Down in the Ground, page 8
Her first language was Albanian. Her father had been a junior minister in the Nazi-puppet government during the Second World War, and when the Hoxha Communists took over, Kasha’s mother, father, and eldest sister were given refuge in Franco’s Spain. That’s how the family came by Spanish, but during the war, to appear chic among the powerful members of the political elite, they had spoken Italian at home whenever possible. When they moved from Madrid to Brazil, where Kasha was born, her first language was neither Spanish, nor Italian, nor even Albanian as one might assume, but Portuguese, which she said she spoke terribly, though she often broke into a mixture of Italian and Albanian at home to make herself understood to her parents who had become lost in the household Babel. Her older sisters scolded her in Spanish and she said she had to stick up for herself in Franco’s lingua franca because she was fluent in the two languages the others struggled to speak, Portuguese and English.
I brought her to a family gathering when we had only been dating for two weeks. That was a bad move. My uncle, a very bigoted former air force officer from the war, leaned over to my mother and asked: “She isn’t Catholic, is she?” My mother turned and looked floored at him.
“No,” she said. “She isn’t. I think she’s possibly Australian.” My uncle nodded in relief. My mother hadn’t lied. Kasha was Muslim but knew enough of the Book of Common Prayer from her Guildford days to pass muster with my uncle when he quizzed her on Church of England rites. I intervened. The nerve of him. Interrogating her like that. Later, when I was taking her home, I apologized.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s a big world we all rattle around in. I’m the product of a family that has been shaken but not stirred, as James Bond would say.” I smiled and nodded, and I could see she was happy with my attempt at contrition when I looked in her eyes.
We had begun meeting up. I wouldn’t call it dating. She would call me from her home with strict instructions that I wasn’t to call her at her number. If I wanted to contact her, I had to leave notes at the library sorting desk where she worked part-time to pay her tuition. Her home life, she said, was something she never discussed with people. When I asked why, she said it was because her family had moved around. Changing addresses was how they stayed safe. Her father had died in Brazil. Her mother blamed the Communists, and said the family would never know peace because of the red terror. But the death of Kasha’s father had made her mother even more of a Fascist than when she had stood at her husband’s side during the war and watched the Axis armies crumble before the partisans.
“And why did your mother want to come to Canada?”
“You’d expect me to say for her children’s education,” (Kasha had three sisters and two brothers, and I wondered what they lived on, let alone how all of them had put themselves through university), “but the truth is she thinks she’s being hunted by Albanian agents.” She must have seen me look askance at her because she added: “Really. She thinks they’re standing across the street. She thinks they’re everywhere. She might even think you’re one if I didn’t introduce you properly.”
And when I finally met her mother, we were not properly introduced according to the multilingual customs of her home. I had pulled a two-and-half-day essay writing session. It was the end of the term and when I arrived at Kasha’s house—we had planned to go out for ice cream and walk along the Kew Beach Boardwalk which I had never seen—she showed me in to her living room, said her mother was out and that I should wait on the chesterfield while she put on a fresh black sweater. I think I fell asleep.
I woke. Kasha had slipped beside me, draping my arm over her shoulder, and falling asleep against my chest with my denim shirt bunched in her left hand. It was the image of perfect innocence until her mother stepped into the room and screamed. There was shouting. I heard some words I understood and others that were completely foreign to me. Kasha’s eyes were tearing and red as she pointed to me, then her mother, and threw out the palms of her hands in desperation. The mother had intense brown eyes, even more intense than Kasha’s and anger turned them into the dark centres of storms. They wanted to burn a hole through me. I could feel it.
Kasha and I sat on a bench on the boardwalk and stared at the lake. Some gulls were hovering over bread crusts left on the sand at the water’s edge.
“You know, there isn’t really a tide here, at least not much, so I’ve been told.”
“You don’t need to make filler talk,” she said. “I know this can’t go any further. I really like you, but my mother told me that if I didn’t come back in an hour I would not be able to come back at all. My older sister, the one you’ve never met—she never came back. I can’t do that.”
“I’m sorry. I understand, I think.”
“It is more complex than you know,” she said as she stood and was about to bid me farewell.
“Before you go,” I said, “there’s something I need to know.”
“Please don’t.”
“No, it isn’t about us breaking up. It is about while we were on the sofa. I woke up before your mother came in. I was listening to the noise of the street. Some kids were playing down the block. And then you said something. You were dreaming, but you talked in your sleep. A psychology prof I had in first year said that our real language, the one that is our true mother tongue, is the one we dream in. Although there were one or two words you were saying that I thought I could understand—bicycle was one of them—I couldn’t figure out what you were saying, what your heart’s language is. What language do you dream in? It’s an odd question, but I need to know.”
Kasha smiled, though her eyes told me she was broken-hearted. “Me? Inside me? I have made up my own language. I am the only one who speaks it. It is not made of any of the tongues that have shaped my life. It is my own way of telling myself what I feel because I can’t say it, no matter where I am or who I am speaking to. And you, well, you’re the only one, other than me, who has heard and tried to understand.”
The Sophomore Philosophy Club
IT WAS SUPPOSED to be role-play night for the Sophomore Philosophy Club, but it went south very quickly. Schopenhauer had gotten the whole thing off to a bad start by asking Heidegger for twenty dollars, which Heidegger obliged because it suited his theory of linguistic interrogation, thinking that, at last, the old question of Schopenhauer’s coin on the tavern table would be put to rest because he’d have to pay up. But Schopenhauer shoved the bill in his mouth, and Hume argued that Schopenhauer didn’t know where the bill had been, or who had handled it, and the whole business was uncertain, if not questionable ad extremis. Besides, shoving money in one’s mouth was disgusting.
Spinoza who had been watching everything through a large magnifying glass he’d brought with him as a useless prop for the evening said: “Well, that’s the last you’re going to see of that twenty.” And then turned to Schopenhauer and said: “You’re an idiot, you should have asked for a brownie or a sunburn,” meaning, according to Berkeley who hastened to explain that a sunburn was a fifty and a brownie was a hundred, that all the money in the world was actually inside him and he just had to find it for himself. But Heidegger didn’t get the connection between the slang term for large denomination Canadian bills and thought that Spinoza was telling him to eat shit, and that’s when the fight began.
Heidegger lunged at Hume, but Hume stepped out of the way because he understood the fundamentals of human nature and saw the anger coming, but in doing so tripped over Plato and spilled Nietzsche’s beer. Nietzsche, Hume was certain, threw the first punch, but it was Russell who took it on the chin as Plato tried to dodge the fray and fell backwards into Anselm. Anselm knew there might be trouble as he’d had an a priori premonition that philosophy could get out of hand, even at the undergraduate level, and pulled a hammer out of his backpack, screamed “God!” at the top of his lungs, whirled around, and caught Nietzsche in the side of the head which made him cross-eyed for a second, just like the real Nietzsche who appears on page 365 in Understanding Philosophy by Hunter and Hoote. At this point, Nietzsche, covered in blood and beer, staggered forward with his fists flailing and took out Plato who fell squarely into Socrates who was sitting there asking: “What the fuck’s going on?”
The two Greeks fell to the floor—Aristotle had known enough to retreat to a safe corner in the room where he could get a better definition of what was happening. Socrates fell on Nietzsche’s glass and opened up a huge wound in his hand. He stood up, looking at the blood, and said: “Why am I bleeding?” Hume and I (I’m Leibniz) looked at him and said: “Know thyself.” To which Hume added: “The unexamined hand is not worth shaking.” And we decided to get the hell out of there. Nietzsche was heard hollering at Aristotle: “I’m going to make a tragedy out of you,” as we headed down the hall on our get-away.
A little guy, who was supposed to be Machiavelli but who was late for the real-politick of the evening, met us on the stairs. He was lugging a two-four, and I said: “This is the best of all possible worlds.” And Hume said: “That’s cheating, you’re parodying yourself.” And I said: “Well, hell, why not? There’s more beer there than we can put back in an hour.” So the three of us headed off to the park down the street from the dorm.
Machiavelli, Hume and I were joined under a large maple tree by Aquinas who had gotten out via the fire escape. “You know,” Thom said philosophically, “I can’t make any order out of what’s going on in there.”
Hume took a long chug of beer. “It is human nature,” he said. “Just human nature.”
“No, I beg to differ. I think it is perfect. It is the expression of the monads that govern the universe, the beauty that makes each leaf on every tree a work of mathematical perfection. Beer is also mathematical perfection.” We clinked our bottles.
We sat for the next several hours beneath that maple tree. A soft breeze was blowing under the leaves and rustling them in the night. The campus police were busy breaking up the Sophomore Philosophy Club in the dorm ... the entire fourth floor had become engaged, engineers battling with psychologists, battling with historians, and so on.
After a long silence, Thom said with a sigh: “You know, that’s what’s fucked up the Western mind. There’s no fucking arguing with the world but that’s what all this philosophy bullshit is about. I’m switching my major next term to literature. At least by the time I get to the last page of a novel I’ll know how it ends, and there’s always that blank page after the final one. That scares the shit out of me, but it makes a pretty profound statement. I always draw a sunset on it, and a cowboy with his back to me, just to ease my anxieties.”
And as he said that, I pictured cowboys riding off into the postcard perfect sunset with silhouettes of mesas rising around them in the afterglow like the last scene in the Magnificent Seven, and considered how we might have saved the village if we’d given it some thought.
The Run
IN A GOOD week of summer weather, my team could lay a run of five blocks or more. First, we’d start by tearing up the old sidewalk, usually early in the morning when people would holler out their windows at us, tell us what sons of bitches we were for starting at that ungodly hour. I wanted to remind them that progress doesn’t take prisoners and they should be up and at it if they wanted to seize the day. Our foreman Frank was usually the guy to tell them that. We weren’t permitted to exchange words or blows with the people on the street. It was against company policy.
Rain was always a problem. If you’re going to lay a run of sidewalk, you can’t have rain. The bed beneath the new cement has to be level and dry or else the run will heave once the frost comes. When a run heaves, it cracks, and then we’re back again in the spring to fill in the cracks in the slabs or just tear them up and start all over. Sidewalks are like the funeral business, in that respect. You never run out of work. There’s always something ahead of you to get to.
If you walk along a street in the north end of the city, especially, you can almost figure out how many times it rained the year the sidewalk was laid. The slabs, as required by civic bylaws, must have date stamps, and you can tell by how often the date stamp changes whether it was set in a wet year or a dry year. You can also tell the good years from the bad by how often the dates change. A good year should last forever, with its date intact, like a tombstone.
We got to this one street where the sidewalks looked like a damaged cemetery. The surfaces were worn and cracked. You could see the slurry of small pebbles that pocked the surface as the smooth covering disappeared. But there was this one stretch, a run set in 1923 that hadn’t seemed to age. The slabs were almost good as new. We knelt down and ran our hands over the surface because we’d never seen such immaculate sidewalks. 1923 must have been a good year. But we had to start the demolition anyways. Company rules. Take up the old, lay down the new.
I started with a jack hammer at the eastern corner. I chipped away all morning and nothing changed. The slab was there. We stood around during our break and discussed what we ought to do with 1923. We concluded that we should pry it up with crow bars. Someone asked about the rest of the run. Those pieces were going to be just as difficult. The framer came up with the idea that a fork-lift with long prongs—his brother just happened to have one and could come in an hour—could get underneath the run and simply flip it over. So, that’s what we did. His brother came around with a truck and the forklift worked just like a bobcat. Our bobcat was somewhere else when we needed it.
We’d just finished lunch. The foreman came around and asked why we were buggering off. We told him about 1923. “That’s the damnedest thing,” he said, removing his construction hat and wiping his bald head with a red handkerchief. “Damnedest thing.”
But the real damnedest thing happened when we flipped the slabs. Nothing had even shifted them for almost a century, and when they flipped, we found coins people had tossed into the cement mix. Coins in a mix are supposed to be lucky. The pennies were shining. We found a newspaper rolled up. It was from July of the year and it was in good shape—good enough to read. But the part that really freaked us was when we were sitting on a lawn and people, real people, not ghosts, not spirits, not phantoms from the overheated brains of men who’d been out in the sun all day, but real people, started emerging from the run. One man, a guy in a three-piece suit and bowler hat, came up to me and asked how far it was to number 231. I pointed down the block and he thanked me and went on his way. A girl in a white dress with puffed sleeves, the kind of kid you see in old movies, especially silent films, came skipping out of the earth. I know we weren’t supposed to speak to the people on the street.
“Hey kid,” I hollered, “how long have you been under there and watcha doing down in the ground?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, and I pointed to the run we’d just torn up. She began to cry, sobbing softly at first, and then breaking into a full wail.
“Why are you crying, kid, don’t cry.” One of the guys reached into his lunch pail to see if he could find the bear claw his wife packed for him every day to give him an extra boost in the afternoon.
“It was my mark,” the kid said. “It was all that was left of me in the world. And you’ve broken it. You’ve torn it up.” She was holding a doll. The doll’s right hand, just like her right hand, was grey with dried cement. “We left our mark on the world. It was the only thing anybody remembered about me, and now it’s gone.”
I turned to the guys. We had to do something. The kid was freaking us all. So, we went to the first slab of 1923, the one that seemed so important to her, and flipped it over. There was the hand print we hadn’t noticed, and the minis-cule handprint of her doll.
“Okay, kid,” I said, “we have two options. We can have you set your handprint in the new slab or we can re-lay the old one with your mark on it.”
“Both,” she said through her sobs. “I want both.”
The entire team struggled to set the old slab in place. We figured if we laid it so it lined up with the new work, it would fit right in and the inspector wouldn’t notice. Kids aren’t supposed to write their names in fresh concrete, especially not the city’s concrete, but that’s never stopped them, or their dolls. We’d see it on just about every job. We hated it when someone wrote fuck or shit in our work because that was defacement, that was a sign they denigrated our work. In the autumn, a leaf would settle on the soft batter and its imprint would remain like a small miracle. I always thought leaf prints were kinda nice. But a kid’s hands? That’s innocence. That’s gotta be preserved for posterity or something. I mean, look at the world. We need to be reminded that there’s innocence and it’s important.
As we smoothed over the freshly laid batter, raking in the grooves to keep people from slipping if it got icy, tamping in the edges so the new slab had a nice frame, and finally setting the city’s official date stamp in the mix, the kid bent down with her doll and they made their prints. I should have asked her name. I didn’t. And I’ll never know.
What I did know was that people become the paths they walk every day. They are swallowed, without knowing it, in their familiar ways, in the routes they trace without giving a second thought to whether they are going home or going to work, or just walking around the block to clear their minds, or whether they’ll ever come back to that place. They are prisoners of familiarity, just as I have become a prisoner of familiarity to the point where I can tear up and lay down a sidewalk in my sleep; and when I close my eyes, I see the mix being poured into the pegged frame. I see my paddle stirring it, smoothing the surface with what we call a float, and then walking away. I imagine my life as sidewalks I tear up and lay and never have a chance to walk because they have not set by the time I board the company truck and leave. When I die, I don’t want to be trapped somewhere. I want to say I’ve had a good run and leave it at that. Maybe many good runs, but that’s a cement man’s joke.
