The Sky Is Falling

I’m not from Vancouver. I came in 1982 to attend the University of British Columbia and, until I met Joe, I didn’t know anyone who had been born here. Everyone in the group was from elsewhere, Sonia from up north, 100 Mile House, Pete from Toronto, Belinda—Isis!—from somewhere in Nova Scotia. I don’t remember where Carla or Timo were from. Pascal had escaped the same small town in Saskatchewan that Dieter had grown up in, Esterhazy, which turned out not to be a coincidence after all. I’d fled too—a strip-malled neighbourhood of Edmonton where I’d been miserable for no good reason other than there always has to be someone to pick on and it’s usually the smart, socially awkward person with the funny last name, skulking the hallways, binder raised up like a shield. Me.

During my first year at university I stayed with my father’s sister, my aunt Eva, who manned her stove in a suburb to the east of Vancouver, cooking through cases of dented cans and frostbitten cuts of meat, by the vat, as though against some desperate contingency. Every day I had to travel all the way across town to the city’s western point, the UBC campus, a three-bus journey. The commute took an hour and a half or more each way, I explained the following summer to my father, who had wanted me to go to university at home in the first place and now didn’t want to pay for me to live in residence. “Read on the bus,” he said. “I get sick,” I lied. In fact, I’d grown so accustomed to the trip I never looked out the window any more, not even to check if my stop was coming up, somehow always feeling for the cord and ringing the bell at just the right moment even while absorbed in the evolution of Doric-order proportions or the impact of the Crimean War on modern warfare. I just wanted to be closer to campus and to get away from my aunt, who seemed more and more an embodiment of all I was destined to become, lonely and eccentric and obsessively cheap. By the end of the summer, I succeeded. I convinced my father that my grade point average was in jeopardy despite the fact that, hitherto, everything I handed in came back scarletted with the letter A.

When I returned to Vancouver in the fall to begin my second year, I stayed with my aunt again while I looked for somewhere closer, the very next day taking the long, familiar bus ride and spending the morning at the Student Housing Office making calls. I had come too late. The inexpensive basement rooms with a hot plate and a bathroom sink to serve all washing functions had been snapped up. The idea of a shared house unnerved me, but I made a few calls anyway only to discover that the cheaper of these had been taken as well. Although I had a full scholarship, it covered only tuition. An apartment was out of the question.

My preferred place to study the previous year had been in the stacks under the old stone Main Library. I went there again after my disappointing morning, descending to the remotest and deepest parts of the bunker-like levels where the obscurest, bookiest-smelling tomes were stored. The carrels were tucked away singly wherever there was a bit of space. Under the glare of the fluorescents, the books emitted their wise scent. (I imagined print powdering off the pages, that I was breathing knowledge.) I found the Russian books and selected one at random. Cyrillic seemed vaguely runic. Latin letters were sprinkled in but the cases were mixed. R was backward. I should have been looking in the classified ads for a room but for the moment I felt so perfectly alone and happy.

Afterward I went to the Student Union Building to buy a cookie, a detour that entirely changed my fate. I actually went for a newspaper, then, overcome by temptation, got in line at the cookie kiosk, hiding behind the paper the way I used to hide behind my binder, like some cartoon Cold War spy. A new study had just come out of MIT predicting that more than 50 percent of Canadians would be immediately killed in the event of a nuclear war. The pretrial hearing of the Squamish Five, a local terrorist group, had begun. The Great Lakes were an acidic broth. All of it reminded me why I never paid attention to the news. The line moved forward, bringing me closer to a bulletin board next to where the coffee was accoutred. Rides. Used textbooks. Accommodations. I stepped away, losing my place, drawn by a notice with a fringe of phone numbers on the bottom.

A man answered immediately, like he’d been poised by the phone. “Did you hang up on me a second ago?”

“I’m phoning about the room,” I said. “Is there a good time to come and see it?”

I could almost hear him shrug. “Come right now.” Then he hung up, forcing me to dig in my change purse for another dime.

It took fifteen minutes to get to the house, which was in Kits, one lot in from the corner, on a street otherwise lined with genteel homes. Next door was a knee-high garden statue of a black man in livery holding up a lamp, as though to illuminate the adjacent eyesore. I walked past the Reliant patchworked with political bumper stickers parked in front—Extinction is Forever. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Impeach Reagan—and up the path that cut through a steppe of unmown grass, climbed to the wide, crowded porch—bicycle, wearily flowered chesterfield, cardboard placards with their messages turned to the wall—and knocked on the rainbow on the door, knocked several times until at last a young man appeared, shirtless, but wearing a kerchief on his head. The year before, fishing for a major, I had cast my net wide over many subjects, among them Art History. Only now did I understand what the professor had been saying about beauty and its relationship to proportion.

He looked right at me, unblinking, in a way I was unused to. “I phoned,” I said and he smiled. To show me he was capable of it, I thought, or to show off the investment (which was patently wrong, I would find out). In their perfect even rows, his teeth glowed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Look.” I stepped into the vestibule and, since he was barefoot, stooped to remove my shoes. By the time I straightened, he was gone.

To the right was a set of French doors, each pane painted with a dove or a rainbow or some other optimistic symbol. I kept thinking about the fifteen minutes. How my life would open up if I were living just fifteen minutes from campus. I poked my head in the living room. Shag carpet, beanbag chair, posters. A fireplace extruding paper garbage. On its hearth stood a statue identical to the one in the next-door garden except for the sign taped to the lamp: It’s payback time!!! Instead of curtains, a poncho was nailed to the window frame. Then I started because someone was sleeping on the chesterfield, lying on his back with a beret over his face. I ducked right out.

Bathroom: chipped, claw-foot tub, tinkling toilet. The cover of the tank was broken, half of it missing, the workings exposed. It embarrassed me to see someone else’s plumbing. Above it hung a poster buckled with damp. Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

I peeked in the bedroom at the end of the hall and, seeing it looked well lived in—there were stuffed animals on the bed—returned to the vestibule with its battered mahogany wainscotting and went up the stairs. None of the three bedrooms on the upper floor was empty either. All had bare fir floors and plank and plastic milk crate shelves. The front-facing room, the largest, had a view of the mountains and the ubiquitous Rorschach Che painted on one wall. The middle room was an ascetic’s cell with a pitted green foamie for a bed, the end room a postered shrine to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, reeking of incense. I went back downstairs to the kitchen, which also smelled but of a more complex synthesis—ripe compost, burnt garlic, beans on the soak—so different from the cabbage and mothball overtones at my aunt’s. It was untidy too. Dirty, in fact. I glanced at my socks with their dust and crumb adherents. The fifteen minutes more than made up for it.

The shirtless one was outside on the deck smoking, leaning against the railing, his back to me. I could make out each distinct vertebra. They seemed decorative. When I tapped on the window, he waved me out through a door beside which a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hung on a nail. Out there in the overgrown yard the decorous history of the house still showed in the unpruned roses in their unmade beds and the old pear tree scabbed with lichen. The garage though, slouching and moss-covered, was practically in ruins.

He exhaled his acrid smoke and pointed up to the window of the O’Keeffe/Kahlo room.

“You have to come for an interview. There’s a sign-up sheet.” He threw the cigarette over the deck railing and led me back inside where a loose-leaf page lay on the kitchen table, three names and phone numbers already written on it. I felt sick and made my writing neater than the others’, only realizing after the fact that it would probably work against me.

“Jane,” he read off the paper before flashing his teeth again. “How do you say your last name?”

Most of the rooms that were advertised in the newspaper and still available were almost as far away as my aunt’s, near Fraser Street or Knight. I went to look at a few only to leave undecided and anxious that someone else would get the place if I took too long to make up my mind. Then someone called “from the Trutch house,” she said, though the house I’d seen was actually on one of the numbered east-west streets. Trutch was the cross street. She told me to come at six-thirty.

I got there too early and waited on the steps. In the house across the street, the living room curtains were open and I could see through to the dining room, where a family was sitting down to supper. A child lobbed an oven mitt across the table. Someone and his dog walked past the stickered Reliant. The dog smiled but the man’s straight-ahead gaze seemed to emanate hostility.

At exactly six-thirty, I rang the doorbell. A thin girl answered, her hair long and dark and not particularly clean. Despite this, despite dressing like a scarecrow and the deep shadows under her eyes, she was quite pretty, which made me leery and more nervous than before.

Pete from two days before was sitting at the kitchen table. Today he wore a shirt, almost a blouse, with full sleeves and a ruffled front and cuffs. He’d dispensed with the kerchief and I saw now that his hair was dirty blond and shoulder-length; he’d seemed Greco-Roman when we’d met previously, but my second impression was Renaissance for sure.

Two other men were at the table, one of them wearing glasses with big plastic frames and a T-shirt entreating the U.S. to vacate Central America. His hair was dark and wiry, nose very narrow, like it had been squeezed in a book. This was Dieter. The third man seemed cleaner than the rest. It took me a moment to notice the girl leaning against the counter, but as soon as I did she became the most obvious person there because of the deep coppery mane hanging halfway down her back and how her freckles contrasted with her creamy skin. Belinda, Sonia, Pete, Dieter, this other person—five complete strangers who didn’t know anything about me, not my tormented high school years, not how I had blown it last year. Last year had been my chance to start over, to make friends, but I had forfeited it, blaming the bus ride. I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with me.

Seeing me hovering in the doorway, the cleaner man stood and shook hands smilingly all around. My heart sank when he picked a violin case off the floor and walked past without acknowledging me. He was my competitor. I felt like turning and running because no one would ever choose sweaty, bookish me over someone who could play the violin.

I sat and Sonia introduced everyone. Pete uncrossed one arm to wiggle his fingers at me. “This is Jane,” Sonia said.

Except for Pete, they looked everywhere but at me so I felt cut out of the picture, as I usually did. Then I was flooded with embarrassment, for I knew it was childish to want two contradictory things: to be left alone and to be included.

With two exaggerated tosses of her head, Belinda threw her hair over each shoulder. Years later, on nights I couldn’t sleep (frequently, in other words), I would sometimes scroll the muted channels in search of a soporific. Belinda would flash past, executing this same ribbon dance, in the service of selling hair conditioner. But now she was indignant, telling Pete, “I do!”

“I know you do,” he said and it was impossible to decipher his tone, whether he was sarcastic or earnest. He could be acidly sarcastic, but I didn’t know that yet.

Belinda humphed and leaned back with crossed arms. The other two, Sonia and Dieter, seemed anxious to keep the interview going. Dieter took over the talking, stapling his eyes to the place I always thought of as my upper right-hand corner. Theirs was a communal rather than a shared accommodation. They each participated equally in the running and upkeep of the house. “We have a chore sheet.” He got up to unmagnet it from the freezer door for me. I saw their different writing styles, Dieter’s tight and precise, Pete’s backward leaning, Belinda’s too large for the space. Sonia had printed her name in a round, elementary-school hand.

“We rotate chores monthly. You do your assigned chore once a week. Every Sunday we put twenty dollars in the kitty. From that you buy the groceries when it’s your turn to cook. We eat supper together. House meeting once a month. Eso es todo.” He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger.

I was not a serious candidate. His perfunctory delivery and the fuck-off adjusting of his glasses made this obvious. Sonia had been sucking on the little gold cross around her neck, but now she let it go to add, “We’re vegetarian.”

“So am I,” I said. It just came out. I was surprised too, because I had just decided I didn’t want to live there anyway so I didn’t care about being rejected by them. But now everyone straightened and Sonia smiled, acknowledging this specious point of commonality.

“I’m in Education,” Sonia said. “Dieter’s in Poli Sci and Spanish. Pete’s in Engineering.”

“I’m a pacifist,” Sonia sighed, and Dieter tugged a lock of her hair twice, tooting, “Pacifist! Pacifist!”

Declarations winging by me, fast and furious. I nearly ducked. I was relieved they didn’t ask because I, I was nothing.

I moved into the Trutch house officially the Sunday before classes started, after transporting my belongings in my suitcase over several trips throughout the week. My aunt didn’t have a car and, anyway, I didn’t want to involve her. Belinda was still occupying the room the first time I came; Pete was there, too, lolling gorgeously on the bed. He smiled right at me while, blushing violently, I stacked my things in the corner Belinda had indicated with a careless, freckled wave. Each time I came back there was a little less of her in the room and none of Pete.

On Sunday the bed was still there, the mattress stripped. I crept downstairs for a broom. Dieter was in the kitchen with another man, older, well into his twenties and dark-complected, who was reading but stood politely when I came in. He wore granny glasses, the gold rims of which matched one of his front teeth. “Ector.” He put out his hand.

Dieter was boiling coffee in a saucepan, watching it so intently I got the impression he was deliberately ignoring me. I asked about the broom, but then Pete came in and told everyone to freeze. “You and you and you. Come.”

Ector and I obeyed. We didn’t think twice. We followed him out and waited in the vestibule while Pete took the stairs up two at a time. A moment later he and Belinda started down with the mattress between them. Ector snapped to when he saw Belinda, pulling a beret from his back pocket, donning it, then opening the door for them to hurl their burden out. He insisted on taking her place, then up he went with Pete. There was banging. From the swearing, not the fucks but the words I couldn’t understand, I realized that the chivalrous Ector spoke Spanish, also, when Pete screamed out his name, that it was actually Hector.

They manoeuvred the heavy frame down the stairs, further distressing the walls, out the front door and down the steps with Belinda directing them like an air traffic controller. “Jane and I will take the mattress,” she said when they dropped it in the long grass. “You guys take the bed.”

Pete turned to me. “What do you think of that, Zed?” I didn’t know what he meant. He was the one who had recruited me. “A real fair-weather feminist,” he said, pointing his chin at Belinda. “All for equality until there’s something heavy to carry.”

Single-handedly Pete threw the mattress on the frame, then we each took a corner of the bed. It was heavy. We shuffled down the walk and straight into the middle of the street. When a car came up behind us, we moved to the side to let it pass.

At the corner we set our burden down and breathed collectively for a moment before struggling on another block. By then my hands were screaming. I wanted to stop, but didn’t. Hector voiced my feelings. He said carrying the bed was killing him. Belinda said that if we died, it would not be in vain, she would erect a plaque.

“To the Glorious Committee of the Bed-Carrying International!” Hector cried.

Another car came up behind us. “Keep going,” Pete told us. “Move to the side,” Belinda said. “God.”

“Why?” asked Pete. “Why should cars have the right of way and not beds? If beds had the right of way—do not let go, people!—this world wouldn’t be so fucked up!”

I dropped my corner. Everyone stumbled forward, and Pete, using the momentum, tackled Belinda on the bed. It seemed he couldn’t let her go after all. She shrieked, then succumbed, letting him twine his body around hers, squid tight, as they necked, demonstrating for her, or us, their interconnection. He flipped onto his back so she was on top, her astonishing hair falling around them, a privacy curtain. Hector burst into applause. When the driver got out of the car, I turned and ran.

My main occupation that first day was putting together the futon I’d bought as a kit and alternately dragged and carried on my back like a peddler all the way from Fourth Avenue without any help from anyone. I found the broom and swept, opened the window to uncloy the air of sandalwood, piled my books against the wall in alphabetical order. Now I lay on the futon trying to read Anna Karenina, but mostly fretting as suppertime approached. I didn’t know why they had picked me. Were there so few vegetarians around? When I went downstairs, would I be accused of letting them down when I let go of the bed? I truly couldn’t have held on a moment longer. Then why did I run away, they would want to know. Because I was scandalized. Was that how people really acted?

I was first to arrive except for Dieter, who was at the sink dumping the contents of a pot into a colander, the lenses of his glasses opaque with fog. Maybe he really didn’t see me this time. “Supper!” he screamed.

Sonia appeared next, pretty and unbrushed, fingering her cross, then Pete, who skated across the floor in socks. As soon as Dieter thumped the pot of spaghetti down in the middle of the table, Pete lunged for it while Dieter waited, poised to get the tongs next. It surprised me, the carnivorous way vegetarians ate; Sonia and I had yet to serve ourselves. She gestured for me to go first. I took half of what remained, she a few tangled strands. The moment the tongs were returned to the pot, Pete snatched them and claimed the rest.

No one spoke—because of me, I presumed. Because I’d dropped the bed. I fixed my self-conscious gaze on the flayed face of Ronald Reagan on the opposite wall, the nail jutting from his empty eye socket. The men seemed intent on their food, Sonia too, but while they ate with gusto, she was a baby bird grappling open-throated with a very long worm. I suspected, though, that if I got up and left the room they would probably start twittering like birds at the precise crack of dawn. Twittering: She dropped the bed! She dropped the bed!

Dieter inflicted a goofy smile on Sonia, who grimaced and turned her tired eyes to me. “Are you all moved in?”

Pete had already cleaned his plate! He went to the fridge for a loaf of bread and a tub of margarine, slapped a nubbled slice down, painted it with the spread. There was a jar on the table full of yellow powder, which he dumped on his bread. Only now did he and Dieter begin to talk, heatedly, as though they were picking up an argument they’d called a truce on before supper. When Dieter called, I’d been reading that scene in Anna Karenina where two prominent Moscow intellectuals come to Oblon-sky’s for dinner. They respected each other, but upon almost every subject were in complete and hopeless disagreement, not because they belonged to opposite schools of thought but for the reason they belonged to the same camp. Dieter was defensive, emphatic, offended, Pete aloof. “You agree?” Dieter asked. “Don’t you?” He would glance over at Sonia every time he made a point, to see the effect it had on her.

When Sonia pushed away her plate, Pete used the excuse of scooping the remaining noodles off it to end his conversation with Dieter and go out on the deck, the strands hanging from his mouth, like hay. Dieter began stacking the dirty dishes. He paused to tug Sonia’s hair and say, “Ding dong, Avon calling!” which drove her immediately from the room. That left just me sitting at the table. It was over, the agony of my first supper, with no one mentioning the bed. I’d hardly been required to speak at all. “Thank you,” I said to Dieter before slinking out, relieved. He looked blankly at me through his big plastic frames.

Back upstairs, in my near-empty room with Anna Karenina, I thought that if it was going to be like that every night I would probably survive, which was, anyway, all I ever expected.

The year before, I’d come to Vancouver with only a general idea of what I wanted to study. I’d made a shopping list of possible courses, but when I showed up to register I discovered it really was like shopping, my least favourite thing, the gym a marketplace crowded with hundreds of students. For every course you had to stand in line to receive a computer card, first-come, first-served. It was a hot day and I was perspiring madly in the crush. At the Slavonic Studies table the line was negligible. I’d always wanted to read War and Peace.

Later in the year Professor Kopanyev told me he’d assumed I’d enrolled in his survey course because of my Polish background, but this was not the case. My father had come to Canada when he was my age, eighteen, so had lived most of his life here. He never talked about his childhood. When I came to stay with my aunt, she told me cabbage rolls were his favourite dish, but we always ate Canadian—pork chops with Minute Rice, Sloppy Joes, McCain frozen pizza. Other than an unpronounceable last name, nothing remotely Polish could be said about me.

In the first semester of Slavonic Studies we covered the history, geography, and economy of the Soviet Union. I wrote a paper on the emancipation of the serfs. We turned to literature in the second semester with Kopanyev presenting a biographical lecture on the greatest writer who ever lived—Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn—depending on the week. We read a sample work by these authors, discussed them in tutorials, then selected one as a subject for a paper. At the end of the year someone put up his hand and asked, “How can they all be the greatest?” It seemed obvious to me by then.

Kopanyev was tall and bearded, always tweedily dressed in shades of brown. One day he asked me to stay after class, which was when he commented on my surname. He said that my paper on Chekhov was both entertaining and insightful and he hoped I would continue in the department the following year. Ours was a small class, not even a dozen students, so I knew not to take his praise too much to heart. But I did. All year I had slunk from lecture to lecture praying that no one would notice me but now I was both thrilled and grateful that someone had.

My paper was titled “Boredom and Sadness in the Short Stories of Anton Chekhov.” I’d chosen a collection of eleven of his stories in a popular translation and counted how many times he used words associated with these emotions. Bored appeared sixteen times, bore three times, boringly once. Not interesting, uninteresting, and uninterestingly once each. People, society, life—these were described four times as dull, and a further seven as monotonous. Monotony was used three times, dissatisfaction twice, dissatisfied once. One character gazed apathetically at her empty yard. I didn’t count the condition of the yard, but I did include her later feeling of emptiness. Also the fact that on first impression Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks there is something pathetic about Anna Sergeyevna, “The Lady with a Lapdog,” soon to be the great love of his life. I interpreted pathetic as sad, an emotion referred to ten other times in the collection. Sadly (3). Sadness (2). Unhappy (2). Sorrow (1). “Were these depressed (3) characters full of melancholy (3) and despair (3) because life was boring (5), or does perpetual boredom (3) lead to a mournfully (1) depressing (1) and despondent (1) life?”

Kopanyev flipped through my handwritten pages. “I read some out to my wife. We had good laugh.”

“This word skuchno. It implies boredom, of course. But also sadness, desolation, gloom, yearning. Russians are always sad and it’s boring. Aren’t you?”

“No?” He rolled my paper into a tube and poked me with it. “Come back next year. Take Russian.”

Kopanyev assured us learning Russian would be easy because, he claimed, it was a phonetic language. But right from hello, from zdrastvuytye, I realized this wasn’t always the case. There was the matter of stress, too, how an unstressed O will convert to an A, for example. If you stressed the wrong syllable, the meaning of the word would change. “Like with pismo. PisMO. Letter. PISma. Letters.”

He seemed even more ursine this year as he handed out the alphabet. Cyrillic, he explained, was named for the Byzantine monk who gave the Slavs a written language. He’d had to draw on Greek, Hebrew, and old Latin. Three full alphabets plundered to represent all the Russian sounds. My eye went straight to the familiar letters, but only five of these actually corresponded to their English equivalents. An Mmight have sounded like an M, but B was V, P was R with a roll, X a truncated gargle. A gargle! A and O were ostensibly the same, but then Kopanyev was shouting at us, “They are long! Long! Open your mouths! Open them!”

There were two special symbols, sort of lower-case bs, that were not letters per se, but signs meaning soft or hard. “You must soften preceding consonant. Like so.” And he showed us what was happening in his mouth, his tongue cozying up against his palate. He drew a picture on the board.

“Okay. First letter: A. Repeat: A like fAther. Like I am doctor looking down your throat.”

We recited the alphabet. That was all we did until, walking out of the room at the end of the fifty minutes, I felt like I was drowning in unutterable sounds.

Now everything had a different name. Dom. (House.) Spalnya. (Bedroom.) Kniga. (Book.) I took over Belinda’s chore, vacuuming upstairs and down, practising my Russian as I worked. In the living room, the gastinaya, Hector was playing the guitar. He didn’t live there, but he often stayed over, and when I came in with the vacuum he perched on the chesterfield, like a crow on a power line, so his feet wouldn’t be in my way.

I was still wrangling the machine, the pylesos (I’d stopped vacuuming to look it up), when Sonia burst in the front door. The way she looked at me, I thought of Anna Sergeyevna without her Pomeranian. Anna Sergeyevna, uncombed. But how could Sonia be pathetic? If I’d been her, of course, I would have been the happiest girl in the world.

Strum! went Hector’s guitar. Sonia made a sound, too, like the last of her wind was being forced out in one invisible squeeze, a little huff of terror, as she bolted past me to her room.

A few hours later, Pete and Dieter came home and consulted the rabbit-eared black and white TV. I hovered in the French doors to find out more. A Soviet jet fighter had shot down a South Korean civilian airliner, sending two hundred and sixty-nine souls plunging into the Sea of Japan. A U.S. congressman, five Canadians, and twenty-two children were among those aboard.

Hector left after the news and Sonia wouldn’t come out of her room, so it was just the three of us at supper that night. “This is it,” Pete announced. “This is the shot that rang out in Sarajevo. Get ready, people.”

“They just happened to be flying over Soviet territory? Right over where the Soviets just happen to have bases? Flight 007. Get it? Double O seven? Isn’t that just a bit of a coincidence?”

Dieter squeezed his nose in his fist. Then the telephone rang and they both turned to stare at it on the cluttered counter, tethered to its twenty-foot cord. Telefon. It rang a second time, yet neither of them moved. They suffered some collective neuroses regarding its functioning, I’d noticed. They would come running only to stare like this, as though it had summoned them and they were sore afraid in its mighty presence. An ordinary yellow phone, their golden idol. It wasn’t for me, that was for sure. Finally Pete took a chance and answered, then covered the receiver. “Sonia! Mommy’s calling!”

Sonia stomped in, swollen from crying, and snatched the whole phone up, carried it off in her arms, the cord unwinding with her departure, loop after loop. I finished the dishes and went up to my room, which was directly above Sonia’s. There was a decorative metal grate in the floor for passive heat exchange. I could see right down onto her dresser. At night, when I woke, the light coming from below would cast a filigree pattern on the ceiling, like a leaded glass window. Sonia’s insomnia gave me a night light. Her sleeplessness gave her those dark dramatic circles around her eyes. Maybe she was a sleepwalker, a lunatik. Someone who walks on the moon.

She was still on the phone, murmuring below me. I heard her sigh and say, “Ma? I’m so scared.”

Then Pete came up. I could differentiate their footsteps now, Pete’s stomping, Dieter’s soundless sneaking, the creak of the wood giving him away. Pete was the door-slammer. Slam! He put his music on (Hendrix). When Dieter banged in protest on the adjoining wall, Pete, out of principle, cranked it up. By the time he relented, Sonia had hung up and I still didn’t understand what she was so afraid of.

On the weekend, I took the long bus trip back to Burnaby to have supper with my aunt, fulfilling the promise I had made about Sundays, which assuaged both her hurt feelings and my guilt. This actually worked out well because every Sunday there was a potluck at the Trutch house, followed by a meeting, neither of which I was invited to.

My aunt answered the door, throwing open her arms, pulling me to her size Z bosom. I smelled her perfume, Eau de Thrift Store Sweater. “I made your favourite,” she said, and I knew she intended to lure me back.

I piled on the sour cream, the fried onions, the bacon. Lots and lots of bacon that probably straddled the Best Before date, but I didn’t care. My aunt took note. When I moved out, she had inflicted on me doleful glances and squashy, overlong embraces, their implication being I would not thrive. Beyond her protection there awaited only loneliness and constipation. Now her cheeks, squiggled with capillaries, glowed in triumph.

“Of course,” I said, but the truth, we both knew, was not enough. I hadn’t really felt full since I’d moved to the Trutch house. I wasn’t getting the protein I required. Also, competition for food was fierce.

Though I was always conscious of her accent, strangely, I never heard my father’s any more. She was older, in her late fifties, the one who’d sponsored him to come to Canada all those years ago. Briefly they’d lived together, then my father went to Alberta where there were more jobs. He didn’t like Vancouver. People were unfriendly, he said, and the red two-dollar bills looked phoney and it rained all the time.

I hadn’t mentioned that two of them were boys. And while I didn’t think of my new housemates as nice, neither did I consider them unkind. Unkind was names scrawled on my locker, papier mâché projectiles fired through an empty Bic. In high school these torments had come erratically, and I was by no means the only one who suffered them. In fact, on the scale of universal adolescent suffering I might not even have attained a rank. It was the haphazardness that caused the most damage. For weeks some other victim would suffer, then it would start up again, usually under some friendly guise—“Jane, do you want to eat lunch with us?”—so I learned always to be on my guard, like some armoured wallflower with its tin petals tightly closed.

As for my housemates, I never expected to make friends with them. I had my books and the people in them were more than enough. Except for supper, I ate toast in my room. Toast was quick to prepare and I could get out of the kitchen fast. But I definitely wasn’t getting enough protein.

What to tell her? Belinda was around a lot, having sex with Pete. She stayed overnight several times a week because, I’d overheard, the house on Blenheim Street was “Women Only.” I talked about her as though she were still living there—leaving out the sex. “She’s very dramatic.” I said she walked like she was doing an interpretive dance and got up to imitate her gliding step. As for Pete and Dieter, apart from the phone idolatry and the fact that they argued all the time, I had a slight impression of them, hardly more than Pete was an anarchist as conceived by Botticelli and the owner of the patched Reliant. Dieter was a zealot for composting (I’d learned by mistakenly throwing a banana peel in the garbage), and possibly a Marxist. Both more or less ignored me, but I still didn’t want my aunt to know about the anarchism, or the possible Marxism, or that the house wasn’t “Women Only” but a locus of premarital sex. She’d surely write my father.

I said Sonia was pretty and very nice. My aunt retorted that I had “beautiful eyes.”

Sonia was pretty, yet she neglected her appearance and, since the airliner incident on Thursday, she seemed in distress. Anti-Soviet demonstrations were taking place across the country. In Toronto, performances by the Moscow Circus were cancelled. The circus business seemed especially to wound Sonia, causing her to stare uncomprehendingly at her plate all through Friday’s supper. In “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov wrote that Anna Sergeyevna’s long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. He wrote, It was obvious she was unhappy.

“I’m glad it’s working out,” my aunt said. “You’re young. You should be having fun.” She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.

After dinner we cleaned up. There were a number of dented cans by the side of the sink, which I rinsed and stripped of their labels. Then my aunt removed the tops and bottoms with the opener and took them out on the back porch where she savagely stamped them flat in readiness for her basement repository. This was how we’d spent Sunday evenings last year: she in front of the TV unravelling the old sweaters she would later reknit into odorific Christmas and birthday presents, me studying in the kitchen. Tonight I joined her for the start of The Wonderful World of Disney until I could politely escape.

When I got back to the Trutch house, the porch was more crowded than usual due to additional bicycles. “Oni velosipyedy,” I said out loud, to no one. They are bicycles. (I was starting to form sentences.) I hoped to stash the care package of perogies in the freezer and slip up to my room unnoticed, but there was no need to tiptoe around. The double glass doors to the living room with their floraed and faunaed panes were still closed. I knew what their meetings were about because of the leaflets and petitions foisted upon apathetic students like me almost weekly. Voices overlapped, several conversations going on at once, while, in the kitchen, the dirty dishes from the potluck stood around on the table daring me not to do them. Then someone began singing. It was a woman’s voice, quavering and strange. “We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace . . .” Others joined in. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”

The bus stop was two blocks away, on Fourth Avenue. In the morning buses came at convenient intervals, though sometimes, if one was too crowded, it would speed indifferently past. Every time this happened, I took it personally, which was what I was doing when Sonia came around the corner nicely dressed for once in a skirt. Not until she was almost at the stop did she realize it was me. “Oh! Hi,” she said.

I wanted to say something consoling about the airliner, but had no idea of the etiquette in that particular circumstance so, as usual, I defaulted to saying nothing and feeling awkward. The bus arrived and we got on and Sonia followed me to the back. All the seats were taken there too. She could barely reach the strap, so I wordlessly gave up the pole and we do-si-doed, exchanging places. “What time is your first class?” she asked.

I told her. She said she had to go out to a school and observe a grade two class that day. “That’s why I’m dressed up like this.” Meanwhile the bus lurched along, accumulating more passengers before making a run for the hill. When it reached the top, a view opened over the plated ocean. I lived mere blocks from it now, but had yet to go and see it. Sonia glanced at me from time to time, as though deciding whether or not to speak. At the campus loop, we were disgorged, and with everyone pushing to get off, she got ahead. I didn’t expect to see her again until supper, but she was waiting when I stepped down.

She knew immediately what I was talking about. “They thought it was a spy plane. Now who knows what the Americans will do? Probably start firing.” She pressed her fists into her temples. “Which way are you going?” I pointed and she walked with me toward the Buchanan building. “I don’t know what to do about Dieter,” she said.

“He always sits next to me at supper. Haven’t you noticed? He knocks on my door for no reason. Now he’s started pulling my hair. It’s driving me crazy. I don’t like him. I mean, I like him. I like everybody. He’s in my group! But I don’t like him that way.”

So what I’d always suspected was true: other people’s problems were shockingly trite.

“It makes it hard, though, to say I’m not interested. Last night he came in and lay on my bed and said he’d protect me.” She turned to me, exasperated. “How does he think he’s going to do that?”

Outside the library she plucked entreatingly at my sleeve. “Jane? Sit beside me tonight?”

I thought of that little tug as I took a seat in my seminar. The fabric pulling against my arm, her plea for my presence. The other students meandered in with their backpacks and throwaway coffee cups, chatting, but not to me. No one talked to me. I always sat in the same chair, at Kopanyev’s right hand, and always the seat on the other side of me was empty. No one wanted to sit next to the overeager girl. Keith, the punk, clomped in. They were completely freaked out by him. Then Kopanyev arrived, folders bursting under his arm. He was not the most organized lecturer. Frequently his tangents tangled us up and, in this, a second-year course, Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation, he seemed to recognize that he was an unreliable driver and so threw the reins to us. We were given a reading list and assigned a date, not to make a presentation per se, but to offer a passage, a character, or simply an observation, as a topic for discussion.

He ticked our names off with a massive fountain pen. “Now, my conversationalists.” Looking around the table, rescrewing the cap. “Michael? Ha! Did you see him jump? What have you brought for us to talk about today, Michael? What have you been reading? Speak! Speak! We are waiting.”

A wing of blond hair hung over Michael’s eyes. He performed the affectation, sweeping it aside. “Chekhov.”

“I notice, well, a couple of things. First, the stories are unbelievably gloomy. Second, the characters always, or often, seem to be in love with people who don’t love them back.”

“Laptev is in love with Julia, a friend of his sister Nina,” I said. “Nina’s dying of breast cancer. Actually, Nina’s also a victim of unrequited love because her husband lives in another part of town with his mistress.”

“Men!” expleted the ponytailed girl at the end of the table and everyone laughed, except Mohawked Keith who generally limited himself to expressions of contempt.

“Laptev proposes. At first Julia refuses because she doesn’t love him. Then she agrees. Because Laptev’s rich and she doesn’t see any other opportunities for herself. The story basically relates the first three years of their marriage.”

Michael swept his bang away again. “Their unhappy marriage. It’s completely depressing.”

“Doesn’t their baby die?” someone asked. “That’s the same story, right?”

“That story is more sad than funny,” I agreed, “but others are really funny. The people are funny.”

“And we have two cases of unrequited love,” said Kopanyev. “Can anyone think of other stories with this element?”

Turgenev’s Bazarov and Odintsova were proposed, but Kopanyev asked that we restrict our discussion to Chekhov. The heavy girl who kept poking at her cuticles said, “There’s that story. I don’t remember titles. Where the creepy husband pisses off the wife who’s trying to help the famine victims.”

“Where he finds the telegram from his wife’s lover saying he kisses her sweet little foot a thousand times?”

“Ha ha ha!” roared Kopanyev. “So wife can be villain? I thought women could only be victims.”

The three other girls in the class rolled their eyes but wouldn’t take the bait, not even Ponytail. “The wife’s the villain in ‘The Grasshopper,’” a male pointed out.

“‘The Grasshopper’!” Michael moaned. “I read that last night. Another riot.”

At Kopanyev’s request, Michael summarized it: wife runs off with arty friends while doctor husband pays for everything, catches diphtheria, and dies.

“But in that story,” the heavy girl said, “the wife didn’t hate the husband. She just thought he was boring.”

“But she still liked her husband, so I don’t think you can call that”—four fingers with ragged cuticles, two from each hand, went up and scratched the air—“unrequited, per se.”

“This army captain? He goes to a ball. Hangs around feeling like a loser. Later he goes into a dark room where this lady’s waiting for her boyfriend. She kisses the loser by mistake. This pathetically transforms the guy’s life. He spends months fantasizing about the mystery lady, hoping for a chance to go back to the house. Finally the opportunity comes up and he goes and realizes what a complete and utter loser he really, truly is.”

Kopanyev stroked his beard for a full minute. Sometimes he treated his facial hair like a living thing, a cat clinging to his face. It seemed to help him think. “You don’t sound very sympathetic, Keith.”

For some time we talked about “The Kiss,” whether being in love with a hypothetical person could even be considered unrequited love, whether Staff-Captain Ryabovitch was indeed worthy of sympathy or merely deluded, and when the majority expressed scorn, Kopanyev declared that we were either preternaturally hard-hearted or had been remarkably successful in love despite our youth. He went on to confess one of his own early trials—he had adored a classmate and was rebuffed—regaling us with humiliating details until he noticed his watch. “You’re not serious!” He clapped his hands. “My dear little children. My pupils. My timepiece has been unkind to us, as usual. Thanks to Michael for excellent topic, which we have barely scratched.”

Chekhov began his career as a writer of comic stories in order to support his family. I was baffled that my classmates couldn’t see the humour in his work. That evening, searching for something funny in “Three Years,” I underlined the passage where Julia is travelling back home from Moscow by train with her philandering brother-in-law, Panaurov. “Pardon the pub simile,” he says to her, “but you put me in mind of a freshly salted gherkin.”

And later, when Laptev’s friends, Yartsev and Kostya, walk drunkenly back to the station, unable to see a thing in the dark: “Hey, you holiday-makers!” Kostya suddenly shouts out. “We’ve caught a socialist!”

Sad (5), sadly (4), unhappy (4), miserable (1), lonely (1), depressed (2), depression (2), disgruntled (1), boring (9), bored (5), dull (1), monotonous (2), apathetic (1).

Downstairs, a pot of soup and a tray of airy, row-provoking biscuits waited on the table. “Sit,” she said, before taking the chair beside me and shouting to the other two. They thundered down. Supper was the only time they ever responded promptly to a call.

Sonia said nothing, while Pete, who was loading biscuits on his plate, exhaled a single word. “Fascist.” Dieter took the chair across from Sonia and knuckled up his glasses. “I’m a creature of habit I guess.”

“Whoa!” said Dieter, taking two biscuits off Pete’s plate and returning them to the tray. “We’ll divide these up evenly. What do you say?”

While Dieter was busy divvying up the biscuits, Pete ate his entire ration. Then he double-checked the empty pot. “Sonia?”

She was by far the best cook. The biscuits were buttery, cloud-light. Dieter wasn’t touching his; I assumed he was saving them for last so he could eat them in front of us when ours were gone.

Pete said, “Sonia, why do you always make so little food? It’s not the end of the world yet.”

She dropped her spoon. I realized before Pete and Dieter did that she was crying. I was sitting next to her and, dumbfounded, saw the tears rain in her soup.

“I’m still hungry,” Pete bleated, clasping his hands. “Feed me. Feed me.”

She leapt up. “How can you joke about the end of the world? How?” Before he could answer, she snatched a biscuit off the tray and hurled it. It struck Pete square on the forehead, then bounced off, leaving a floury mark. He sat, momentarily stunned, before letting go a long, crazy, primeval whoop, a pterodactyl call. “It’s not funny!” she shrieked. “Not at all!” and she stumbled from the table and out of the room with Dieter hurrying after her. “Asshole,” he hissed at Pete.

Pete took advantage of the moment to jam a fourth biscuit in, the one that had ricocheted off him. “Do I go too far, Zed?” he asked when he had finally choked it down. I didn’t reply. I didn’t think he cared what I thought. When he left, he took another biscuit with him.

I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink, though cleanup was the cook’s job. I could hear Pete talking in a funny voice and Sonia begging him to stop. When he wouldn’t let up, I went down the hall to see if she was all right. Her door was open and she was sitting on the bed hugging a stuffed toy, Dieter kneeling on the floor at her feet, Pete on the bed behind her, massaging her tiny shoulders. “Leave me alone,” she was moaning, “go away,” while Pete kept telling her in a duck’s voice that everything would be okay.

That night I woke to the leaded glass window on the ceiling. I stared up at it, wondering what time it was. Maybe Sonia was afraid of the dark. Maybe that was why her light was on so often at night.

I felt my way into the dark hall and down the stairs. Moonlight penetrated the living room, rebounding off the white surfaces—the note taped to the lamp, It’s payback time!!!, and the statue’s painted grin—relegating the rest of the room to obscurity. I carried on past the French doors, to the kitchen where I saw the glow and stopped.

The stove was on. My first thought was that this was why I’d woken. Sometimes it was the front door slamming, or Belinda and Pete’s noisy exertions. But Belinda wasn’t there tonight so I must have instinctively sensed danger. I’d just taken a step to shut the burner off when I realized someone else was there—Sonia, moving toward the stove at the same time, her face and upper body washed in the thin orange light. Palm down, fingers outstretched, she was reaching for the element, lowering her hand over it. When she got close enough to the coil to make me wince, she drew her hand back and shook it out. She tried again, getting closer the second time.

I crept back upstairs and lay on my futon staring at the pattern on the ceiling, wondering what to do. When Sonia’s light finally snapped off, I turned my own on, tore a sheet from my notebook, tore that in half, wrote. I folded the note until it was compact enough to wriggle through the grate. Then I listened for it, the small sound of it landing on the dresser below, the soft tap of my message reaching her.

She seemed so tormented, but if I lost any sleep over Sonia’s problems, it was only because her light woke me up. Those first months in the Trutch house I mostly tried to avoid my housemates, staying in my room and getting up earlier than everyone else. But I couldn’t escape our communal supper or the awkward dashing to and from the upstairs bathroom that I shared with the men. And in the afternoon, when I came home, someone was inevitably there. Pete would be there, or Hector with his gold tooth and his beret, watching Looney Tunes with Pete. Sometimes if Dieter was there, he and Pete would exchange a look when I came in, their unsecret signal to close the subject, which was always politics. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was them wondering about me and just what my problem was.

Then one afternoon I came home and found my bedroom door open. I always kept it closed, but it was open now and Pete was there, in my room, his back to me, hair in a ponytail, T-shirt inside out. I saw a tag and seams.

He wasn’t looking for a pen. He was lying on his side on the floor, one hand propping himself up as he studied the spines of my books. My private, treasured books. My room received the sun’s afternoon attention and he was basking in it, in a bright cloud of dust motes. “There are pens downstairs by the phone,” I said.

Now I mustered a tone nearly appropriate to what I felt. “Can you get out of my room, please?”

The books were arranged in three pillars. He pulled one out from the middle, causing the whole stack to collapse, opened it and began flipping, pausing to read the underlined bits. “Art is just a means of making money, as sure as haemorrhoids exist.” He looked over his shoulder at me. Utter delight. Complete self-satisfaction. My expression seemed not to register with him. “I rest my case. It’s written right here. What is this?” He glanced at the cover.

I wanted to snatch it from him, whack him with it. Riffle the pages in his face—literature farts at you! Instead I dropped my backpack to the floor and began digging. Pete read on to himself but, finding nothing else of interest on the page, tossed the book back on the pile. “You need a bookshelf, Zed.”

“Oh, good.” Before he left, he took the pen and scribbled on his arm to make sure it worked.

I don’t know if he could hear me, crying, over his music. When I had calmed down, I took a decision. I couldn’t live there any more. These people were horrible. I hated them. Pete was a drug addict. (What he smoked out on the deck was marijuana.) Dieter was a control freak. Sonia hadn’t even mentioned my note. I’d go back to my aunt’s and live there until I found another place. I didn’t care about the bus ride, or that she was crazy. They were crazy. I knew I was overreacting, but at that time I felt I had nothing, nothing except my privacy.

I heard Sonia’s call to supper and Pete and Dieter bolting, racehorses out of the starting gate. Sonia called again. A few minutes later a tap sounded on the door, though I hadn’t heard any steps. Sonia was weightless.

Pete came up directly after supper. When I didn’t answer his knock, he thudded to his room. A moment later my pen shot through the gap under the door. “I’m returning your private property!” he called.

I heard him go away, then come right back. “I need to borrow that again.” I was afraid he’d barge in so I got up and kicked the pen back under the door. It came skating through a second time, followed by a piece of paper I could read from where I had retreated to my nest. Property is theft.

I threw the covers off and stomped to Pete’s room, where he was apparently anticipating our clash, standing with arms crossed, half smiling. “I don’t go into your room!” I shrieked.

He wasn’t mocking me. He mocked Dieter mercilessly all the time and that was not the tone he was using now. I hurled the pen but, other than dodging it, he didn’t react, just stood there, a beautiful statue that had briefly come to life. “Hold it,” he called after me.

I slammed my door. Pete opened it—without knocking!—and set down two yellow milk crates. “I don’t want those,” I said.

He returned with two more, blue and red, then the boards. Kicking my books over a second time, out of the way, he began assembling the shelf. Two crates, a board, two more crates, another board. I sank down on my futon, face in my hands, and sobbed.

“There. You want me to put the books back or do you want to do that yourself?”

He was still on his knees but, to my horror, he changed position, got comfortable interlacing his fingers behind his head and falling onto his back—all to ponder his reply. It didn’t take long. “I want a fairer world,” he said. “What do you want, Zed?”

“Polite is bullshit. It’s bourgeois. I don’t recognize private property and I don’t respect it.”

“I’m not talking about respecting property! As if I care about a stupid pen!”

“Oh,” he said. “But I respect you, Zed. You’re intelligent. You don’t play games. You’re funny.”

“Dry. Anyway, I didn’t want to go all the way downstairs to get a pen. I was curious about what kind of books you read.”

He spoke so reasonably to my hysteria. At least that was how it seemed now. I scrambled for a tissue. “You might say sorry.”

“Fine.” I blew my nose with an embarrassing quack. “Can you get out now?”

“I can.” But he stayed exactly as he was, on his back, naked foot tapping the air. When I threw up my hands, he laughed. “You asked me if I could.”

I felt dizzy after he left. I couldn’t believe he thought those things about me. I looked over at my scree of books and, though it actually pained me to see them in disarray, I resisted putting them away. Then a voice quavered through the grate. “Is everything all right up there?” I went over and peered down. “Toast?” Sonia asked.

She sat on the floor and hugged her knees, watching me eat. “I heard you and Pete,” she said with a glance at the grate. “Don’t mind him. He acts like that because he’s smarter than everybody else.”

Sonia: “It’s true. He doesn’t even go to class. He studies on his own in the library. Engineering’s unbelievably hard. I admire him so much. He has discipline. He lives by his code.”

Sonia nodded. She didn’t seem to get sarcasm. “His family’s rich. He won’t have anything to do with them. He has a trust fund, but he gives most of it away. He gives Hector money all the time.” And though Pete paid the kitty, she told me that he wouldn’t take any money out because he didn’t believe in it. In money. He shopped on the five-finger discount, which explained the bizarre miscellany of groceries he always unloaded from his pack. Tomato sauce, popcorn, frozen peas. I’d seen him come home from university with a roll of toilet paper under each arm.

“Remember that time he said, ‘Jane will tell me if she doesn’t like what I call her’?”

I finished the toast and, licking my finger, gathered up the crumbs. “Zed. He calls me Zed.”

I meant, Does he think he’s Jesus? but Sonia brightened. “Are you a Christian?”

She felt for the little cross around her neck, as though to reassure herself she was. “The other thing. Pete separates out his feelings. Unlike me.” Tears appeared then and were blinked back fiercely. “We are this close to a nuclear war,” she said, pronouncing it “nucular.” There was precious little space between the finger and thumb she held out. “Ever since they shot down that airliner, I’ve been waiting. Waiting. It’s killing me. I can’t talk about it now. I’ll be a wreck. I have a project due tomorrow. As if it matters.” She let go of her knees and lurched over to hug me while my own arms hovered in the air, not knowing what to do. “Actually,” she said, letting go, “would you like to help me? Are you busy?”

We went downstairs to her room. Sonia collected Japanese things. There was a teapot and two tiny handleless cups on the dresser, strings of origami cranes, a calligraphic banner. The stuffed toys looked Canadian. I went over to the dresser and peered up into my room, but all I could see was the blank of the ceiling. “Do you know Japanese?” I asked.

“Drink—more—tea,” I pretended to read off the teapot. Then I saw my note behind one of the cups, still folded budtight.

“Let’s have tea,” she said, so I passed her the pot and cups. The moment she left the room, I tossed the note into her open closet where it fell among her shoes.

She returned shortly with the tea and sat down on the floor. I sat the same way, cross-legged, facing her while she poured with demure, faux-Japanese gestures, the little white cup balanced on the tips of her fingers as she bowed to me. I accepted it, bowing in return.

We were going to make origami cranes for her practicum. Sonia spread out the coloured paper. I chose a yellow square, Sonia a pink one. She flipped aside the braided rug to start. “Okay. Like this.”

I reoriented the square as a diamond, like she did. I repeated each step, each fold and turn, fascinated, even distracted by her deft little fingers. It was like watching the manipulations of a baby or a raccoon, except her nails were chewed down and raw-looking. I wondered if they hurt. We made a tighter diamond, transformed it into a kite, pleated and repleated what we’d done. Then, somehow, out of this intricately wrapped present of air, we coaxed two birds. “That’s good, Jane. Your very first crane.” Which was how she talked to her seven-year-olds, I presumed. “Keep it if you want,” she said.

We paused to sip our tea then bowed again over new squares, the crowns of our heads almost touching. “A hundred and fifty thousand people died when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.” Sonia looked up, gauging my reaction.

I helped her fold twenty-four cranes, for which she hugged me again. Afterward, I went back upstairs where I set the yellow one on the grate so she would see it roosting there if she happened to look up. Then I moved my books into their new home. Art Through the Ages. The Science of Life. Chekhov. Turgenev. Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy. When I was done and I slid back for a better look, a line from The Cherry Orchard popped into my head: My dear venerable bookcase, I salute you.

Mid-terms came and I wondered how I had allowed myself to be flattered into taking Russian. It was nothing like French, the only other foreign language I’d attempted. French was a mouthful of feathers. Russian was spitting out stones. But if only I could spit them! I was able to read simple sentences now and even understand the absurdist dialogues in the language lab, but I choked on the stones. In addition to Russian and Russian Lit, I’d enrolled in the stupefying Canadian Poetics, and Biology 100, the obligatory science credit I’d sidestepped the year before. After exams were over, when I could with great relief recap my highlighter pen and file away my index cards of notes, a house meeting was called. The main item on the agenda: what to do about Halloween.

Pete: “If we’re not going to use it as a consciousness-raising opportunity, then I’ll boycott it as a bourgeois ruse.”

“How is Halloween a bourgeois ruse?” It was the first time I’d spoken during a meeting.

“Yes. Essentially begging. A friendly adult disperses candy—for free! How fun! But what does it teach them? That the society they live in is generous and benign? Zed? Imagine a genuinely needy person begging door to door. And is that candy really free? Is it even sweet? Under what conditions did the workers in the factory labour to produce it? And what about the virtual slaves toiling in the sugar cane fields?”

Dieter: “I see your point about candy. Maybe we can hand out something else.”

Sonia literally lifted off the seat of her chair, making excited flapping motions with her hands. “Yes!”

Pete smiled, showing all his perfect teeth. “Okay. Let’s write messages on the cranes. I’m fine with that.”

We did and I felt pleased because it was my idea. Sonia went to get the origami papers from her room, then we set to writing. The crane is a symbol of peace, I wrote. I didn’t know what else to say. When I got bored writing that, I just wrote Peace, but that, too, became tedious. The others were writing more than I was. Pete appeared to be composing a manifesto. Dieter kept leaning over to read Sonia’s messages, leaning close so she almost had to fold her little self sideways to avoid touching him. Think about what peace means, I wrote, though I had never given it any thought myself. I glanced at what Sonia was writing.

We worked for half an hour then all of us but Pete were done. “I need a smoke,” he said. “I’ll finish later.” When Dieter tried to read one of his messages, Pete pounced, slapping his hand over it. “Do you mind?”

Dieter stalked away, offended. I stayed and offered to help Sonia fold the cranes. “Did you write this?” she asked, reading one of my banal messages.

Later that night as I lay reading in my room, something made me look up from my book: a green square sliding under the door, fed slowly through from the other side. Then an orange square, then a red.

UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT
ANARCHISM !

1. What is Anarchism, Uncle Peter?
Why, that’s a good question! Let Uncle Peter tell you. Anarchism is the name of a political philosophy based on the rejection of any form of compulsory government.

2. What a funny word, Uncle Peter!
Yes, Sonny. It’s derived from a Greek word meaning “without rulers.”

3. How can I tell if someone is an Anarchist?
Judge people by their actions, not their appearance. Above all, beware of men in suits.

4. But Uncle Peter! My daddy wears a suit!
See #3.

UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT ANARCHISM ! (PART TWO)

1. Uncle Peter! I’m only eight years old How can I be an Anarchist?
It’s never too early to start living by the principles of Anarchism, Sonny! The first thing you must do is identify the authority figures in your life.

2. What are authority figures, Uncle Peter?
The people bossing you around. Mommy. Daddy. Big brother or big sister. Teacher. Principal. These are the most likely culprits. At this stage of your life, they stand in for “compulsory government.”

3. Then what, Uncle Peter?
Question everything they say. If they say, “Eat your peas,” you say, “Why?”

4. Uncle Peter, what if they answer, “Because I said so”?
You say, “That’s not a good enough answer.”

5. Uncle Peter, do Anarchists often get spankings?
Yes.

UNCLE PETER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT ANARCHISM ! (PART THREE)

1. Uncle Peter, how can I be a good Anarchist at school?
The same way you are a good Anarchist at home: question authority.

2. Dear Uncle Peter, can you give me an example?
Certainly, Sonny. Never turn in your homework.

3. Why not, Uncle Peter?
Because homework is simply a tool for authority to extend its control of children outside of school.

4. But I’ll fail, Uncle Peter!
You won’t. You’ll take the test and ace it.

5. What else can I do, Uncle Peter?
Take this crane to school and show it to your classmates.

In the morning I woke to find a whole paper mat of squares at my door. I read them while I was eating my toast in my room. By the time I’d finished folding them into cranes, Pete’s music had come on (The Doors) and, with the men jockeying for the bathroom, the day’s fresh disputes began.

“Zed!” Pete called to me later as I was coming down the stairs. “Did you see what I put under your door?”

He stepped out of the kitchen, peanut butter jar in hand, and, taking the spoon out of his mouth, asked, “What did you do with them?”

He threw his head back and let loose a peanutty peal that filled the hall. “Did you read them?”

I’d barely recovered from mid-terms and now I sensed another test. He’d stopped Dieter from reading what he’d written, but I settled on the truth. “Yes.”

I zipped my jacket, hefted my texts onto my back. “You really want my opinion?”

Pete had a suit! At supper, it induced a fit of giggling in Sonia every time she looked at him. “What?” he asked, deadpan. “It’s Halloween.”

We were still eating when the first chorus sounded. “Trick or treat!” Pete got up, plucked Reagan’s face off the wall, snugged it over his own, and tucked his hair in.

Dieter: “You should have said you were dressing up. I would have been Margaret Thatcher.”

Reagan: “That’s the whole idea.” The mask distorted his voice. He didn’t even sound like Pete, and I recoiled though I had only ever thought of Ronald Reagan, if I thought of him at all, as affable and doddering. Pete threw open the front door, booming: “Who have we here?”

“A peace crane. And there’s a special message inside it. When you get home, ask your mommy and daddy to read it to you.”

“You’re welcome. Now be careful tonight. You never know when I’m going to drop the Big One.”

He shut the door and came back to the kitchen, still the president. Dieter had gone for the belt of his bathrobe and was tying a tea towel over his wiry hair. “Who are you?” Reagan asked.

Sonia and I went to the living room where, kneeling on the chesterfield, we watched the procession out the window. Voices rang out all along the street, screeches too, then a firecracker discharged, and Sonia cringed. “Oh God. It’s like a war.” As soon as she said it, I saw it too, a tattered exodus, pillowcases stuffed with belongings, dragged along. They carried on right past our house, though our porch light illuminated a welcome. When a pirate broke free and started for us, an adult called him back. Finally a few older, unchaperoned kids took a chance. Reagan and Arafat answered.

The kids fled down the walk. Two of them were playing with the cranes, using them as bombers, flying loop-the-loops, colliding mid-air. Sonia dismissed Pete and Dieter. “Go. Leave. Jane and I will hand them out.”

We put on coats and shoes and took the bowl of cranes with us. From our new post at the end of the walk, we intercepted the next group that came along, Sonia crouching before a child in a hooded coat with rouge-appled cheeks. “Hello, sweetheart. Are you having fun?”

“I’m cold,” the girl said, and Sonia cupped both her hands and breathed on them until a smile appeared.

I had relieved Sonia of the bowl so she could conjure the smile. Now I thrust it at the child. Her mother asked, “What’s that you’re giving out?”

She frowned. “Okay,” she said to the little girl, “just take one and say thank you. Jeremy! Wait for us! Say thank you.”

As soon as the woman turned her back, Sonia stuck out her tongue. “She doesn’t want her kid to have a paper crane. It’s okay, though, to rot her teeth with candy. People are so stupid. They hate us on this street. Have you noticed? They never talk to us. The woman next door gives me a dirty look every time I walk by. They think we’re Communists. If you want peace you must be a Communist. It’s stupid.”

More children came. Sonia stepped in front of them too and, scooping a crane from the bowl, flew it, twittering it into a sack. The children watched her, rapt. I watched their father, saw him take note of the house, its psoriatic paint and overgrown yard, then Sonia—her mournful hair, the button on her anorak: Think Peace. She was speaking to his children in birdsong, exuding harmlessness, but his lip curled anyway and he bustled them along.

And so it went, all Sonia’s overtures rejected. Then a loud WEEEE!! sounded, followed by a BANG!, and she grabbed the nearest child and clutched too hard. She only wanted to protect him, but he started wailing; his outraged mother snatched him back. The bowl was empty anyway so we went back inside where I put the kettle on. Sonia gnawed her nails, looking miserable. Don’t, I wanted to say, just as a single voice called out from our darkened porch, “Trick or treat!”

The fruity weight of the breast, nipple projecting into the cold air. The left one. The other side was draped in filmy white fabric that hung off one shoulder and fell in folds around her Birkenstocks. “Come on,” Belinda said. “You have them too.”

The freckles petered out on her chest, making her look snowed on. She raised her arms. White feathers were attached and, in her armpits, aigrettes of auburn. “I am the Goddess,” she intoned, flapping.

Belinda followed us in and through to the kitchen. “How did it go with the cranes?”

And the general mood was autumnal, Chekhov wrote. My umbrella was on the porch with the old placards, drying out. A beaded curtain of rain poured off the ruined eaves. Things had changed. I thought it was that fall had officially come and with it the infinite rains, the dirty batting of cloud, the sadness. I looked forward to the sadness. It made me feel like I shared something with other people, even though it was just a mood. I went down the front steps, past Pete’s car. The next-door neighbour was standing in her front window in her flowered housecoat, hugging herself, face resigned. I felt like calling out, “Me too!”

At the bus stop I joined the ranks of the damp, our small shivering group physically separate but united by this resigned melancholia. Soon the bus came, but as it neared we saw that it was full. No one was surprised, not even when, in passing, it sent up a tidal wave of dirty water. By the time I got to campus, my hair would be stringy, my runners saturated. My feet were already cold and would be for the rest of the day. I could switch the hand that held the umbrella and warm the other in my pocket, but my feet were defenceless. If I’d been a character in a Chekhov story, I would have put on galoshes. (It was the same word in Russian: galoshe.) Ga-losh-es. Losh like slosh. Sloshing through puddles. Through luzhi. Galosh, galosh. A comical word, yet how sad they actually looked on a person’s feet!

And so, standing in line for public transit, I found a subject for my first Russian Lit paper of the year. Chekhov and shoes. The stories are filled with them—galoshes, felt boots, slippers. Dr. von Koren in “The Duel” challenges the dissipated Ivan Layevsky partly because he wears slippers in the street. Podorin in “With Friends” (I’d read the story the night before) feels at home with the Losevs only when he borrows a pair of slippers. Later, weary of the visit, the slippers define his estrangement. Then he sat silently in one corner, legs tucked under him, wearing slippers belonging to someone else.

The following Sunday, when I came home from my aunt’s, I stood staring at the jumble of shoes in the vestibule, wondering what I could discern about the group behind the closed French doors based on what they wore on their feet. Sonia’s clogs were set neatly against the wall. I already knew she was from 100 Mile House, that both her parents were high school teachers. Her mother taught Home Ec and her father Math. She had a younger brother, Jared, and a Sheltie named Skipper. They lived on an acreage where they raised sheep. But the clogs allowed me to imagine her slipping them on in spring and running out to the barn to greet the lambs that had been born in the night. Kicked in the corner were Pete’s Birkenstocks, the cork soles crumbling, plastic bread bags stuffed inside them, his trust fund untouched. Dieter’s Adidases were there too, a Marxist-leaning red. As for the other shoes, including a giant’s rubber boots, I couldn’t begin to guess who owned them because what had really changed with the season, with the arrival of autumn, was that my housemates were starting to become fleshed-out characters.

I decided to study in the kitchen. With the addition of the bookshelf, my furniture situation had greatly improved, had, in fact, doubled, but I still didn’t have a desk. In the kitchen I would have the luxury of a table. They always broke with that song and, as soon as I heard it, I could flee upstairs. I brought down my translation homework and cleared a space among the potluck dishes.

1. Comrade Popov says that he received a letter every day from his wife in London.

2. This author will spend a long time writing and in the end he’ll write a good novel.

I could hear their voices in the other room, the different pitches—when a woman was speaking and when a man was—the melody of assent, the appassionato of disputation, but I couldn’t make out the words. Outside, rain drummed impatient fingers against the window. I struggled, brain attempting to convert the English word into its Russian equivalent, hand to write the symbol that corresponded to the Russian sound, all the while feeling that maybe it was English I couldn’t understand. When I had got through about half the exercises, the French doors clattered open unexpectedly and Dieter said, “Let’s take five.” A man I didn’t know, tall and heavy with a head full of sloppy yellow curls, passed by the kitchen without looking in. One of his pant legs was rolled to his knee.

Then Belinda appeared, the only person I’d ever met who made freckles seem glamorous. Without acknowledging me, she headed to the sink where she filled a glass with water and drank from it, her back turned, forcing me to be her audience. She was so dramatic I could see why Pete enjoyed being cast as her leading man, but I didn’t want to be in the play about her. Despite how enthusiastic she’d sounded when I was chosen for the house, in all our subsequent encounters her disdain for me was plain. I was finally starting to feel comfortable and knew she could easily ruin things for me by just a few calculated comments. The popular and beautiful have such powers.

Belinda drank a glass of water three feet away from me and, when she finished, she set it on the counter with an attention-getting rap, turned, and swept over, saying, “Hmm. I wonder what Jane studies? Accounting, I bet.”

Instinctively, I covered the page—too late. She hovered above me, hair grazing the table. “Is that Russian?” she asked, dropping the stage voice.

Of course I couldn’t. The stones stuck. I tried to read what I’d written, but I hadn’t worked out the pronunciation yet. Then out of my mouth came one of the sentences I’d translated. “Tovarishch Popov govorit, chto on poluchil pismo.”

Dieter bellowed for everyone to gather, and Belinda, first hesitating, blinking at me with new respect, swished out again. “Jane knows Russian,” she said to the blond man I’d seen a moment ago with the rolled pant leg who was coming back down the hall.

He looked in at me. His cheeks were round and pink, like a baby’s. I heard Belinda in the other room: “Pete! Guess what? Jane knows Russian.”

I’d already closed my book and was just waiting for the opportunity to bolt upstairs when Pete strode in. “Do you speak Russian, Zed?”

Now Sonia appeared and, behind her, Belinda again, followed by a pale girl I’d never seen with shorn beige hair. Pete held the page in the air. Belinda snatched it and passed it along. “Jane!” Sonia cried. “What does it say?”

I repeated the Masha question. “Where was Masha going when we saw her yesterday?”

“It means you prefer the Romance languages,” Pete said. “Why are you offended? You said it yourself.”

“Let’s finish the meeting,” Sonia pleaded and they all followed me out, though I turned right at the stairs and went up where they turned left at the living room. They didn’t bother closing the French doors this time and a few minutes later, the song started up.

“Arts is anything. Dieter’s in Arts.” She added quickly, “Not that there’s anything the matter with Dieter.”

“He has a lot of rules,” I said and Sonia cringed. A few days ago he’d tied a grease pencil to a piece of twine and taped it on the fridge door. It was for writing our names on our bread and yogurt and milk. Only supper was communal. But Pete, of course, was drinking from any milk carton he liked. He’d drunk from mine right in front of me.

There was a demonstration at the art gallery. The Americans were trying to deploy more missiles in Europe. At first, the West Germans wouldn’t take them, but now that the Soviets had shot down the Korean airliner, it looked like it was going ahead. Sonia wanted her banner to be in Russian.

I suspected this couldn’t be directly translated. I could write “weapons” for “arms,” but maybe you couldn’t refer to it as a “race” in Russian. Finish the weapons’ athletic competition! No one would be able to read it anyway. “I need my dictionary,” I said, then did my best up in my room, working out the phrase and bringing it back down to her on a clean sheet of paper. Ostanovitye gonku vooryezheniy! She was in her room, cutting a bedsheet in half lengthwise. Then she laid it, a white runner, in the hall. Pete was on the phone in the kitchen. We could hear him saying, “Why can’t I go in through the window?”

Then he roared. Hammering—the receiver against the counter, again, again. Sonia and I rushed to the kitchen where Pete was redialling. We heard Belinda’s faraway hello. “Did you hang up? You didn’t? Are you sure? They cut us off then, the fuckers!” He hurled the receiver and charged past us, knocking aside Sonia. She went over, picked the phone out of the sink, and, with the greying dish cloth, wiped some tomatoey stuff off the earpiece. “Belinda?” she said.

“He’s mad,” Sonia said in the phone. “He went upstairs. Were you really cut off? Jane and I are making the banner. Maybe she will. Anyway, I’m going to ask her to the movie. Are you going? Nobody’s going? So? I’ve seen it before too. I’ve seen it four times. All right. I’ll ask Jane.”

“That was Belinda,” Sonia said, on the way back to the hall. “She asked if you were coming to the demonstration.”

I said no, I had to study. “Is there something the matter with the phone?” I asked.

Which was why, apparently, it provoked such awe. I didn’t believe it, though I didn’t say so. I just nodded and tried not to show how silly I thought that was. Meanwhile, Sonia settled cross-legged to watch me sketch out the Cyrillic letters.

I shrugged, though I was pleased. I stored the compliment the way my aunt socked everything away in bread bags—the shoes in her closet, her bits of costume jewellery, little pastel shards of soap. My aunt would pick an expired bus transfer off the ground and put it in her pocket, as though it were legal tender. I’d saved the things Pete had said to me, too—that I was funny and intelligent—and a comment Kopanyev once scrawled on the bottom of my paper: Jane, you are a very sensitive reader.

“I think it’s because they haven’t met any. If they knew a few, they wouldn’t be so afraid.”

“Personally, I’m more afraid of the Americans. They have more bombs. Do you know a lot of Russians?”

When I was nearly done, she went to her room, walking on the edge of the banner, one tiny foot placed in front of the other, close to the wall. She returned with brushes and a plastic yogurt container half-filled with paint, which she set in the middle of the banner. We each started at an end and worked our way toward the centre, filling in the letters.

“There’s a movie playing at the SUB. If You Love This Planet with Dr. Helen Caldicott. Have you seen it?”

She extended the invitation to Hector and Dieter too. I thought for sure Dieter would come, but he only pushed up his glasses and sneered. “It’s a fundraiser for SPND, isn’t it? I wouldn’t give them a cent. They’re useless.”

“Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. I used to be in SPND when I lived in residence. Dieter and Pete were in it too, but we broke away. All they ever do is have bake sales and march in the Walk for Peace.”

Hector was in the living room watching a sitcom. “Adios, Hector,” Sonia called. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

“Oh dear,” said Sonia. “I think we’d better have a meeting about Hector.”

The night was clear and cold, the only clouds formed by our breath. I could even see stars, puncture holes in the night, rare for November. Sonia had put on a funny knitted toque with earflaps and a couple of sweaters, both of which looked like they came from my aunt’s stash. Over them she wore an anorak and scarf, yet she still seemed too thin. Her clogs resounded on the wooden steps as we went down them.

“SPND. That’s what they’re into. Education. And that’s why I joined. But education isn’t enough if you don’t do anything with it.”

It occurred to me then that nothing I studied had any practical application whatsoever.

The bus was nearly empty and, when we arrived, the campus seemed deserted too. The forested Endowment Lands cut the university off from the city, though in the residences and the frat houses, in the Pit Pub under the Student Union Building, life was undoubtedly going on. We saw scant evidence of it, however, as we walked past the glass wall of the Aquatic Centre; only a few swimmers were clocking laps. The SUB itself felt evacuated, the cafeteria closed, the cookie kiosk too, the couches mostly empty with barely a handful of people milling around before the movie started.

The lobby was down a set of stairs. More people were there, maybe twenty, all of whom Sonia seemed to know well enough to embrace. We bought our tickets from a girl she introduced as Ruth. “This is Jane, my housemate.”

Ruth wore a fringed paisley scarf like a sloppy bandage around her neck. Her long blond hair was divided evenly by the part and her eyes were a very pale blue. Sonia took her ticket and wandered off to talk to someone else. Ruth held on to mine. “You live in Trutch house?” she asked.

The way she looked at me, so intently, I felt washed in blue light. “But I’ve never seen you at anything.”

She nodded. I only remembered the man with the violin, not the other names on the interview sheet. Yet Belinda had told me I was the only woman to apply. She’d said they needed “gender balance” and that was what I thought she meant. “Are you vegetarian?” I asked Ruth.

“Yes!” She sighed. “It must be great living with Pete and Dieter. They’re so committed. Dieter’s probably going to Nicaragua next summer. Are you in NAG!?”

An older couple approached the counter and Ruth finally handed over my ticket. Sonia was standing with her back to me, an arm around a much taller person’s waist. I bought popcorn and a Coke and waited in the corner until the theatre doors opened and people started filing in. Sonia looked around then, smiling when she saw me.

We sat at the very back, near the door. “That girl Ruth?” I said, holding out the popcorn.

Sonia refused, wrinkling her nose. “Ruth’s in SPND,” she said. “She’s really nice.”

“I know. I felt bad when she didn’t get in. It’s horrible rejecting people.”

“A couple of reasons. Well, one. No, I can tell you. Two. We thought she was using it as a way to get into the group. She really wants to be a Nagger. Afterward, I phoned her and told her she should get some people together. And make a new group. Like we did.” She pulled off her toque and tossed it on the empty seat in front of her. Staticky feelers of hair reached toward the light. “She cried. I felt terrible.”

Sonia glanced around before answering. “Belinda was worried about Pete. He sleeps around.”

“Really?” I said. Wasn’t he doing it enough with Belinda? It seemed I was always trying to shut out their groans and laughter. If I was studying or writing a letter to my parents, I’d screw toilet tissue into my ears. If I was trying to sleep, I’d muffle them with my pillow. Yet in the morning, crossing paths with Belinda in the hall or on the stairs, I’d be the one to blush. “Then why did she move out?” I asked.

“It was getting too intense,” Sonia said, disappearing inside the anorak then shucking it like a cocoon.

Belinda had picked me. She’d picked me to keep her boyfriend safe. I was offended. Hurt. I was sensitive. Overly sensitive, my mother told me all the time. “It’s not always about you,” she would say. Last year Kopanyev had written it on the bottom of my paper. And then the lights dimmed and the movie started and I didn’t think about the humiliation of being Belinda’s foil again, not for years and years.

The funny bits were first, clips from old black and white Ronald Reagan movies and hokey newsreels from the war. I leaned back with my popcorn and my drink. Then Dr. Caldicott, lecturing in a pink blouse and pearls, began to describe what happened the morning the bomb fell on Hiroshima, her Australian accent counterpointing the chorus of angels on the soundtrack. I had seen footage of an atomic bomb exploding. It was not unfamiliar to me: a white ball of light gradually detaching from a flat plain of smoke, rising slowly, levitating, while underneath it a boiling pillar formed. Then the head, the ball, changed too, expanding, growing petals of ash. The glow inside was horrible, yet beautiful too, the way it folded in on itself and bloomed. And the angels sang higher and higher until they were keening, and the flattened city stretched before us, a treeless ruin. There were mountains behind it, just like Vancouver. That bomb was small, Dr. Caldicott said. Today’s hydrogen bombs were twenty megatonnes, equivalent to twenty million tonnes of TNT, and today the United States had 35,000 of these bombs, enough to kill every Russian forty times, while the Soviet Union had 20,000 bombs, enough to kill every American twenty times. The probability of a nuclear war occurring by 1985, a little over a year away, was fifty-fifty. Many famous and brilliant scientists believed this to be true.

I set my drink on the floor. It tipped over and some detached part of me could hear the can rolling all the way down to the front of the theatre. The other part listened as Dr. Caldicott explained in exact clinical detail what would happen in the event of a nuclear war. In the remaining eternal half-hour she presented to us our certain fate. How every person within six miles of the epicentre would be vaporized, then up to a radius of twenty miles killed or lethally injured, thousands severely burned. The film showed what these burns were like on Japanese survivors. I saw a skinless child lying on a cot, a man face down, his back a map, the countries burned on him, rivers of scars. Living people melted, like wax. We saw footage of houses imploding in nuclear test blasts, dummies being sucked out windows, dummies lying dismembered in the rubble. She warned us about the flying glass, the steel thrown around like toothpicks. What was left of the buildings would be lying in what was left of the streets. And if you looked at the blast even from forty miles away, if you happened just to glance at it, you would be blinded. As she said this, the hideous burned face of a living person turned its poached eyes toward us. Everything that was flammable within an area of three thousand square miles would start to burn, creating an unstoppable conflagration so that everyone idealistic enough to have taken refuge in the bomb shelters would be pressure-cooked or asphyxiated. Afterward, the millions of decaying corpses would cause uncontrollable outbreaks of disease—polio, typhoid, dysentery, plague—uncontrollable because no medical infrastructure would remain. Unlike in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there wouldn’t be an outside world to come and help. Civilization, the doctor said, would be laid waste. Almost more sickening to me was her explanation of what this meant: no architecture, no painting, no music, no literature.

Dr. Caldicott: “And the survivors would die of a synergetic combination of starvation, radiation sickness, epidemics of infection, sunburn, blindness, and grief.”

At these words Sonia, who had been quaking next to me, lurched from her seat and bolted for the door. It opened with a yawn into the silence on the other side before thudding closed again. I was still sitting in the theatre, stunned, but I knew I would follow her through that door and that on the other side everything would be different now.

We huddled together on the rocks. More than cold, we were frightened. I was nearly numb. This is what people feel like when the doctor tells them they have cancer, I thought. I thought: I’m going to die. I have until 1985. I have thirteen months to live. We’d gotten off the bus at our usual stop, but instead of going home, Sonia had taken my hand and led me the two blocks to the beach. We staggered together, helping each other along an unlit path between two houses, down a set of slippery concrete steps. I’d hardly been to the beach, never at night or by this secret route, so when I looked around I really was seeing it for the first time. Across the strait, the mountains wore tiaras—lights from the ski hills. West Vancouver twinkled at their feet. I saw the void of Stanley Park and the Emerald City brilliance of the West End. In thirteen months it would all be gone.

Sonia put her head on my shoulder and began to cry. After a few minutes she stopped. It was physically impossible to keep shedding tears at the rate she had. “I’ll never get married,” she said, using her sleeve to dry her face. “I’ll never have children. I’ll never have grandchildren.”

I started crying too when, the moment before, I’d been in shock. I never expected to get married and have children either, but the fact that Sonia wouldn’t seemed unspeakably sad. But what Dr. Caldicott had said about the end of civilization, the end of literature, that was what broke my heart.

Sonia: “For me it’s the children. The children who’ll never be born and who’ll die so horribly.”

“We’ve got to talk to people, Jane. Tell them the truth. All over the world it’s happening. People are saying no. They’re saying these weapons aren’t making us safer. The opposite!”

The house was dark when we got back. Hector was asleep in the living room and Pete and Dieter were out. Sonia brought me to the kitchen. I felt for the light switch but when I turned it on, she immediately snapped it off and, letting go of my hand, shuffled away in the dark. I heard a click. Gradually my eyes readjusted and I saw the shape of her waiting at the stove, hands clasped like she was praying to it. The coil blushed and, as the colour deepened, I could make out her face in the glow. She was grimacing.

“This is what I do,” she told me, letting her hand hover above the burner. “This is how I’m getting ready for the burns.”

Many times that weekend I started a letter to my parents, both to warn them and assure them that, contrary to the impression I might have given over the last few years, I loved them very much. Unable to find the words that truly expressed our predicament, I tore the letters up. I thought of my father at the bus depot in Edmonton telling me that if anything bad ever happened to me he’d buy a horse, a dog, and a gun and ride away and no one would ever hear from him again.

“What will you call the horse?” I’d asked, like I used to when I was little.

I decided to tell them when I went home for Christmas. If it hadn’t already happened.

I’d handed in my shoe paper the week before. Now I was supposed to come up with a discussion topic, but when I looked to my venerable bookcase, I could think only of the incinerated libraries and the books that would disappear forever. I mourned them all, but mostly the Russian ones.

The stout, red-faced, flabby Samoylenko, with his large, close-cropped head, big nose, black, bushy eyebrows, grey side whiskers, and no neck to speak of, with a hoarse soldier’s voice as well, struck all newcomers as an unpleasant army upstart. But about two or three days after the first meeting his face began to strike them as exceptionally kind, amiable, handsome even. Although a rude-mannered, clumsy person, he was docile, infinitely kind, good-humoured and obliging. He called everybody by their Christian names, lent money to everyone, gave medical treatment to all, patched up quarrels and organized picnics, where he grilled kebabs and made a very tasty grey mullet soup.

I couldn’t imagine a world without Dr. Samoylenko! These characters were realer than most real people, more important to me than the students in my seminar where we discussed them. That was why I was learning Russian. So I could know them better. Kitty and Levin, the Nihilist Bazarov, old man Kirsanov with his cello and his tears—after my parents, they were the people I cared about most, as well as, and especially, Chekhov’s characters. That slippered fool Ivan Layevsky, Alexei Laptev, the Hamlet of Moscow, even poor, bewhiskered Staff-Captain Ryabovitch in “The Kiss”—they had all endeared themselves to me with their foibles and struggles and depressions. Heroically, or unheroically, they endured the boredom of provincial life, the disappointments of love. I loved them. I loved their galoshes and felt boots and smoky icon lamps, their black bread and tea with jam, the old men in slippers sleeping on the stove. I loved the mud and the vodka, the wasted days, the gambling, the flies. I loved that dog named Syntax. It was easy to imagine them perishing, not just the books they lived in. The people in the film were Japanese, but who could tell, they were so badly burned. They were human beings. Only human beings, like Anna Sergeyevna and Alexei Laptev and Dr. Samoylenko, burned and blinded and dying of grief.

I stayed in my room the whole of Saturday, and when I came down for supper Sonia jumped up from the table and hugged me. At that moment I passionately did not want to die. I thought I would cry again, but didn’t, because of the men. Our embrace aroused enough curiosity that they paused with their forks in mid-air. After a few minutes Hector remarked, “The ladies are very quiet tonight.”

“Excuse me. I had just been told there are no ladies present here. Only two very quiet women.”

Concern flashed across the little round lenses of Hector’s glasses. It glinted off his tooth. “You are sad, Jane? Why?”

“This is the movie you invited me to last night? Then I’m glad I didn’t go. The world is full of cruelness and injustice, but Friday night is not for suffering.”

“As you should,” said Dieter. “The bombs could start raining down at any moment. Quick! Go to the window! Check! Are they falling yet?” He grinned when, predictably, Sonia wailed and had to be comforted. Stiffening against his chest, she struggled free.

Pete had finished eating but instead of going for his second course of bread and margarine, he folded his arms on the table and addressed me. “This is what’s going to happen, Zed. First you’ll feel frightened. Then you’ll feel depressed. This is normal given the circumstances. You’ve just learned that you might die at any moment.”

Dieter: “This is more than death, Hector. This is annihilation. The entire planet.”

Sonia resumed picking at her dismantled burrito. “Is there meat in this, Hector?”

“After the fear, after the depression,” Uncle Peter went on, “you’ll begin to get angry. This is good because when you’re angry enough, when you’re sufficiently pissed off, then change can happen. You’ll say, ‘This is not right. This is unacceptable to me.’ At that point you’ll commit to action.”

“No, we couldn’t,” said Dieter. “We would need consensus. Have you heard of SPND? It’s a group on campus. Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.”

Pete: “Whoa. This is premature. Let’s wait till Zed gets mad. I’ve seen her mad. She showed promise.”

On Sunday morning I brought the sacred yellow telephone to my room and called my aunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You are upset about something. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I can’t talk about it.” The dread was rising in my throat, acidic, like reflux. “I’ll come next week. Not tonight.” I hung up before the tears started. How could I confide in a person for whom the worst thing in the world was constipation?

Sirens kept going off. The fire hall was a few blocks away on Balaclava Street. I’d always tuned out the shriek of the trucks, but I heard them now and every time thought of the newsreel schoolchildren in If You Love This Planet donning gas masks and crouching futilely under their wooden desks. Finally I opened my Chekhov again and got to work. Just before the duel between Layevsky and von Koren, I underlined two sentences. Layevsky experienced the weariness and awkwardness of a man who perhaps was soon to die. And this: It was the first time in his life he had seen the sunrise.

The meeting was still going on downstairs when I finished preparing for the next day’s discussion. I wrote another note to Sonia, the same thing as before, Are you all right? but this time I snuck down and put it in her clog. And I wrote it in Russian, so she would know it was from me.

The next day she brought it to me so I could read it to her. “It says Vsyo normalno?”

“Jane,” she said, staring at me, twisting her little cross in agitation. “I’m not normal.”

“Everybody goes around like—like everything is fine. But it’s not. I know you understand. I know you feel like I do. Don’t you?”

1983