute later and I handed hers to her. “I’m going up too.”

“Oh, good. You remember about going limp?”

“Yes.”

Now that these words had passed between us, I could be myself again with her.

Sonia hugged me when I told her. “Dieter’s mad,” I said.

“Never mind. This is more important.”

We were going in two trips, the women then the men, starting at the top and working our way down. Timo and Pete would leaflet the odd-numbered floors, the rest of us the even. As well as distributing the suits, it was supposed to have been my job to stand at the end of the corridor and make sure the coast was clear, but Dieter did this on his own now, shooting me a disgusted look when I stepped out with the others. At his signal, we sauntered into the lobby and over to the elevators.

“Act normal,” Belinda had primed us, adding with a snort, “if that’s possible.” It seemed to be working. We waited with downcast eyes and, somehow, in that logic peculiar to toddlers and ostriches, no one paid any attention to us. Even as the elevator door slid away and we stepped aside to let the descending passengers exit, we received no more than a few curious glances.

An elderly couple got in with us. “Thirty-two,” said Carla and I pressed the button. The man, stooped and sporting bulbous hearing aids, asked for the sixteenth floor. We ascended in silence, my gaze flitting nervously from Sonia to the numbers illuminating in excruciatingly slow sequence above the door. I could hear the elderly couple breathing behind us, no doubt staring at the radiation symbols stencilled on our backs, putting two and two together. The elevator stopped—on the fifth floor, not the sixteenth—and in that eternal pause before the door retracted, we exchanged a look of panic. To be caught so soon, with the pockets of our radiation suits bulging with undistributed leaflets.

It was Pete. Pete alone, staring off to the side, the mask under his chin like a huge white goitre. Until then I wasn’t aware his charm was something he could control, that it was more than the sum of his good looks and orthodontic work, but now he saw us in the elevator and turned on all his lights. (Radioactive sprang to mind.) When he beckoned, Belinda took a tranced step toward him. We all did. We shuffled obediently out. Behind us, the old woman said to her husband, “There’s another one! Is there something going on in this hotel?”

“They have conferences!”

“Oh!”

The door closed on them, leaving us standing in the hall with Pete. “What are you doing?” Belinda asked. “Where’s Timo?”

“I want to talk to you.” He made a sweeping motion to dismiss the rest of us and Sonia pressed the elevator button.

“Are you crazy?” Belinda said. “We’re in the middle of an action!”

When the elevator came, Sonia held the door for Carla. “Go,” Pete told her but Carla crossed her arms and wouldn’t budge. Sonia and I got in and travelled up alone, floor numbers lighting up all over the panel as though we were already being pursued. We got out on the thirty-second floor, according to the plan, and worked the long hall without incident, sliding a leaflet under each door, meeting no one, the only sound the friction of our suits. In the thrill of the work, we forgot about Pete being such a hot-head, finished, and went down two more floors, also as planned, stooping before each door again, sliding our warning through. I was taking action. As long as I was taking action, we were safe. Here and there a room-service tray bore the congealed remains of a midnight snack, pop stagnant in the bottom of a glass, wadded napkins—a still life of waste. I stepped right over it. I’d fallen into a rhythm: stoop, drop the leaflet. One sharp tap to send it under the door. Three paces to the next room: repeat. Tap. The leaflet shot through.

“What’s this? Pizza?”

I was still bent over, staring now at a pair of long bunioned feet with frosted nails. Slowly, I straightened, the way you would if you chanced upon a bear. Against the bright white of her robe her paper-bag cleavage seemed years older than her face, her raised eyebrows two thin lines in a child’s drawing. I turned to see where Sonia was. Way down at the end of the hall, staring back at me. Condensation formed inside my mask.

The woman leaned out the door. “Oh. There’s two of you.” She beckoned to Sonia, kept moving her hand, winding her in. I searched Sonia’s eyes above the mask as she drew closer. We could easily bolt but Sonia showed no sign of wanting to. The woman, meanwhile, tried reading the leaflet from several distances before giving up and asking us in. She hummed a few bars of “London Bridge” as we shuffled under her arm. “You are girls?”

Sonia pulled her mask down. “We’re women.”

All the gold in her mouth showed when she laughed. “Fine. Little women. I’ll call you—can I see you?” We both took off our hoods and she scrutinized me. “I’ll call you Jo. And you,” she told Sonia, “you are surely Beth.”

She walked over to the beds with their unmade floral spreads. Her glasses were on the side table next to some prescription bottles. She put them on and looked around for the leaflet, turning a complete circle before Sonia picked it off the floor and handed it to her.

“Thank you. Sit down. There’s—there they are.” By the window, two armchairs no one made a move to sit in. Sonia and I watched her read. “Oh. You’re protesters.” She looked at us over the top of the glasses. “Sit down.”

Sonia sat on one of the beds, so I did.

“Can I offer you girls—excuse me. Jo. Beth. Can I offer you a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Sonia said. “We’re working.”

“I’ll have one if you don’t mind. Jo?”

I shook my head.

She crouched before the miniature fridge so her legs jutted through the robe’s opening, all the way to the tops of her veined thighs. I averted my eyes. When I looked next, her backside was swaying before us, huge and white. She had dropped onto one knee and was gripping the shelf of the mini bar, trying to get back on her feet. As soon as she was steady again, she disappeared into the bathroom. Though there were clean glasses right there on the bar, she came back with one that had a toothbrush in it, adding a few shards of nearly melted ice from the bucket, then the clear contents of the bottle she uncapped with her teeth. She crossed the room and sank into one of the armchairs. “Now,” she said, stirring with the toothbrush, tossing it aside. “Tell me all about this awful missile.”

Sonia told her. She opened one of the leaflets and referred to the grainy pictures and graphs as she talked. “It’s a first-strike weapon. They think—”

“Who?”

“The Americans. They think that nuclear war is inevitable and that they can win by launching a pre-emptive strike. But they’re insane if they think you can win a nuclear war. It’s suicide. Back in September? After the Soviets shot down that Korean airliner? Do you remember? We were this close. And Trudeau is allowing the Americans to test the cruise missile in Alberta. So we’re implicated as much as they are.”

She talked about how many weapons the Americans and the Soviets had amassed, how many times over we would all be killed. She mentioned the Doomsday clock. “That’s awful,” the woman said. “Just awful. They really are a bunch of bastards,” and she drained the glass and slammed it on the table. “I see you have more of those flyers.”

“Yes,” we said.

“Because, Jo, Beth, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go early to dinner tonight and I’m going to put them under everybody’s plate.” She thrust her chin in the air the way I’d seen Belinda do. “Everybody’s. What do you think of that?”

Sonia stared. “Are you with the conference?”

“Not really. I get dragged around.” She sniffed and waved a hand toward the window behind her. “I do like this Robson Street.” Then, as though reminded of the world outside, she turned, showing us the sleep-matted back of her head.

Sonia and I got up and went over to the window and the three of us looked down. The West End high-rises looked so tiny. We saw Stanley Park, a miniature Lion’s Gate Bridge, water water everywhere giving off a silvery sheen. Sonia tapped the pane. “We live over there. In Kitsilano.”

With my eye I followed the beaches—Jericho, Locarno, Spanish Banks. Around the end of Point Grey was Wreck Beach, the nudist beach at UBC. I couldn’t see it from here, but the Buchanan Towers, where Kopanyev had his office, were perfectly visible. He was probably sitting there right now, puzzling over my absence.

“What’s that big island?” the woman asked.

“Vancouver Island.”

“I thought we were on Vancouver Island.”

Sonia leaned against the glass, prepared, it seemed, to fall right into the city. Her mouth left a foggy circle, like the translucent shadow of the radiation mask.

“It’s very beautiful here,” the woman said, yawning.

“Yes. Can you imagine it destroyed?”

“Unfortunately, I can. I’m from Detroit.”

Sonia turned to her with clasped hands. “Would you really put leaflets under the plates?”

“Oh, Beth. It would give me tremendous pleasure. You have no idea.”

Sonia went over to the bed and counted out twenty leaflets and placed them on the table. “Will that be enough?”

“Whatever.”

“Thank you so much. Now we have to finish handing these out.”

The woman was still gazing out the window, her eyes half shut, glasses cocked, but she came to enough to wave to us. “Farewell, little women!”

In the hall outside, Sonia bounced on her toes. “Jane, I’m so happy. See how easy it is? No one wants to die. We just have to explain the situation like we did with her.”

I wasn’t so sure the woman would even remember the leaflets by dinner though I didn’t say this. I let Sonia bounce. I let her be a rabbit. After all, who knew what effect our words would have? Maybe we would be her provenance. We continued leafleting and soon came to a door propped open with a cleaning trolley. The maid was standing in the middle of the room, a rag in her hand, hypnotized by something on the television. Sonia had her in her sights, but I wanted to try now. I tapped on the door. The maid snapped the TV off and swung around to face us. “Sorry to bother you,” I began. “We’re wondering if we might talk to you about something that’s going on in this hotel.”

She gestured vigorously. “No Ingleesh!”

In the elevator I still felt charged. It was what kept the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses going despite how many doors are slammed in their faces. If one soul could be saved, even one. Sonia said, “Now I don’t know what to do. I feel like we should keep talking to people. But someone has to get arrested.”

“Pete will, I bet.”

“I hope so,” she said as the elevator opened and we stepped right out into the waiting arms of a crimson-faced security guard. “Stop,” he said. It was a plea, rather than a command. I was momentarily horrified, but Sonia could not believe our luck. She smiled and put her hands up like in a Western.

“Thank you,” he told us, breathlessly. “I’ve just been chasing your friend around.”

“Who?” Sonia asked.

The guard took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, the one appliquéd with the Hyatt crest, and wiped his face. Now that he had us, he switched to sarcasm. “Sorry. I didn’t catch his name.” A staticky ejaculation sounded from deep inside the jacket and he whipped a walkie-talkie out, clearly deriving a childish pleasure from handling it. We got a brief glimpse then of the other thing in the jacket—the belly straining against the belt. “Interception on twenty-eight. Two more coming down.” He reholstered his toy. “You have to come with me. Not that way. We gotta take the stairs. Here.” He seized Sonia’s arm, then mine. This was when we were supposed to go limp. I waited for Sonia to go first. She pulled her mask off. “We won’t run away.”

“Sure you won’t.”

“What did he look like?”

“The big guy?”

“Timo,” Sonia said to me. “If he was alone, that’s not good. Where’s Pete?”

When we got to the stairwell door, the guard nodded for Sonia to open it since both his hands were full. It shut heavily behind us and we found ourselves in a concrete shaft much like a bomb shelter. A vertical bomb shelter with thirty-some floors of Escher handrails. Our steps echoed as we started down, the suits swished, and the guard’s breath came in nasal spurts. “Are you going to call the police?” Sonia asked him.

“That depends on how much trouble you are.”

“Oh, we won’t be any trouble.”

“Then you should be fine.”

“It’s the people at this conference who are making trouble,” I said, with a glance at Sonia. She nodded, adding, “But you can call the police if you want. We’ll go peacefully.”

We reached the next landing. She pulled her hood down and shook out her hair, which I took as a signal. “You probably wonder why we’re here,” I began.

“Nope.”

“There’s a conference in this hotel. One of the companies involved is making the guidance system for the cruise missile. Do you know anything about the cruise missile?”

“Sure. I read your leaflet.”

“Then you understand,” I said.

“No, I don’t. I don’t understand at all. You look pretty young. You should be in school, shouldn’t you?”

“That’s true. We should be, right, Sonia? If we felt safe, we would be in school, but we don’t. We feel—imperilled.”

Sonia liked this word. She smiled. By this point the guard’s hold on us was procedural rather than restraining. The more laboured his breathing, the more symbolic his touch, which alarmed me for we were only going down. He wasn’t old. Aftershave emanated from him, stronger as he heated up.

“Are you married?” Sonia asked.

“I don’t have to answer your questions.”

She raised the arm he was holding and looked at his wedding band.

On every second landing, we passed a heavy metal door like the one we’d entered through, with the number of the floor painted on it. The guard was perspiring copiously now and, worried for him, I asked to take a break. He looked relieved as he shepherded us into the corner of the stairwell, spreading his legs wide to block us in, yanking out his handkerchief. “Sorry about the trouble,” Sonia said.

“Sure you are.”

“We are. We really are.”

He swabbed the back of his neck and face, then meticulously refolded and restored the soggy cloth. I sensed he was stalling. His chest heaved. Sonia asked, “Do you have kids?” just as the walkie-talkie woke up with what might have been “Jack?”

“Yeah. We’re on our way down,” he answered. We heard the word situation in the reply. “So I should just leave these ones here?” he asked.

“Ah?”

“I’ll be there when I get there. Over.” And he sighed.

“Is your name Jack?” Sonia asked.

“He called me Jock.”

“It’s Jock?”

He looked at her sidelong. “It’s a joke. No more chit-chat. Let’s get going.”

“I’m Sonia. This is Jane.”

He smirked as we started down again. I could hear that his breath sounded more normal now for a too-fat man. I kept glancing at Sonia, who was making tartar of her bottom lip. She was, I guessed, thinking of another plan. Sure enough, as we neared the next landing, her eyes slid sideways, slyly, to meet mine the second before she slipped. Her bum hit the concrete stair and, with the guard still holding us, she almost brought me and him down on top of her. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” Her howls reverberated in the shaft. “My ankle!” she cried, rubbing her tailbone.

“I’ll get some ice,” I said.

“Wait!” Jock shouted as I bounded back up the stairs and burst into the hotel proper. I was gone less than three minutes, jogging the halls in search of an ice machine, but when I returned, Jock was sitting on the stairs with Sonia, showing her a photograph, apparently to distract her from her pain. She beamed over her shoulder at me. “See? I told you she’d come back. Look, Jane! Aren’t they cute?”

I exchanged the ice I’d carried in the bowl of my mask for the photograph. Two little girls posing on a fur rug. One was missing a tooth. “How old are they?” I asked.

“Seven now. They were five when that was taken.”

Sonia rolled her sock down and delicately painted her anklebone with an ice cube. When the walkie-talkie sounded off again, she told him, “Just don’t answer it. Is it fun, having twins?” “It’s fun now, but in the beginning—oh, my God. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”

“Jock? Jock?”

“Can you put any weight on it?”

“I’ll try. Ow! Ow! Just a sec.” She sank back on the stair and filled the sock with ice. It actually looked sore then. Using the railing, she hoisted herself to her feet. The grimace was real. “This should be interesting,” she said, hopping down a step.

“I think we can use the elevator.”

“No,” said Sonia. “I don’t want to get you in trouble. I can do it.” She hopped down another step. I tried to look as blank as possible. There was a kind of bird that did this very thing, I remembered. It would feign a broken wing to save its offspring.

“That’s the way,” said Jock. “You’re doing great.”

When we had made it down to the twelfth floor, Sonia said, “I can’t believe you don’t worry about them.”

“Who?”

“Sara and Michelle.”

She knew their names!

“Who says I don’t?” Jock said.

“I mean that you wouldn’t do absolutely everything in your power to keep them safe. You seem so nice.” He pulled his head back, insulted, and a few extra chins appeared. Sonia said, “I’d do anything for my child. Except that I don’t have one and I never will.”

“Why not, if you’re so keen on them?”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring a baby into the world knowing what’s going to happen.” She gripped the railing. Hop.

He stopped. “It’s just a job, okay? A person has to have a job.”

I jumped in again. “That’s what everyone says. The people at the conference who make the weapons. Reagan. Andropov. They’re just doing their jobs.”

“We live in a free country,” said Jock. “I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Me too,” Sonia said. “I hate politics. But this isn’t about politics. It’s about life.”

“I get your point. I even agree with you—somewhat. But I still can’t let you run around in here dressed up like that. I’ll get fired. Then how am I going to feed my girls?”

“Would you call the police?” Sonia asked.

“Why? I’m here so the police don’t have to be. I’m going to escort you out. Peacefully, right?”

“Of course,” Sonia said.

I thought of something then. “We still have leaflets. You could put them with the tourist brochures later. No one would ever know it was you.”

To see a person change his mind. It seemed more beautiful and moving than any sunset or spring flower. Here was a man who had believed one thing twenty minutes ago, who, before our very eyes, became convinced of something else. I gave Sonia all the credit. How had she done it? Not so much with words, though pleading was part of her success. It was mostly that you took one look at her and saw she embodied the fears of every child. You wanted to save her from any harm.

She took her remaining leaflets and turned to me for mine. The guard accepted them, slipping them into some secret pocket of his wonder jacket without a word. We went down the last three flights in silence, holding our breath in case he changed his mind. “Thank you,” Sonia told him when we reached the bottom. Her eyes shone. “Thank you. You did a good thing today for Sara and Michelle. For the world. You should be proud of yourself.”

He blushed, more so when she kissed him. Then she turned to me and did the same. She wrapped her thin arms around my neck and pulled me close. It was the first time anyone not related to me had kissed me and a tingling sensation started up where her lips touched my cheek. Jock opened the door and, cued by Sonia’s nudge, took our arms again. We stepped out into a short corridor. Until we reached the lobby, the commotion didn’t register. I was still dazed from the kiss.

“Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

A pair of guards in the same navy jackets was dragging Pete toward the revolving doors. All around the marbled atrium people stood and stared—the clerks at the front desk, the bellhops and the doormen, the men in suits, some scandalized by, some laughing at, Pete’s tormented flailing.

“Fucking warmongers! I hope you all die!”

They shoved him—“Die, warmongers, die!”—into the glass cell of the door where we couldn’t hear him any more. But we saw him—pounding on the glass, face twisted and unbeautiful.

Meeting afterward at the car was about the only thing that went according to the plan. No one got arrested. Except for Dieter, who had slipped unobtrusively out, we’d all been dragged or shoved out, depending on our state of limpness. Sonia and I didn’t even try to go limp. We were too horrified by what Pete had yelled.

“What the fuck was that about?” Dieter asked him as we drove away. But Pete was disinclined to explain himself, why he had ignored the plan and, worse, discredited us.

“Something happened to me and Jane,” Sonia piped up tearfully from the back. “We met this woman from the conference? She took a bunch of leaflets. She’s going to give them out.”

Pete snorted.

“She said she would! Didn’t she, Jane?”

“He’s always so negative,” Belinda said.

“I’m always so negative? Why is that, I wonder? Maybe it’s because the world is run by homicidal despots. Maybe the death sentence we’re living under makes me feel just a little bit down.”

He honked the horn. We were passing Timo on his ten-speed, crossing the bridge to meet up with us in Kits, one pant leg rolled to the knee so it wouldn’t catch in the chain. He lifted his giant mushroom helmet and, when he saw us, glumly waved.

“And we made friends with our security guard. He was going to hand out leaflets too,” Sonia said.

Pete: “Really? Maybe he’d like to join the group.”

“Ha ha. He wouldn’t anyway. He wouldn’t because you yelled horrible things at everybody.”

“Pete,” said Pete, “was only trying to get arrested. Pete thought that was the point.”

It had been. All over the world it was happening, all over Canada too. There was a group in Ontario, CMCP, the Cruise Missile Conversion Project, whose members were arrested regularly. There was ANVA, Alliance for Non-Violent Action, and ACT, Against Cruise Testing. All the way home I kept thinking that if we got pulled over, we would probably be arrested because Pete had cut the seat belts out of his car. And I wished we had a better acronym. Mostly, though, I thought about Sonia’s kiss.

“Drop us off,” Belinda ordered.

“I thought we were going to debrief,” Pete told her, keeping his eyes fixed on her in the rear-view mirror—until I got nervous and tapped him on the arm. “Fuck,” he muttered, accelerating.

After we let Belinda and Carla out on Blenheim Street, we drove home. Dieter stalked straight into the house while I lingered by the car. Neither Pete nor Sonia showed any signs of getting out. Pete was still behind the wheel in some furious kind of trance. Though Sonia had opened her door, she seemed to lack the strength to stand. “Is your ankle all right?” I asked.

“It’s my bum that hurts,” she said.

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.

Do they?

I got up for a drink of water and, realizing then how stiff I was from lying on my futon all morning, decided to go out for a walk. I left the house and for several blocks walked with my head down, agitated but pretending not to be, trying to think about my paper without thinking about the implications of that line, so by the time I reached Kropotkin Street and looked up, what I saw stopped me in mid-stride: the avenue ahead in full frothy bloom, as though a pink mist was streaming down it on both sides. I crossed quickly over. A cumulus of blossoms. Overnight these few blocks of Third Avenue had been transformed. Nature had performed this action which, indisputably, trumped ours. All at once I felt like sobbing, the way I had at the end of If You Love This Planet when Dr. Caldicott declares how deeply in love she is with the world and how seeing it in spring especially makes you realize you have to change the priorities of your life. Maybe it was the tears in my eyes, but everything seemed magnified, more intensely coloured, pinker. I desperately loved the world! That was what I was feeling, I decided. The pure embrace of life.

I broke off a cluster of blossoms that, back home, I placed in a glass of water on my card table. Over the next few hours I kept glancing up at it, reassuring myself I hadn’t dreamed what I’d seen and felt.

Mid-afternoon Sonia called up and asked what I was doing. “Reading,” I said.

Ya chitayu.

I got an idea. I plucked all the petals off the branch, waited a minute, then called her name. When she appeared under the grate, I released them, pink, liberated moths, watching as they fluttered down on her smiling, upturned face.

One hundred and forty-nine pages later, Kitty, having been made physically ill when Vronsky abruptly transfers his attentions to Anna, is taken by her mother to a German spa. There she meets a Russian girl of her own age, Varenka, and Kitty, as often happens, felt an inexplicable attraction to this Mademoiselle Varenka.

The similarities disturbed me: as young girls do, as often happens. Did it? I knew it happened now, because of Carla, but I had assumed that lesbianism was a modern phenomenon, that it had to do with feminism, with taking a stand against men, not with love. But now I read in a book more than a hundred years old that Kitty was aware, when their eyes met, that Mademoiselle Varenka liked her too.

Five chapters are dedicated to Kitty’s obsession with Varenka, chapters that had apparently not seemed very important the first time I read the novel since I barely remembered them. Varenka, Kitty decides from a distance, while pretty, is not likely to be attractive to men. The two women see each other daily in passing but, not having been formally introduced, are obliged to communicate with their eyes. Kitty’s eyes say, Are you the delightful being I imagine you to be? and Varenka’s answer, I like you too, and you are very very sweet.

Kitty begs her mother for an introduction until the Princess Shcherbatsky, weary of these entreaties, approaches the Russian girl at last. “My daughter has lost her heart to you.”

Varenka: “It is more than reciprocal, Princess.”

And so they finally meet. Kitty blushed with happiness, long and silently pressing her new friend’s hand, which did not return her pressure but lay passively in hers. The hand did not respond to her pressure but Mademoiselle Varenka’s face glowed with a soft, pleased, though rather sad smile. . . .

Exactly the way Sonia’s looked when I showered her with petals! I remembered, too, how she had held my hand during that first NAG! meeting, and my confusion about what to do. I, too, had gone limp. Like Kitty, I blushed now.

Kitty becomes more and more fascinated by her friend, enraptured by her. Soon she learns that Varenka has also been wounded in love. “Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you,” Kitty tells Varenka.

“How good you are, how good!” exclaimed Kitty and, stopping her, she kissed her.

She kissed her.

I touched my face, feeling that tingle again. No, I couldn’t write about it. As I reshelved Anna Karenina in the milk crate, the word palpitations came to mind, though it felt more like my heart was hurling itself against the bars of its cage. Eventually these protestations subsided. I had other, more pressing things to distract me: our date with the end of the world, my long mental slog toward another essay topic.

At our next house meeting we decided to have a party. After the requisite bickering, we reached consensus on a date—the following Friday—who, and how many people we would invite, and what each of us would do to get ready. Then, on Friday, I came home to an unusual domestic scene, Sonia on her knees angrily scrubbing the kitchen floor while Pete sat cross-legged on the table, well out of her way, shelling peanuts into his lap.

“Let me,” I begged her. “I’ll do it.”

“That’s not the point,” she said.

The point was that we, the women, were yet again cleaning while they, the men, were not. Sonia glared at Pete. I hurried out with the teeming compost, knocking another rotting stave off the fence in my eagerness to stay in the we that included her. When I came back with the empty bowl, Pete waved me over and dumped his shells in it.

Since hinting wasn’t working, Sonia sat up on her haunches and asked him outright: “Pete! Why aren’t you helping us?”

“I got the snacks.” He waved the bag of peanuts.

“When we said we’d get the house ready, we meant put the food out and decorate. We didn’t mean do everybody’s chores.”

“So put the food out and decorate.”

Her little nostrils quivered. The effect was charming. “You go around saying you’re a feminist! If you really were, you’d help!”

“Wrong. I really am a feminist, therefore I refuse to treat you differently than I’d treat a man.” He cheerfully cracked another shell with his perfect teeth. “Ask Dieter. He’d be happy to patronize you.”

This was why anarchism would never work, I thought. No one would ever want to wash the kitchen floor. When I made the mistake of voicing this, Pete replied, “Wrong, Zed. This is actually an example of how perfectly anarchism works. Someone always wants the kitchen floor to be clean. In this case, Sonia wants it to be clean, so she’s washing it. She’s washing it of her own free will. If I relinquished my principles and went ahead and washed it, even though I’m perfectly satisfied with the condition of the floor, I wouldn’t be an anarchist. Because an anarchist will not be limited in the exercise of his will by fear of punishment or by obedience to any person or metaphysical entity. He—or she—is guided in his—or her—own actions by his—or her—own personal understanding and ethical conceptions.”

Dieter walked in then and Sonia got up off the floor and threw the sopping rag at him. It slapped his chest with a horse-dungy plop that made me laugh out loud. Sonia shrieked that she was on strike and ran out.

“Asshole,” Dieter told Pete.

“I didn’t do anything.”

Dieter dropped his books on the table and, tugging his pant legs at the thigh, got down on all fours. I knew then that he still liked Sonia, though he hardly bothered her any more. His glasses hung off his face as he worked, clinging to his temples by the arms. Pete kept on cracking peanuts.

I went after Sonia and, finding her lying on the meadow of her bedspread, sat down to watch the fortunate air filling her up, the unfortunate air leaving. I felt so awkward around her now, a different kind of awkwardness than when I had first moved in. Then I had felt invisible, but now I felt far too obvious, like the sleeve I wore my heart on was fluorescent or Hawaiian.

“I’m exhausted,” she said after a minute.

“You should have waited for me to get home. I would have helped.”

“It’s not just that. Jane? After exams? After my practicum?”

“Yes?”

She was staring up at nothing. “Do you want to move out? We can get an apartment.”

“Together?” I said.

“Yes.”

It was hours before it really sunk in and the euphoria hit. What she said and her proviso: “If we’re still alive, I mean.”

We had said eight o’clock but no one came until almost ten, after which the house was full of noise. Some of Dieter’s amigos turned up, including Hector, back from Victoria in the hope that his refugee application would finally be processed. For this Latin American contingent we played music happy with maracas, buoyant with unintelligible choruses, until midnight, when Pete brought down his milk crate of tapes and put on Purple Haze. People from SPND and EAR were there, too, and every-one from NAG! Belinda and Carla had set up in the kitchen, Belinda straddling a backward chair while Carla wove tiny braids into her hair. Several times during the evening Pete came in and asked, “Are you done yet?” to which Belinda replied, “God,” without looking up.

I tagged along while Sonia hugged everyone and made sure they had drinks. Everything she did—replenishing the chip bowl, stashing a six-pack in the fridge—she did with grace. I was fascinated, enraptured. Then Ruth came over. “Can I talk to you, Jane?”

“I’m helping Sonia,” I said and blushed. The adoration in my voice. So obvious! I followed Ruth out in case she’d noticed.

No one was in the living room despite all the effort Sonia and I had put into festooning it with cranes. Ruth closed the French doors after us then slumped on the chesterfield and, face in her hands, began to cry. I was supposed to hug her, I knew, but I didn’t. I waited until she had blotted her tears on her paisley scarf. Taking a few pulls from the bottle jammed between her thighs, she said, “I’d do anything, Jane.”

“For whom?”

She burped into her fist. “To get into NAG! I know you’re in now. Sonia told me. How did you do it?”

I felt sorry for her and told the truth: “I live here.”

“I knew it! I tried so hard. You have no idea how hard I tried to get in. I even sucked up to Dieter.” Ruth started to sob in earnest now and, embarrassed, I looked out the ponchoed window. Someone was coming up the walk in moon boots. More than out of season, the glowing white boots were out of climate, but I was accustomed to strange garb by then, to T-shirts that screamed slogans, to tie-dye in the full spectrum of purple, to work socks worn with long Indian cotton skirts, to Birkenstocks, buffalo sandals, huaraches, clogs. He set down the duffle bag he was carrying and removed something from it—a book.

“I’m so depressed,” Ruth said.

How strange that our roles should be reversed, that Ruth with her barely blue eyes and blond hair and her pretty peach-fuzzed face should be miserable while I was so exultant. Strange, too, that I had the power to save the night for her. All I had to do was tell her why I was so happy. Ruth was drinking with intent now. I said, “Sonia and I are moving out.”

She looked at me. “When?”

“After finals.”

“Thank you,” she gasped.

“Together,” I added, in case she hadn’t understood that I loved Sonia. There. I’d finally admitted it.

“So two rooms will be free?” she said, incredulous.

The doorbell rang and, tingling all over from my confession, I went to answer it. The book was under his arm now, the duffle on the porch, a dark grey parka with a fake fur–trimmed hood draped over it. I only noticed because it was the same coat that got so many boys through Alberta winters, that boys all over Canada wore, presumably, but that I’d never seen in Vancouver because parkas were unnecessary. His hair, brown and wavy, flopped in his eyes.

“Does Dieter Koenig live here?” he asked in a voice thick with hope.

I nodded and stepped aside; he whisked the duffle in with him. There was something so comical about how he did it, bowing and bobbing and brushing away the hair, that the people who were hanging around in the vestibule smiled. Or maybe it was the boots. “Go ahead,” I said. “I think he’s on the deck.” Just then Ruth came out of the living room, blotted and beaming, and I hurried after the newcomer before she had the chance to thank me physically.

“Through that door.” I pointed.

Sonia, tidying the counters, collecting empties, smiled at me. How good you are, how good! I thought, as Dieter’s friend in the boots came clomping back inside, the book clutched to his chest like a flat black breastplate. “I don’t see him,” he told me.

We went out together where about a dozen people braved the chill. Dieter was in the corner with Hector, the two of them talking with their hands. When Dieter spoke English, even when Hector did, their arms hung limply at their sides. English seemed to bring on a semi-paralysis, while Spanish animated everyone who spoke it. I wondered what Russian did. Made you drink vodka probably. “Dieter!” I called over the voices, the boom-box maracas, and pointed to Moon Boots, who raised a tentative hand and smiled. Dieter waved back blankly. A joint that was circulating reached us just then and Moon Boots took it with wide eyes, looking from the person who’d passed it, to me, as though he’d won a prize.

I went back inside where Sonia was telling a man in a Question Authority T-shirt about the renaming of the streets. “Far out,” he kept saying. “Far out.” Ruth was bubbling away to Pete, who unwound the scarf from her neck and draped it over her head like a dust cloth over a lamp. She carried on giggling and saying flirty things, even after Pete walked off. Then Moon Boots came in for a second time and, noticing Ronald Reagan hanging on the nail, stopped to put the mask on. The notebook slid out from under his arm and he stooped to retrieve it, almost tripping someone else coming in from the deck. He tugged the mask off, bobbed an apology, was just attempting an exit, seemingly before something else could go wrong, when Sonia nabbed him. “You don’t have a drink.”

His eyes darted. “Milk?”

Sonia poured him a glass out of her carton, handing it to him with a suppressed smile. We watched him glug it, saw the pump in his throat and the residue above his lip, the only moustache he looked capable of growing. His jawline was spackled with zits.

Sonia: “I like your boots.”

He looked down at them. We all cracked up.

A siren woke me. I thought it was a scream until the fire truck rumbled past. It would be hours before anyone else got up, I assumed. But Sonia was at the kitchen table when I went down, in her pyjamas, cradling her headache in her hands. First I surveyed the devastation, then I put the kettle on. “Go back to bed,” I told her. “I’ll clean it up.”

“Why should you?”

Because I wanted to. Because I loved her. Because I wanted to make her happy.

“It was fun last night,” she said. “I feel so guilty whenever I have fun. That’s when it’s going to happen. When we least expect it. Reagan’s just waiting for me to look the other way so he can press the button.”

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“No. Tell me the truth, Jane. Is my insomnia honourable or am I just torturing myself?”

This was a reference to Dr. Korolyov in “A Case History.” “So you’re not sleeping,” he tells Liza, the young, conscience-stricken textile factory heiress. “It’s lovely outside, spring has come. The nightingales are singing and here you are sitting in the dark, brooding.” Outside, the watchman bangs two o’clock, and Korolyov sees Liza tremble and notices that her eyes were sad and clever, and clearly she longed to tell him something.

Korolyov: “Your insomnia is something honourable: whatever you may think, it’s a good sign.”

“I want to be a Liza,” Sonia said. “I want it so badly.”

“You already are one.”

“I’m not. I’m not. I won’t be able to save anybody. The bomb will fall. We’ll all die.”

She’d saved me. I wanted to tell her that but just then she turned away, toward the window. I brought the teapot and jar of jam over, clearing a space in the mess to set them down. Then I saw what she was looking at. Someone was coming up the stairs to the deck wearing a bizarre sort of robe, long and padded with a fur-trimmed hood. He walked like he was dragging one leg behind him. My first reaction was shock, that some crazy person had wandered into our yard. Then the robe detached from the hood and became the sleeping bag he slung over the deck railing. I saw the moon boots. “That’s Dieter’s friend,” I said.

Sonia tapped on the window. He swung around and looked at us and, in that moment, hair flopping in his eyes, he seemed very, very young. It was hard to tell how old anyone really was. Sonia looked young too, because she was small, while Pete, so forceful, seemed older. Belinda always struck me as being at the height of maturity—maybe as much as twenty-five. Hector probably was that old, but all of us in NAG! were eighteen or nineteen at most. We may have called ourselves women and men but we were barely adults.

Sonia opened the door to the deck for him. “Tea?” she asked, flitting to the cupboard for another mug. Sand rained on the floor as he shed the coat. He took the white boots off, then his socks, which were wet and, like the bottom of his pants, encrusted with sand. “Sorry.” He tiptoed to the sink and wrung them out.

“Is it raining?” Sonia asked.

“No.” He set the ball of socks on the table next to his mug.

“We’ve been drinking our tea with jam,” she said. “That’s how they drink it in Russia. It’s delicious.” She nudged the jar toward him and he added several spoonfuls, dipping each one again and again until the spoon came out clean and the tea looked like diluted blood. Sonia and I traded smiles the way we had the night before when he chose milk over beer.

“I slept on the beach,” he said.

“Wasn’t it cold?”

“No. It’s like spring.”

“It is spring,” I pointed out.

“Really?” he said, which Sonia seemed to find funny. “Then, in the middle of the night? I woke up? There was water right up to my knees!”

“The tide came in,” she said.

“I didn’t know it did that.”

“What’s your name?”

“Pascal.”