Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who’s pushing it, Tell me again why I agreed to this.
It’s the first time he’s asked her, it’s a slightly self-mocking joke, and he says it in French, but she doesn’t get it. She’s Haitian, in her mid-forties, a little humorless, brusque and professional—exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse. Now he’s not so sure. Her name is Renée Jacques. She speaks almost no English and French he understands with difficulty, although he’s supposedly fluent, at least in Quebecois.
She reaches over him and opens the bedroom door and eases the wheelchair into the hallway. They pass the closed door to the bedroom that Emma has used for her office and for sleeping since Fife started staying awake all night with the sweats and chills. He wonders if she’s in there now, hiding from Malcolm and his film crew. Hiding from her husband’s sickness.
If he could, he’d hide, too. He asks Renée to tell him again why he agreed to this.
He knows she thinks he’s only whining and doesn’t really want an answer to the question, even if she has the answer: she says, Monsieur Fife agreed to make the interview because he’s famous for something to do with cinema, and famous people have to make interviews. She says, They have already been here an hour setting up their lights and moving furniture and covering all the living room windows with black cloth. She adds, I hope they plan before they depart from here to put everything back the way it was.
Fife asks Renée if his wife—her name is Emma Gold, but he calls her Madame Fife—has changed her mind and decided to stay home today for the filming. He says, I want her here, if possible. It’s easier for me to talk to a camera if I think I’m talking to her. Especially if I’m trying to talk about something personal. You know what I mean? he asks the nurse. He tells her that what he plans to say today he doesn’t want to say twice and probably won’t.
Renée Jacques is nearly six feet tall and square-shouldered, very dark with high, prominent cheekbones and eyes set wide in her face. Fife likes the sheen cast by her smooth brown skin. She is a home-care day-nurse and doesn’t have to wear a uniform on the job unless the client requests it. Emma, when she hired Renée, had specified no uniform, please, my husband does not want a uniformed nurse, but Renée showed up the first day in crisp whites anyhow. It spooked Fife at first, but after nearly a month he has gotten used to it. Also, his condition is worse now than when she first arrived. He’s weaker and more addled—only intermittently, but with increasing frequency—and is less willing to pretend that he is only temporarily disabled, out of whack, recovering from a curable illness. The nurse’s uniform doesn’t bother him as much now. They’re ready to add a night-nurse, and this time Emma hasn’t specified, please, no uniform.
Renée pushes the wheelchair across the kitchen, and as they pass through the breakfast room, Fife flashes a glance out the window at the black domed tops of umbrellas fighting the wind on Sherbrooke. Large flakes of soft snow are mixed into the rain, and a slick gray slush covers the sidewalks. Traffic sloshes soundlessly past. Gusts of wind beat in silence against the thick walls and the tall, narrow, twenty-paned windows of the fortresslike building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the southeast half of the first floor of the gray cut-stone building. The archdiocese of Montreal built it to house the nuns of the Little Franciscans of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted the building into a dozen high-ceilinged, six- and seven-room luxury apartments.
Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and decided to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked me to tell you that she will come out to see you when the film people have left.
She adds that, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and a man doing the interview and to the people who will watch the movie on television, he can pretend that he’s talking to his wife the same as if she were there in reality.
He says, You talk too much.
You asked if I knew what you meant about wanting her to hear you in the interview.
Yes, I did. But you still talk too much.
She slides open the heavy pocket-door to the living room and shoves the wheelchair over the high threshold into the darkened room. The Fifes’ apartment was originally occupied by the monsignor who supervised the seminary. It’s a wood-paneled, three-bedroom flat with a formal dining room, parlor, reception hall, office, and library that Fife uses as an editing room. He bought the apartment in the late 1980s when the bottom fell out of Westmount real estate. Leonard Fife and Emma Gold are childless, bilingual, socially attractive, artistic semi-celebrities, and over the years they have adapted the rooms to suit the mingled needs of their professional and personal lives.
Nothing in the room is the way he remembers it. Instead of entering a large, high-ceilinged, brightly lit room with four tall, old-fashioned casement windows, a warm, inviting, yet intellectually and artistically serious room, the low, mid-twentieth-century sofas, chairs, and tables deliberately arranged so that three or four or even more complicated, earnest discussions can take place simultaneously, Fife has entered a black box of unknown dimensions. He knows that he and Renée are not alone—he can feel the presence of several other people in the box, perhaps as many as four. Their silence is sudden, as if caused by his entry, as if they don’t want him to know they have been talking about him. About his illness.
He can hear their breathing.
Over here, Leo! It’s Malcolm, speaking in English. He says, Vincent, give us some light, will you?
Vincent is the cameraman—though he prefers to be called director of photography. DP. Vincent asks Malcolm if he wants the houselights on. So Leo can get his bearings, he adds. Good morning, Leo. Thanks for letting us do this, man. Really appreciate it. Among friends Fife is known as Leo.
Malcolm, too, says good morning and thanks him. Let’s hold off on the lights for now, Vincent. It took us a fucking hour to get it totally dark, he says, and all the lamps and light fixtures are moved.
Vincent hits a switch, and a small, sharply cut circle of light appears on the bare wooden floor. It’s where Fife will be interrogated. He remembers that section of the floor being covered by the Karastan carpet he and Emma brought back from Iran in ’88. Fife would prefer to keep the room in total darkness, just let him be a voice emitted from the dark, but he knows what kind of film Malcolm has planned. Malcolm needs that single pin spot. Fife hopes he won’t have to hear Malcolm and his crew tell him again how great he looks. He got more than enough of that last month when they visited him at the Segal Cancer Centre and someone had the bright idea to shoot this interview.
Actually, he thinks it was his idea, not Malcolm’s or anyone else’s. And it wasn’t because he thought he looked good enough to be on camera. It was because he knew he was dying.
A woman’s voice trills out of the darkness, thanking him. Fife recognizes the voice as Diana’s, Malcolm’s producer and longtime home companion. They are all grateful to him, she says. Her high-pitched thin voice sounds to Fife like a repressed shriek. Anytime you want to take a break, she says, or rest or whatever, just do it. Don’t push yourself.
Malcolm and his crew are based in Toronto, and everyone is speaking English now. To Renée, Diana says, Bring the wheelchair over here into the spotlight, will you, dear? We’re not going to show the chair, just Leo’s face, sometimes straight on, sometimes in profile or even from behind. Everything else will be blacked out. She says it with the condescending authority of a British grade-school teacher. Renée couldn’t care less how they intend to shoot Fife, but she understands Diana well enough to place his wheelchair directly under the pin spot.
It’s the style you invented, man, says Malcolm. Backlight the off-camera side of the subject’s face, nothing else. He steps up to the wheelchair and lays a hand on Fife’s shoulder. Seemed only appropriate. Hope you don’t object.
No, I don’t object.
Consider it a protégé’s homage.
A protégé’s homage. Fair enough, I guess. Who else is here? In the room, I mean.
Sloan’s over there in the corner. She’ll mic you and run the sound. You met her a couple times in Toronto.
I remember, Fife says, cutting him off. He believes that Malcolm is having an affair with the girl. She’s a pretty redheaded kid with freckles and can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Malcolm is close to fifty now. How is that possible? Fife has ex-students, protégés, who are old enough to have inappropriate affairs with interns and famous enough to be able to hook and land the financing and distribution for a filmed final interview with Leonard Fife, himself a documentarian, too old and sick now for inappropriate affairs and famous only in certain, unfashionably leftist quarters, a man who couldn’t raise the money for a project like this on his own.
Malcolm Shoumatoff films the history of Canada, soft-focus liberal takes on early settlement, les coureurs de bois, the Native Peoples, Loyalist immigrants from the American War of Independence, American slaves who followed the North Star on the Underground Railroad, hockey, Cajun music. He’s the Ken Burns of the North, and now he’s documenting his old professor’s final confession. Malcolm thinks he’s about to film his mentor’s last interview and has written out twenty-five questions designed to seduce Fife into making the kind of provocative and often profound remarks and observations that he is famous for, at least among those who know him personally or studied with him at Concordia back in the 1980s and ’90s.
Fife tells Renée to park him where they want him and then please bring Madame Fife here, he has something important that he must tell her.
Renée moves his chair into the circle of light. She sets the brake and disappears into the darkness beyond.
Fife wants to know where the camera is located.
Don’t worry about it, man. All you got to do is sit there and do what you do best.
Which is?
Talk.
Talk? That’s what I do best?
You know what I mean. What you do better than anyone else. What you do best, of course, is make your films. You sure you’re feeling up to this, Leo? I don’t want to push you, bro. We don’t have to do the entire shoot today, if you’re not up to it. Maybe just thirty minutes or so, till we use up the first card. We can come back tomorrow to continue.
Diana chimes in and confirms. We can stay in Montreal all week, if it suits you, and edit in the hotel as we go. There’s no need to shoot it all in one day and go back to Toronto for the editing.
Fife says, I want to keep you here. Until I finish telling everything.
What do you mean, ‘everything’? Diana asks. Malcolm and I have worked up some great questions.
I’m sure you have.
The girl, Sloan, has stepped out of the darkness and is miking him. She clips the tiny mic onto the collar band of the black long-sleeved mock turtleneck shirt that has been part of Fife’s uniform for decades. He likes being touched by her. He likes the mingled smell of cigarettes and sweat and minty shampoo. Young women smell different and better than middle-aged and older women. It’s as if desire has one scent and longing for desire has another. When Emma leans down in the morning to kiss his cheek before leaving for the production company office downtown, she smells of English breakfast tea and unscented soap. And longing for desire. This girl, Sloan, smells of desire itself.
It’s not fair to notice that, he thinks.
But it is true. And Emma’s morning smell is not unpleasant. Just one that’s empty of desire and filled with a wish for it to return. He wonders what he smells like now, especially to a young woman. To Sloan. Can she pick up the odor of his medications, the antiandrogens he was on for months and the Taxotere and prednisone he started this past week? Can she smell the bisphosphonates he’s taking to keep his bones from breaking under the weight of his body, the morphine patches, the urine dripping from his bladder into the catheter and tube emptying into the bag hooked onto his chair? The bits of dried feces clinging to his butt? To Sloan he must smell like a hospital ward for chemically castrated old men dying of cancer.
Tell me again why I came home from the hospital, he says to no one in particular.
Malcolm says, I imagine you’re a hell of a lot happier here. With Emma being close by, I mean, and everything that’s familiar.
There’s no more being happy or happier, Malcolm. He’d like to add—but doesn’t—that all there is for him now is more pain and less pain, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion.
C’mon, Leo. Don’t talk like that, Malcolm says.
I believe I can talk any damned way I want now.
Yeah, you can. That’s why we’re here today. Right?
Right.
Sloan puts her headphones on, and the darkness swallows her.
Where the hell is my wife? Fife asks the darkness. He can still smell Sloan.
Right behind you, Emma says in her low, smoker’s voice. Renée told me you wouldn’t do this unless I’m present. True?
True.
Why? This is for posterity. I’m not posterity, she says, and laughs. I’m your wife.
It’s easier for me to know what to say and what not to say if I know who I’m talking to.
You’re talking to Malcolm.
No! No, I’m not. He and Vincent and Diana and Sloan, they’re only here to film and record me, so they can cut and splice my images and words together and make from those digitalized images and words a little forty-five-minute movie that they sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation so it can be resold to Canadian television viewers after I’ve gone and before I’m forgotten. Malcolm and Diana won’t be listening to me and watching me. They’re making a movie. Different thing.
Emma asks Diana for some light so she can find someplace to sit.
Sloan, Diana says, but Sloan is listening only to Fife through her headphones.
Vincent flips on the overhead light, and Fife sees that they have pushed all the furniture against one wall, making the room seem as large and empty as a hotel ballroom. With all the furniture clustered at the far wall in front of the fireplace and surrounding built-in bookshelves, the room feels tilted onto its side, as if it’s a cruise ship, not a hotel, and the ship has struck a reef and is listing and about to go down. Fife suddenly feels nauseous. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit.
Emma crosses to the pile of furniture, and the ship lists a few inches further in that direction. She sits on the end of a sofa, crosses her arms and legs.
Be careful, Fife says to her.
What? Careful of what?
Nothing. Diana, please shut off the room lights. It’s disorienting. The spot’s okay, but I don’t want to see the room. Or be seen in it.
Oh, Leo, you look great, Diana says. Really, you do.
Definitely, Malcolm says. You look great. Too bad we’re only going to shoot your beautiful brooding bald head.
The light goes out, and Fife is once again illuminated solely and from above by the pin spot. The room floats back to level, and his nausea passes.
You know the drill, Malcolm says. Ready?
Ready as I’ll ever be. Or ever was.
Ready, everyone? Vincent? Sloan?
Yes.
Yes.
Diana?
Yes.
Malcolm says Fife’s name and the date, April 1, 2017, and location, Montreal, Quebec, and claps his hands once in front of Vincent’s camera. The camera is attached to a track that orbits the circle of light on the bare floor and stares at the featureless, flat-black side of Fife’s face. It’s lit only by the overhead spot shining down on the unseen side of his face. The light gives his profile a molten golden edge, surrounded by impenetrable black space.
For a few seconds everyone is silent. Then Fife says that he’s going to begin by answering a question that no one knows to ask. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It’s a question that was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would either be stupid or insulting. Rather, to ask it here and now would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.
The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?
For nearly forty-five years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the U.S. military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed from the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum.
The truth, however, as always, is more complicated. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm Shoumatoff’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by Shoumatoff in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who for nearly half a century believed that Leonard Fife had fled north in the spring of 1968 solely to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question our past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.