Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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They wore sweaters and knit wool caps and smoked cigarettes while they drank their coffee and looked out at the dark settling on the lake. The whole place pulsed with the night: frogs and cicadas chorusing back and forth, black clouds of bats shivering above the tree canopy and then melting into the black night sky. Oskar kept a diary of their trip in a cardboard-covered notebook. He fished it out of his pack and flipped through the pages, stopping to check a list, write a note in the firelight. Across the front cover he had written in black ink: UPPER CANADA HOLDING COMPANY O. Tiklowicz, A. Levi props. He had pasted maps onto its pages, train tickets, labels from the first tins of condensed milk and navy beans they ate, receipts, bills, a hand-written contract, a snapshot of the two of them with Your great-greatgreat-grandfather probably spit on Columbus and de Torres as he ran to make the boat to Tangiers. their packs strapped on at Haliburton station. He sketched the lakes they paddled over, jack pines, Alberto fishing, Ojibwa birch canoes bobbing in the waves; he wrote notes about the mines, trappers, traders they met, the diarrhea, poison ivy, and stinging black fly bites that plagued them both; he jotted down poems that echoed in his mind when he looked out at the smoky bluegreen forest that flowed like a river over the mountains and lake-studded valleys of Upper Canada. He had carefully pasted in a cutting from The Globe & Mail about the future of the Hudson's Bay Company and wrote tiny notes in pencil along the margins. "You see, Europe is a lady of advancing years," Oskar said, shutting the book and shaking his finger at Alberto's smiling face. "Sophisticated. Gorgeous. But when you bend down to kiss her, the sweat in her armpits, the breath in her mouth she smells sour, of Death. But Canada!" He was shouting now, his voice a high-pitched squeak in the night, clapping his hands to punctuate his sentences, performing for Alberto and the crackling fire and the slick-furred otters who peered at them from the lake shallows. "Canada is the beautiful virgin girl bursting with the life! With swelled, firm breasts. She is ready to clasp a Jew to her warm body! Her breath is sweet, her mouth hungry!" Alberto laughed at the impossible image of his skinny, toothless friend with his face in some girl's chest. "What a rabbi you'd make," Alberto said. ''It's not too late, you know." "It's so funny, ha ha, my fall from grace," Oskar said, smiling, his face covered in the smile, his small, delicate hands stretching out to embrace the whole night. "But this is exactly the place for us, Bertie. Up here with the Indians," he gestured, pointing at the creatures watching them from the lake, "with the animals." Alberto siniled and nibbled on a piece of the frying-pan bread. Oskar's voice, the fire, the smell of smoke and the spruce needlecovered earth made the night unfurl in front of him: he could see his life as a series of places - Ontario, New York, the steamship, his father's store in the melfa with its hundreds of hammered tin and glass lanterns hanging from the ceiling, lined up on rickety shelves gleaming in the North African sun. He sawall those places eInpty of people, quiet, only angles and shadows, turning them over in his mind like a child with a seashell. Oskar nudged the coals in the fire with a stick, sending sparks and crackles and a puff of smoke into the blue-black night. "You know, we're like the Jew Columbus who set sail on the ninth of Ab looking for cinnamon sticks and discovered the world," Oskar said. "What are you talking about?" Alberto laughed. "Christopher Columbus was a converso?" "Of course he was. Don't you even know that? Why else were there only Jews on his trip as his advisors? You ever heard about Luis de Torres? Why were all the investors Jews? Tell me, my Spanish-speaking friend - why did he choose to sail into the great blue beyond for the Indes on the very same, exact day the Grand Inquisitor had sent every Jew in Spain packing and all the ports were clogged with weeping and wailing yentas? Your great-greatgreat-grandfather probably spit on Columbus and de Torres as he ran to make the boat for Tangiers." "Stop it," Alberto laughed. "Next it's going to be - you know that English Jew, Henry Hudson? This guy would not drink a cup of tea with everyone else on Yom Kippur! No, not a sip!" "Believe, don't believe. It's true." Oskar shrugged his shoulders. Alberto, still laughing, began to stack the pans, the enamelled tin plates and cups, the flame-blackened lard pail. Tiklowicz was quiet as they cleaned up from dinner, all of a sudden seized with one of his somber moods. He squatted at the fire, smoking and peering into the smoldering purple and red flames, the orange coals. Alberto went into the tent, shook out the blankets. He heard Tiklowicz moving
around, boots scraping on the rocks, the fire stoked. He heard the cooking pans clang together as Tiklowicz strung them up onto the branches of the huge spruce tree. And then Oskar's squeaky voice declaiming into the darkness, his voice full of emotion: She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. As he lay down under his blankets, a blister of happiness burst inside Alberto, trickling through him until his entire being was warm from it. Everything around him, the faint sound of waves lapping at the shore, the cool, tender summer air covering them like a duvet, the sound of Oskar's voice, a crying loon flying over the lake, the rustling breeze and jack pines that grew gnarled and bent along the shore, all felt part of him. Tiklowicz was right - of all the places he had moved through, this was the only one he had ever wanted to stay in. It was as though for the first time since he was a boy in the mella and had watched his father, all beat up and bleeding, die that Alberto's nerves had become untangled and were loose and free, drifting inside his soul like the fingers of a sea anemone fluttering in underwater currents, letting him feel the universe as it spun by. He fell into sleep that night like he was diving into the lake, buoyed by happiness, the happiest he'd ever felt. When Alberto woke up, Tiklowicz was swhnming. Mist rose from the gray-blue water. Night still hung in the air and faint clouds stretched between skinny poplars and spruce trees like webs of cotton wool. Oskar waded out of the lake up onto the narrow stone beach naked, white from the cold, his penis curled between his legs. Steam evaporated off his warm body into the dawn. He began shivering when he was drinking his coffee; soon he was burning with fever and crawled back into the tent. Without thinking what he was doing, Alberto picked him up and carried him through the sundrenched morning along the overgrown logger's path, startling the wood thrushes and orioles in the understory. The day became suffused with the smell of pine needles and the sun-warmed earth. Alberto left Oskar at the road-head under an aspen, lying on his side in the shade, and went back to their campsite. And it was then, as he retraced his steps and gathered up the two packs, stuffing them with pots and pans and blankets and cans of food and their loaf of bread and wax paper-wrapped cheese and clothes and Oskar's diary - then carrying everything, sweating in the bright, unfiltered light, that he learned that time was liquid; that it runs in a great rushing forward that sometimes gets diverted into pools that swirl in endless circles. That a person can spend his lifetime, caught, floating in a moment. By the time they got to Toronto, to the Royal Eglinton hospital, Oskar couldn't speak from the chattering of his teeth. Alberto sat in the hospital with Oskar. The influenza ward was long and full of muted sunlight, quiet except for the padding of wool felt slippers on the rubber-tiled floor, and the coughs and moans of febrile men. For the three days before Oskar died, Alberto was overwhelmed by his friend's raging fever. It seeped into Alberto and exploded in his mind until everything was clouded. A pretty Scottish nurse came and wiped Tiklowicz down with ice water. She wiped his thin body with a flannel, carefully tracing his bony knees and hips, the hollow of his collarbone. Oskar was flushed deep red, his skin raised in goose pimples. On the dawn of the third day that Oskar was in the hospital, it began to rain. Alberto watched the rain drip down the windowpane all day. He thought of his mother, the Hand of Fathma around her neck, her beautiful brown eyes wet and round watching him, sending him away forever as he stood on the crowded deck of the steamship next to his sister, Mila. In the early evening, just as the rain stopped and the sky above Toronto turned orange and pink and red from the sunset, he knew that Oskar was about to die; he knew it with as much certainty as if it had already happened and he were remembering it. He bent next to Oskar's hot, flushed face, breathed in his sour fever and kissed his cheek "Oskar," he said, and then quickly, without thinking, he whispered into his ear, "don't worry, I'll stay here with you. I won't go back I won't ever go back" III Tllr IInnrn nllllni IInlF'\lUn nnllnlU\f
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Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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