THAT NIGHT, OVER IN her own house, she couldn’t sleep. She lay in the big bed in her and Jack’s bedroom, and through the half-open window and through the very walls she could hear the ocean and the wind in the trees.
She lay listening, not wanting to think of the pale images of the two young people, but the images would not leave her. Those dark eyes. Their pure faces and the young girl’s naked shoulders. And both with their hair so black and combed straight back, showing all of the forehead.
At some point she picked up the flashlight on the bedside table and put on slippers and robe and walked through the house. In Andrew’s room she sat at his desk, on the driftwood chair he’d made some time ago. The room was almost exactly as it used to be when he was alive. A year ago he’d practically moved here. CFB Greenwood was not far inland, and often he and one or two colleagues from the base would stay here on short leaves.
She looked around at his bed, the desk and chair, Grandmother’s old chifforobe with his clothes in it, and the bucket of lead net weights that he used to work out with. The only thing different was the medal they’d given her, the Silver Cross for Mothers, commonly known as the Mother’s Cross.
She shone the flashlight on it, there on the wall where she’d hung it, framed behind glass.
Barely out of university and as an observer still in early training to become a co-pilot and eventually a pilot, he’d been on three flights to Africa already, always on United Nations peacekeeping and relief operations for which Canada had been asked to provide support. There were no incidents, and the newspapers didn’t even report those missions. But then came the war in Ethiopia where Somali troops had invaded the Ogaden region and laid claim to it. The conflict grew, and soon it involved Russian and American interests as well.
On that last assignment, he’d been on a transport aircraft that carried a field hospital and medical supplies to help ease the suffering among civilians. The landing zone was supposed to be secure, but when the crew climbed out and lowered the ramp, they came under heavy mortar fire.
At CFB Uplands in Ottawa, his coffin came down the tail ramp of the same kind of airplane he’d been on, a Lockheed C-130. But a week or two later a report on an American channel said that ever since Vietnam, many coffins were coming home secretly empty, but with flags on them and salutes, just to make the parents feel better. A TV reporter had snuck into a hangar and opened two of the draped coffins, and the camera had shown them to be empty.
The story was denied by a military spokesman, but in a studio interview on that same channel two veterans said that it could easily be true, and that it probably had to do with the way many soldiers were dying. Not from mere bullets passing through them, but from deadly accurate mortar and artillery fire. In those massive explosions, some soldiers simply disappeared.
“Literally blown away, ma’am,” the one veteran had said to the interviewer. His lower legs were gone, and he sat strapped into a wheelchair with a microphone around his neck. “Shredded and evaporated. The human body being mostly fluid, you see. Which doesn’t compress, just becomes vapour. The gas expansion and initial speed of shrapnel from a shell being some twenty or thirty thousand feet per second. Sometimes they can’t find not even the boots, never mind the dog tag.”
It had been as a result of that report that she escaped for a while into the notion of the empty coffin. Only Michael knew about that. He’d listened to her and opened his hands and composed them again and said nothing. Until a few weeks later she herself came to the end of it.
She clicked off the flashlight and sat in the dark for a while. So many gaping holes in her life. Her mother, dead of an aneurysm when Margaret was only eleven. A doctor had made a drawing of it on a piece of paper to help her understand. Like a red river with a bulge in it from all the heavy flow, an eddy getting wider and wider and one day just bursting the bank and flooding all the land.
Then Grandmother. Then her father. Then Andrew and his empty coffin.
And now her wild, true, besotted love of Jack, and perhaps her marriage. She had so loved being married to that man. What had happened to that feeling? Where did it go?
But enough of this. Enough now.
Grandmother had died in this room. In this very bed. Andrew never knew that. It had been a long time before him. Margaret had been twenty then. Twenty, and back for the summer after her second year at university. After all the youthful philosophizing and playing with ideas about life and death and meaning in the absence of God, suddenly came her first loud wake-up call, her encounter with real dying, followed by real death. All of it. The terrible sounds, the disbelief, the panic, and finally the silence.
She would go down to the water and sit in her favourite place on the rock shelf with her eyes closed and the salt wind hard in her face, and try to understand. Sometimes her father would come down and sit with her for a while, and then he’d get up and leave and get to work again, distract himself in his beloved forest.
After Grandmother had been taken away by the funeral people, the bed had remained unmade for days and the slippers had remained on the floor, side by side, ready to receive the feet that would never come again. In the silence of the room, the orphaned slippers more than any other thing bore a message, and she puzzled over it for days until it came to her that if she applied the thinking she was learning in Paris now, the message could be seen to be not about death but about life. It could be seen as a reminder that life was to be used while one had it, used absolutely, used up like firewood in the flames, as the more interesting new writers and philosophers were saying.
On that one notion they all agreed, that there was no use for life other than to live it; to make it into whatever adventure or imaginary game one chose, and when your time was up, it was over and done with and you could take nothing with you. Nothing. Not even your trusty slippers.
She’d sat listening for the ring of truth in that, all those years ago on her rock. And she sat listening for it again now. In this burdened room, for the echo of it.
She turned the flashlight back on and swept his bucket full of lead, the bed, the fancy brass hook shaped like an eagle that he’d found in an antique store and had polished until it shone and then mounted it on the wall as his special place for his uniform.
She stood up from the unbelievable chair he’d made. Sweetheart, she said to him. Sweetheart.
During her time at the Sorbonne she’d lived in a furnished flat in a war-damaged house. Tank shells had passed through the building from front to back. The great holes had once been boarded up, but the boards had since been pried off and people had climbed in and out and stripped panelling and light fixtures and furnishings from the damaged half. But the side with her apartment was liveable and the lock on her door worked.
It all lent an element of adventure, and the rent was cheap. All the café crowd lived in similar accommodations, or in unheated hotel rooms. Often on Saturdays in the spring and fall, she and Franziska and Anne went out to stroll the streets and to spend hours window-shopping and at the counters at Bon Marché. In the evenings they often sat with others in the noisy cafés. Their favourite haunts were Le Boeuf d’Or and Les Deux Langoustes. They loved Paris by night and by day, and they loved the new ways of thinking they were learning, ideas that could help you see things differently and in this way could change your life.
They lived a few streets from each other, and they studied French and English literature and history and philosophy. They practised as-ifness and absurdism and phenomenism, keeping notes on their progress. They bought black turtlenecks and they wore lipstick and kohl or no makeup at all, and they bought purple berets and put them on in front of mirrors and set them just so.
They learned a great deal from one specific teaching assistant in philosophy, an unpaid Ph.D. docent, young and intense and brilliant. His name was Jean-Charles Manssourian, French of Armenian extraction. For a while Franziska had a crush on him, but he already had a girlfriend, a tall, thin one with a nice smile, who wore only black and no bra.
What Manssourian taught was thinking imported from the ruins of other European capitals and sifted for truth and reinterpreted. Especially now, after the war, he said, when one had learned to see through life so completely, one needed to make the effort to rise above things, in order to see what one had missed before.
Among the established writers and thinkers, he liked best the few who, in his words, were not fixated on existential nothingness, like staring into a hole that everyone knew was empty, but rather they chose to examine the notion of Now what? Here we are, and how do we go forward?
And even something as simple as finding beauty in nature, said Manssourian, or making the effort to brew a very good cup of coffee or to tie a shoelace exceptionally well was more interesting than the empty hole. Courage and a sense of humour had a lot to do with it, he said.
That kind of searching had been everywhere in Paris in those days. So soon after the war, with buildings in ruin on many a street. The smell of rust and wet rubble in the air. With young men on crutches and in wheelchairs, and the most unfortunate of them without any limbs at all, being wheeled about in barrows or carried in backpacks with their heads poking out, set down on designated café chairs where the uprights protruded above the top rail so that the straps could be hooked over them and keep the bagman from falling over. Someone, most often his mother or father, would put a glass to his lips and let him sip.
Sometimes a wife. There was one blond woman in American jeans and a pilled black sweater and tennis shoes who did this regularly. She still loved her husband, she said brightly right in front of him. Loved his mind and spirit. And understood him, now more than ever. So much so that not only did she still want his child, who would have arms and legs as strong as his used to be, but if one day he were to ask her to help him die, she would do that for him as well. Of course she would.
Throughout the evening she’d crumble tobacco and roll brown-paper cigarettes and tap them and light them and get them going, and then hold them for him between thumb and forefinger. She’d hold the glass to his lips at just the right angle. If liquid spilled, she’d dab his chin with a handkerchief folded to a dry spot. And when it was time to go she’d put down coins for the drinks and a tip, and she’d say good night and shake hands with everyone around the table. She’d crouch and someone would help her into the straps and she’d stand up and walk away bent over, with her husband on her back.
Everyone a philosopher, a seeker, and new thoughts or old, in her days in Paris the investigation into how to live right, how to make a work of art of the brief absurdity that the war had once again shown human life to be was like a virus, an infectious mood. It in itself gave startling colour and immediacy to every moment of the day.