AS SOON AS SHE WAS ABLE to walk with some assurance, Helen used her new skill to walk away from me. When I remember her now, it is always the back of her head I’m seeing, her determined shoulders as she toddles out of the yard on some business of her own. She always treated me with dutiful affection. In fact, despite a certain distaste for the corruption of middle-aged flesh, she loved me, in her evasive fashion. I was non-essential. Everyone was. Though she was fond of us, especially when we were near by.
Helen’s beauty was an attribute of such magnitude it became an independent creature, a sort of symbiotic organism that attached itself to my daughter. In photographs, she seemed upstaged by her own beauty, which was like a competitive friend sticking her head in front of the camera, obscuring the presence of a shy child who satisfied herself with the vicarious pleasures of living life through another. Helen’s beauty robbed Helen of herself.
Her grandmother Alice was no fool. She saw that Helen was in danger. Alice would watch my little girl walking through the cow parsnip with the sun flashing from her raven hair. She called to her, but Helen never came when we called; we would have to fetch her. Helen was listening to her own ticking heart, dazed by the fracture between herself and the resplendent girl the world saw. My mother was a nineteenth-century woman, and she perceived the problem as one of simple vanity. And being an idealist, she thought to correct what seemed like vapid girlishness with a good strong dose of her favourite medicine, that being formal education.
So Alice took Helen to school.
My mother would come for Helen every morning at five o’clock. I would gather Helen up in my arms and walk down the path separating our houses. She would clutch me with cool little hands about my neck while we bounded down the path through the dusky leaves. Her living grandmother greeted us at the clearing, a white figure half lit by a lantern held high, and with an easy shift of her weight, Helen was gone. From one life raft to the next. Always with that same detached gaze. I stopped them and demanded my kiss, and Helen would lean out from the ledge of Grandmother Alice’s arms and obediently put her lips anywhere in the vicinity of my face. Then with a trace of a smile, she was gone.
During the long buggy ride, she stared up at the fading stars, listening to Grandmother Alice sing, and when they were drawn into the streets of Winnipeg and the horses drummed on cobblestones and her grandmother fell silent, Helen sat up very straight to stare at people. The city had grown big by then, and there were many people walking and many carts with milk and newspapers and pigs and bread, and at least in the richer south part of the city, there were electric streetcars.
One morning on their way to the school, they saw a horse and wagon collide with a streetcar. The wagon tipped over, dragging the horse down with it. The horse struggled to its feet, twisting the traces till one snapped off and splintered into its neck. It was trapped, speared, gaffed half-backwards, its front legs buckled, then it stood and pulled the wagon on its side over the street, the wood frame breaking up into pieces. Alice tried to cover Helen’s eyes, but Helen pulled away. She was keen, alert, interested.
By the time they arrived at the Mission school, there were a dozen children waiting at the door with that forthright insistence of hunger. Those were the ones without food at home. Some members of the church distrusted Alice’s method of supplying food and clothing to bribe the children to come to school. Salvation is sufficient unto itself, they argued; such economic meddling will defile the true spirit of the church. My mother agreed and removed the school to its shoddy digs near the CPR station and the Dominion Immigration Hall (which was always overflowing with those “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” so desirable to the Minister of the Interior—as long as the shabby Europeans left town quickly to farm, and as long as they did not get the vote).
The first job was to feed the children. Not all the students of Alice’s school needed breakfast; in another hour, nearly forty others would arrive, warmly dressed and fed. But the first hour was the loveliest. Mr. Kolchella had lit the stove long before. They sat peaceably at the refectory tables, to sip porridge sweetened with lots of Grandfather Peter’s honey. Helen had a couple of friends among the children attending this early communal meal, two silent little boys with handsome, dirty faces who became her companions. Helen unconsciously took the seat at the head of the table. The two boys sat at either side. The friends spooned their porridge with darting efficiency and then sat mute, all three holding hands. These were Helen’s first suitors.
The children were let out to the yard to play while Alice and Mr. Kolchella washed the dishes and replaced the porridge bowls with tattered books. My mother hated the school bell, but the kids loved it, as they loved flags and military medals. She had only to stand on the steps, holding it by its clapper like a dead animal, and the kids would stampede inside.
Mr. Kolchella was Austrian-born. He was, like Alice, slight, and strong. He had a very wide mouth with long white teeth, a big, triangular nose and genial brown eyes framed by thick lashes. All of this eloquence was fit into a tiny face, just as his enormous energy was barely squeezed into his diminutive frame. Mr. Kolchella taught in German, Slavic and Bohemian. Alice somehow covered the others, with the help of the children themselves, who had little regard for their mother tongues and preferred bewilderment in English to knowledge in their own language.
Classes proceeded through a relay, in which information was spoken in, perhaps, Polish and transformed into Yiddish by the recipient, who substituted half the words with Russian or Chinese and sent it forward through a cycle of perhaps twenty languages before it was returned, transmuted, to Alice in English. A game of Grandmother’s Whisper.
The lessons had an athletic quality. Giddy children leapt up to pluck words out of the air. Knowledge was a fat man; the kids seized him roughly and tossed him around, shrieking with laughter. It was a boot camp for anarchists.
The school day ended at two o’clock. The students had been fed once more, some soup and, on some days, bread. It made them drowsy. “Goodbye, old gentleman,” said Alice, shaking the sticky hand of one of Helen’s solemn suitors. The boy nodded and bowed to Helen, and then stopped at the door and said, “Here we are tomorrow.” “No,” said Alice. “Tomorrow is a holiday. We’ll see you in three days.” The suitor understood the word “no” but was confused by the rest and too proud to ask. Grief rippled through him. Helen went to him and kissed his cheek, murmuring something that seemed to fill him with painful admiration. Before my mother could stop him, the boy reached for a pair of scissors, and with his eyes upon Helen, his motion small and furtive, he stabbed the scissors into the palm of his hand. When Alice reached him, he was holding his bleeding hand up to Helen’s face; she wore that intent look again, awake. She drifted while Grandmother Alice bandaged the boy’s hand, but before he went off, he shyly came to her. Once more she kissed his cheek, and then she gently nudged him, Go home.
When he was gone, my mother kneeled down before her granddaughter and looked at her for a long time, thinking. Then she said, “People—male people—will try to give you strange gifts, Helen. You do not need to accept them all.” Helen pulled away. Grandmother Alice held her. “Be careful what gifts you take.” But with a quick, resentful glance, Helen was gone.
Every day on the way home from school, my mother and Helen stopped at a shop near by called the Evil Eye. Above the shop, Mr. Kolchella had two small rooms that he shared with his tiny wife.
Mr. Kolchella was Mrs. Kolchella’s second husband. Mrs. Kolchella’s first husband had been executed in Russia only a year before. “It was a shock,” whispered Mr. Kolchella, taking Alice by the arm. “They made her watch.” He shook his head and looked back shyly at his wife, who was standing at the window looking down into the street. “There were other things,” confided Mr. Kolchella, “which I will not name in front of the child. The soldiers…” His eyes filled with tears, and he shrugged bitterly. “We are not far from the animals,” he said. Mrs. Kolchella turned from the window and smiled at them. Helen, who had been making pictures at the table near by, fiercely resumed her scribbling.
The Evil Eye smelled of leather and polish. Its windows were full of glass jars piled on waxy furniture. The proprietor was a man named Mr. Cantor. They were good friends, and they always addressed one another as Mr. Cantor, Mrs. McCormack, Mr. and Mrs. Kolchella.
They sat around a table at the back of the store, drinking coffee hot from the stove. The table was littered with newspapers in Russian and Ukrainian and Yiddish. Of the four adults, Mr. Cantor had the biggest lap, and though he often got furious, he never jumped up and down like Mr. Kolchella and Grandmother Alice did, and he wasn’t all bones like Mrs. Kolchella, and so Helen would go to Mr. Cantor. She climbed into his chair and put her head against his chest and listened to them argue the way she listened to the trains from her bed at night. Mrs. Kolchella sat beside Mr. Cantor, and when one of the adults would evoke too clearly the cruelty known only among such old people, she would reach her tiny hand to stroke Helen’s hair, humming an aimless lullaby to protect the child with a veil of white noise.
They said it was a bad year. Mayor Sharpe (and Helen, hearing his name, thinking of a man with hands like scissors) had cut down a strike by the employees of the Electric Street Railway Company by bringing in the militia from the nearby Fort Osborne barracks. As the mayor read the Riot Act, the soldiers had arrived with bayonets and a loaded Lewis gun. Helen understood a riot as something grown-ups do, something with women and soldiers. She dozed against Mr. Cantor’s baritone chest and dreamed of soldiers. The mayor has a machine gun; the government executes old husbands; execute is electrocute, what the government was going to do soon in the city. It is safe only behind danger, inside its ribs, to go to the adults with the mad hearts and soft hands. Helen learned that war is inside people and we must go to the lap of the strongest man with the quietest body, and thus, at the centre of the storm, we will be safe.
There was a marvellous bird at Mr. Cantor’s store. Two feet high and bright blue, with a beak the colour of raspberries. With its dragon’s claws, it gripped the bars of its cage and rocked back and forth. Helen thought it was an angel from the wilds of heaven.
The bird spoke a language so strange that even Grandmother Alice couldn’t respond. Mr. Cantor said it was a parrot and it came from South America. It spoke sentences like the drummings of a partridge, softly percussive, wood on earth. A remarkably gentle voice, coming from the rapacious red beak. The parrot was, Mr. Cantor said, the sole living creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe. All the speaking people were gone, and they’d left behind only this creature. The parrot was older than Mr. Cantor, older than Grandmother Alice. When it died, it would take with it the last words of the lost people. Helen imagined her own forest growing over the blackened logs of her house, her little bed sinking under the trees and the dark bushes. She laid her ear against the man’s chest.
Outside the light thrown by a wood stove, there is a constant riot going on, stirred by the sharp fingers of soldiers. But inside, behind the empty glass bottles at the Evil Eye, was a cadre, a place of peace. Helen listened. With vibrating voices, the adults invented a new medicine. They called it revolution.
Everyone said “revolution” a different way. Mr. Cantor rolled the R in his chest, a low pneumatic rumble rising through the very back of his throat, with the N nicely flattened by his tongue. But Mr. Kolchella opened it up like one of those wooden dolls, and it became a sunny word full of A’s and generous U’s. But Grandmother Alice winced and spat, and the small-scale Mrs. Kolchella refrained from saying it altogether, and every time the word was spoken she looked anxiously at the door.
When Helen asked what it meant, she received so many answers she came to know only that “revolution” was the last word on the lips of the last angel. Helen saw a blue pinwheel spinning so fast it cut her beautiful face, and the light released from that lit up the world.