Bobcat and Other Stories Read online

  I AVOIDED MY PAPER for the next month or so, until spring crashed in huge warm waves and I finally sought it out, sunk in its darkened drawer. It was a horrible surprise. I was not any more of a scholar, of course, than I had been six months earlier, when I’d plagiarized it, but my eyes had now passed over Marx and a biography of Stalin (microphones lodged in eyeglasses, streams of censors on their way to work, bloody corpses radiating out of Moscow) and the gentle Bonhoeffer. Almost miraculously I had crossed that invisible line beyond which people turn into actual readers, when they start to hear the voice of the writer as clearly as in a conversation. “Language,” Tretsky had written, “is essentially a coercive act, and in the case of Eastern Europe it must be used as a tool to garden collective hopes and aspirations.” As I read, with Solveig napping at the other end of the couch, I felt a thick dread forming. Tretsky, with his suggestions of annexations and, worse, of solutions, seemed to be reaching right off the page, his long, thin hand grasping me by the shirt. And I could almost hear the wild mazurka, as Stasselova had described it, fading, the cabarets closing down, the music turning into a chant, the boot heels falling, the language fortifying itself, becoming a stronghold—a fixed, unchanging system, as the paper said, a moral framework.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY I WAS on my way to Stasselova’s office, but not before my mother called. The golden brochures had gone out in the mail. “Sweetie!” she said. “What’s this? Keynote speaker? Your father and I are beside ourselves. Good night!” She always exclaimed “Good night!” at times of great happiness. I could not dissuade her from coming, and as I fled the dorm, into the rare, hybrid air of early April, I was wishing for those bad, indifferent parents who had no real interest in their children’s lives. The earth under my feet as I went to him was very sticky, almost lugubrious, like the earth one sometimes encounters in dreams. Stasselova was there, as always. He seemed pleased to see me.

  I sat down and said, “You know, I was thinking that maybe somebody else could take my place at the symposium. As I reread my paper, I realized it isn’t really what I meant to say at all.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Of course you can deliver it. I would not abandon you at a moment like this.”

  “Really, I wouldn’t take it as abandonment.”

  “I would not leave you in the lurch,” he said. “I promise.”

  I felt myself being carried, mysteriously, into the doomed symposium, despite my resolve on the way over to back out at all costs. How could I win an argument against somebody with an early training in propaganda? I had to resort finally to the truth, that rinky-dink little boat in the great sea of persuasion. “See, I didn’t really write the paper myself.”

  “Well, every thinker builds an idea on the backs of those before him—or her, in your case.” He smiled at this. His teeth were very square, and humble, with small gaps between them. I could see that Stasselova was no longer after a confession. I was more valuable if I contained these ideas. Probably he’d been subconsciously looking for me ever since he’d lain on the muddy banks of the Vistula, Warsaw flaming across the waters. He could see within me all his failed ideals, the ugliness of his former beliefs contained in a benign vessel—a girl!—high on a religious hill in the Midwest. He had found somebody he might oppose and in this way absolve himself. He smiled. I could feel myself as indispensable in the organization of his psyche. Behind his head, in the sunset, the sun wasn’t falling, only receding farther and farther.

  THE DAYS BEFORE THE symposium unfurled like the days before a wedding one dreads, both endless and accelerated, the sky filled with springtime events—ravishing sun, great winds, and eccentric green storms that focused everyone’s attention skyward. And then the weekend of the symposium was upon us, the Saturday of my speech rising in the east. I awoke early and went to practice my paper on the red steps of Humanities, in whose auditorium my talk was to take place. Solveig was still sleeping, hung over from the night before. I’d been with her for the first part of it, had watched her pursue a man she’d discovered—a graduate student, actually, in town for the symposium. I had thought him a bit of a bore, but I trusted Solveig’s judgment. She approached men with stealth and insight, her vision driving into those truer, more isolated stretches of personality. I had practiced the paper countless times, and revised it, attempting to excise the most offensive lines without gutting the paper entirely and thus disappointing Stasselova. That morning I was still debating over the line “If we could agree on a common language, a single human tongue, perhaps then a single flag might fly over the excellent earth, one nation of like and companion souls.” Reading it now, I had a faint memory of my earlier enthusiasm for this paper, its surface promise, its murderous innocence. Remembering this, I looked out over the excellent earth, at the town below the hill. And there, as always, was a tiny Gothic graveyard looking peaceful, everything still and settled finally under the gnarled, knotty, nearly human arms of apple trees. There were no apples yet, of course: they were making their way down the bough, still liquid, or whatever they are before birth. At the sight of graves I couldn’t help thinking of Tretsky, my ghostwriter, in his dark suit under the earth, delightedly preparing, thanks to me, for his one last gasp.

  By noon the auditorium had filled with a crowd of about two hundred, mostly graduate students and professors from around the Midwest, along with Hans and Solveig, who sat together, and, two rows behind them, my long-suffering parents, flushed with pride. I sat alone on a slight stage at the front of the room, staring out at the auditorium, which was named Luther. It had wooden walls and was extremely tall; it seemed humble and a little awkward, in that way the tall can seem. The windows stretched its full height, so that one could see the swell of earth on which Humanities was built, and then, above, all manner of weather, which this afternoon was running to rain. In front of these windows stood the reformed genius of martial law himself, the master of ceremonies, Stasselova. Behind him were maple trees, with small green leaves waving. He had always insisted in class that language as it rises in the mind looks like a tree branching, from finity to infinity. Let every voice cry out! He had once said this, kind of absently, and water had come to his eyes—not exactly tears, just a rising of the body’s water into the line of sight.

  After he introduced me, I stood in front of the crowd, my larynx rising quite against my will, and delivered my paper. I tried to speak each word as a discrete item, in order to persuade the audience not to synthesize the sentences into meaning. But when I lifted my head to look out at my listeners, I could see they were doing just that. When I got to the part where I said the individual did not exist—citizens were “merely shafts of light lost, redemptively, in the greater light of the state”—I saw Hans bow his head and rake his otherworldly hand through his hair.

  “And if force is required to forge a singular and mutual grammar, then it is our sacred duty to hasten the birth pangs.” Even from this distance I could hear Stasselova’s breathing, and the sound of blood running through him like a quiet but rushing stream.

  And then my parents. As the speech wore on—“harmony,” “force,” “flowering,” “blood”—I could see that the very elegant parental machinery they had designed over the years, which sought always to translate my deeds into something lovely, light-bearing, full of promise, was spinning a little on its wheels. Only Solveig, that apparatchik of friendship, maintained her confidence in me. Even when she was hung over, her posture suggested a perfect alignment between heaven and earth. She kept nodding, encouraging me.

  I waited the entire speech for Stasselova to leap forward and confront me, to reassert his innocence in opposition to me, but he did not, even when I reached the end. He stood and watched as everybody clapped in bewilderment, and a flushed floral insignia rose on his cheeks. I had come to love his wide, excited face, the old circus man. He smiled at me. He was my teacher, and he had wrapped himself, his elaborate historical self, into this package, and stood in front of the high windows, to teach me my little lesson,
which turned out to be not about Poland or fascism or war, borderlines or passion or loyalty, but just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of. And I did long for it, to say one true sentence of my own, to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity—the light of which, incidentally, was streaming in on us just then through the high windows. Above Stasselova’s head the storm clouds were dispersing, as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they’re told to do from deep within.

  Slatland

  I went to Professor Pine for help twice in my life, once as a child and once as an adult. The first time, I was eleven and had fallen into an inexplicable depression. This happened in the spring of 1967, seemingly overnight, and for no reason. Any happiness in me just flew away, like birds up and out of a tree.

  Until then I had been a normal, healthy child. My parents had never damaged me in any way. They had given me a dusty, simple childhood on the flatlands of Saskatchewan. I had two best friends—large, unselfish girls who were already gearing up for adolescence, sometimes laughing until they collapsed. I had a dog named Chest, who late at night brought me half-alive things in his teeth—bats with human faces, fluttering birds, speckled, choking mice.

  My parents couldn’t help noticing my sadness. They looked at me as if they were afraid of me. Sometimes at the dinner table the silence would be so deep that I felt compelled to reassure them. But when I tried to say that I was all right, my voice would crack and I would feel my face distorting, caving in. I would close my eyes then, and cry.

  One night my parents came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed. “Honey,” my father said, “your mother and I have been thinking about you a lot lately. We were thinking that maybe you would consider talking to somebody—you know, a therapist—about what is the matter.” My father was an earnest, cheerful man, a geologist with a brush cut and a big heart. I couldn’t imagine that a therapist would solve my problems, but my father looked hopeful, his large hand tracing a ruffle around my bedspread.

  Three days later we were standing outside an office on the fourth floor of the Humanities Building. My appointment was not with a true therapist but rather with a professor of child psychology at the university where my father taught.

  We knocked, and a voice called from behind the door in a bit of a singsong, “Come in you, come in you.” Of course he was expecting us, but this still seemed odd, as if he knew us very well or as if my father and I were both little children—or elves. The man sitting behind the desk when we entered was wearing a denim shirt, his blond hair slicked back like a rodent’s. He looked surprised—a look that turned out to be permanent. He didn’t stand up, just waved at us. From a cage in the corner three birds squawked. My father approached the desk and stuck out his hand. “Peter Bergen,” my father said.

  “Professor Roland Boland Pine,” the man said, and then looked at me. “Hello, girlie.”

  Despite this, my father left me alone with him. Perhaps he just thought, as I did, that Professor Pine talked like this, in occasional baby words, because he wanted children to respond as if to other children. I sat in a black leather chair. The professor and I just stared at each other for a while. I didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t speaking either. It was easy to stare at him. As if I were staring at an animal, I felt no embarrassment.

  “Well,” he said at last, “your name is Margit?”

  I nodded.

  “How are you today, Margit?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Do you feel okay?”

  “Yes. I feel okay.”

  “Do you go to school, Margit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like your teacher?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “It’s a her.”

  “Do you hate her?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you here, Margit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is everything okay at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love your mother?” A long tic broke on his face, from the outer corner of his left eye all the way down to his neck.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she a lumpy mother?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Pardon me, Margit. I meant does your mother love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she love your father?”

  I paused. “Yes.”

  “And does he love her?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Margit, what is the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t see why we’re talking about my parents so much.”

  “Why don’t they love each other?”

  “They do—I said they do.”

  “Why can’t you talk about this?”

  “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “You can tell me the truth. Do they hurt each other? Lots of girls’ parents hurt each other.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Is one of them having an affair, maybe?”

  I didn’t say anything. “Maybe?” he repeated.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Which one, Margit? Which one of the babyfaces?”

  I stared at him. Another tic passed over his face. “Pardon me, Margit. I meant which one of your parents is having the affair?”

  “My dad. But I don’t think he’s actually having it. I just heard him tell my mom a few months ago that he was considering it.”

  “And do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks ago I picked up the phone and a woman was talking to my dad. She told him that she had to have her breasts removed and asked if that would make a difference.”

  “How difficult for you. How sad for the girlie-whirl.” Another tic, like a fault line shifting. “Margit, may I tell you something from my own childhood?”

  This worried me, but I said yes.

  “When I was young, I loved my mother. She was a real lumper. Then one day, kerpow, she was dead.” He held his forefinger to his head as if it were the barrel of a gun and stared at me for a few seconds without speaking. “It wasn’t actually her, you see, but a woman of about her age who happened to be walking toward me on the sidewalk. A man came running and shot her. I was so devastated that I fell right on top of her. I didn’t care if he shot me, too. I was only ten at the time, and my mother’s death could have scarred me for life. But it didn’t. And do you know how I got from that moment to this one—how I got from there to here, to sitting behind this desk now, talking to you?”

  I shook my head. “How?”

  “I rose above the situation. Literally I did. I felt my mind lift out of my body, and I stared down at myself leaning over the bleeding woman. I said to myself, very calmly, there is little Roland from New Orleans, the little erky-terk, realizing that someday his mother will die.”

  He was looking at me so intently, and his birds were flapping in their cage with such fervor, that I felt I had to say something. “Wow,” I said.

  “I suggest you try it, Margit. For every situation there is a proper distance. Growing up is just a matter of gaining perspective. Sometimes you just need to jump up for a moment, a foot above the earth. And sometimes you need to jump very far. It is as if there are thin slats, footholds, from here to the sun, Margit, for the baby faces to step on. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Slatland, flatland, mapland.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Pardon me, Margit. I know so many languages that sometimes I say words out of place.”

  At the end of the session I asked him when I should return. He told me that another visit wouldn’t be necessary, that usually his
therapy worked the first time.

  I didn’t in fact understand what he had said to me, but his theory seemed to help anyway, as if it were a medication that worked whether you understood it or not. That very evening I was having dinner with my parents. It started as the usual dinner—me staring at my plate, my parents staring at me as if I were about to break in two. But about halfway through the meal I started feeling light-headed. Nothing frightening happened, but I did manage to lift slightly out of myself. I looked down at our tiny family. I saw my father from above, the deep map of his face. I understood in an instant that of course he was having an affair, and that he was torn between my mother and this other, distant woman. I saw my beautiful mother from above, and I could see how she must hate this other woman, yet sympathize as well, because this other woman was very ill. I understood how complicated it was to be an adult, and how haunting, and how lovely. I longed to be back in my body then, to be breathing and eating, straining toward maturity. And when I returned, one split second later, I hugged my parents, one after the other, with a spontaneity that a depressed person could never muster.

  IN THE TWENTY YEARS that passed between my first visit to Professor Pine and my second, from 1967 to 1987, I remained in the same city. I graduated from Massey and then from LeBoldus High and then from the University of Saskatchewan, with a degree in biology. As an adult, I worked as a soil consultant, traveling around the province to small satellite towns in a flatbed truck that I could sleep in, if necessary, on warm nights.

  Bouts of the depression did return, but they never overwhelmed me. Perhaps my life was not the most rigorous testing ground for Professor Pine’s technique, because my life was relatively free of tragedy. Most of my depression erupted out of nowhere. I’d be in the fields in the midst of a bright day, and a dreariness would mysteriously descend. I’d sink into it for a few minutes, but the lift would always come. I would take a step up, or two or three, and recognize how good life in fact was. From above, my job appeared to me excellent and strange. There I was, under a blazing sun, kneeling in a yellow expanse, weighing samples of earth. And later, with instruments as tiny and beautiful as jewelry, testing the dirt for traces of nitrogen and phosphorus, the gleam of potash.