A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
Under all the souvenirs, another one, the thing I was looking for. I took it back to my bedroom and hid it, not examining it, hardly able to pick it up for the loathing I felt. I sat on my bed and smoked and thought This isn’t the way to do it – something is all wrong here. I won’t ever be able to touch that contrivance. Anyway, it probably doesn’t work, not any more. It’s rotten with age, more than likely.
Let’s say I tell Mother I have to go to the city for a few days. What for? I could be buying books. There are plenty of drugstores, and not a soul to know a person. Could I ask, or would I get my words confused, come out with something I never meant to say?
None of this should be, not this way. How can I be steadier? To be nonchalant would be the best thing in the world, if I knew how. It’s all right for Stacey. She’d laugh, probably. Everything is all right for her, easy and open. She doesn’t appreciate what she’s got. She doesn’t even know she’s got it. She thinks she’s hard done by, for the work caused by four kids and a man who admits her existence. She doesn’t have the faintest notion. She left here young. She gave the last daughter my name. I suppose she thought she was doing me a favour. Jennifer Rachel. But they call her Jen.
“How about the sandwiches, Rachel? Are they ready?”
“Yes. You don’t want them yet, do you? It’s only eight.”
“No, I just thought I’d see how you were coming along, dear, that’s all.”
“Fine. Everything is ready.”
“Oh, that’s lovely, dear.”
The phone. I can’t intercept her. She’s too quick.
“Rachel – it’s for you.”
Her voice rises in questionment. Damn. I am shaking and cannot seem to stop. Mother, her mock-diamond earrings flickering in the hall light, hands me the receiver and a blank look.
“Hello.”
“Hi. Sorry I didn’t phone you earlier, Rachel. I meant to, but this place has been like a circus today. Are you busy?”
“When? Now?”
“Yes.”
In the livingroom the voices mercifully begin again.
“No – I’m not busy.”
“Can I pick you up in – let’s say a quarter of an hour?”
“Yes. That would be fine.”
He laughs. “I like that polite voice of yours. I’m glad it’s deceptive, though.”
“Is it?”
“Well, that’s my impression. I could be wrong.”
“Although you so rarely are?”
“That’s it, darling. You’ve got it. Well – see you.”
I have to summon Mother. She comes out looking anxious.
“What is it, Rachel? Is anything the matter?”
“No. No, of course not. It’s just – well, I’m going out for a little while. With Nick.”
If she had not answered the phone, I think I would have told her Calla was ill and I had to go over there. It isn’t that I want to lie to her. But she invites it, even demands it. Whoever said the truth shall make you free never knew this kind of house. Now she’s upset.
“Is that the same person, Rachel?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s too late to go the movie, dear.”
If I laughed, she would be hurt, really hurt.
“We’ll go to the Regal and have coffee. I like talking to him.”
“Well, dear, you do what you think best. I’d never suggest you shouldn’t go. Only, on a bridge night – well, never mind. We’ll just have to stop playing while I do the serving, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. Honestly. It’s just that –”
“Oh, I quite understand, dear. You go right ahead. I know it doesn’t happen very often. It’s just that you’re always here, on a bridge night, that’s all, and it’s such a help to me.”
I won’t go, then – I find the words are there already in my throat, and yet I force them back. This newfound ruthlessness exhilarates me. I won’t turn back. If I do, I’m done for. Yet I can’t look at her, either, or see the sallowness of her face.
“Well –” her voice is like a thread of gum, stretched thin from someone’s mouth until it may break and dangle, “I guess Verla won’t mind giving me a hand with the cups and things –”
“I’m sorry. I mean, to leave you like this. But I won’t be late.”
“No,” she says, circling my wrist with her white sapphire-ringed hand, “don’t be, dear, will you?”
The Kazliks’ place is about three miles out of town, along the gravel highway where the telephone wires hum like the harps of the wind. The house is set back from the road, indistinguishable from a thousand frame farmhouses planted among the poplars. The barn, though, is splendid and enormous, as newly white as an egg. At the front of the house someone, Nick’s mother probably, has planted orange and yellow calendula, and blue larkspur and zinnias stiff and dowdy as paper flowers.
“I’ve never been here before.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would have been.”
“How long are your parents away for?”
“Oh, just a few days, likely. My mother would like to stay a week, at least, at her brother’s place in Galloping Mountain, but the old man will never stay away that long. He doesn’t trust me. Jago is here, but nevertheless my dad expects to get back and find the business in ruins. Of course, he’s quite right in a way. I don’t know the first thing about cows, except what I remember from when I was a kid, and that was as little as possible.”
“Didn’t you ever like the place, Nick?”
“I guess before I started school I did. Not after that. Historical irony – it took my father fifteen years to build up that herd of his, and I used to wish every goddamn cow would drop dead.”
“What did you wish he’d been?”
“Oh – doctor, lawyer, merchant chief. Even a railway-man.”
“Or undertaker?”
“No,” Nick says with a smile, “not that. Did it bug you?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Don’t misunderstand, though. I loved my father.”
“Never mind. It’s a common complaint. Come on, darling, let’s go in.”
As we enter the front room, he laughs.
“Seems funny, doesn’t it? Waiting until the family is out. Like reverting to adolescence.”
The room has an almost untouched look, the neatness of a livingroom in a house where people congregate always in the kitchen. The furniture is old and ornate, pieces gathered with loving frugality, perhaps, throughout a quarter-century of auction sales. A walnut sideboard with a high bevelled mirror, a china cabinet plumed and scrolled woodenly and filled with objects hardly discernible behind the ruby glass. A plum-coloured chesterfield made for some giant race, curved hugely into the bow of the bay window. Then, in the midst of these known shapes, a gilt-bordered ikon, and an embroidered tablecloth with some mythical tree nestled in by a fantasy of birds, and on the wall a framed photograph of long-dead relatives in the old country, the heavily moustached men sitting with hands on knees, wearing their serge suits and rigid smiles, the women aproned elaborately and wearing on their heads black-fringed babushkas patterned with poppies or roses.
“Like a drink, Rachel?”
“Yes, all right.”
Now, in his own house, he seems for the first time reticent, or at a loss for words. Or else he thinks – words afterwards. How can I tell?
But when we are in his room, I can’t tell him what has been on my mind, what’s worrying me. It’s his concern, too. I know that. But will he know it? I have to speak of it. I promised myself I would. It’s essential. But I can’t bring up the subject at all. It crosses my mind that I don’t know him well enough. That’s ridiculous, of course.
“What’s the matter, Rachel?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I feel better, actually, here in this place.”
“How – better?”
“Safer.”
He laughs. “Because of its four walls and a roof?”
“You think that’s foolish, do
“Yeh, maybe. But women don’t.”
Women. I’m not the only one, then, who feels that way. Nick goes to the windows and opens the curtains.
“My mother always closes them,” he says, “to keep out the sun. It gives me claustrophobia, having a place shut up like this.”
Then he puts his arms around me.
“Come on, darling, come and lie down beside me.”
There seems to be a kind of tenderness in his voice. After a while I won’t feel apprehensive any more. I can even take off my clothes without feeling very unfamiliar about it. See – I have changed.
His hands are careful and gentle and slow at first.
“You have nice small breasts, darling. You’re very slender all over, aren’t you?”
“I’m too thin.” Then I’m sorry I said that.
“No. I like it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I like you here, and here. Very delicate shoulders, too, you have. And beautiful thighs, and the skin there is – feel how soft your own skin is, Rachel, when I stroke you there?”
Am I like that? I never knew.
“You touch me, too,” he says. “There. Put your hands there. That’s good. More.”
Then I want my hands to know everything about him, the way the hair grows in his armpits, the curve of his bones at the hips, the tight muscles of his belly, the arching of his sex.
“Now, Rachel?”
“Yes. Now.” If only I can relax. Relax, Rachel.
“Relax, Rachel.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No – it’s all right. Just relax, darling.”
“I’m sorry – Nick –”
“It’s all right.”
But it isn’t. Without wanting to, I’m holding myself away. But it hasn’t hurt after all. Now there is only the swiftness of him, the heaviness of him on me, and at the final moment he does not cry out like before, but his face is so intense I can hardly look upon it, for the open tenderness I feel, seeing him so. Then it is over, and after a while he lifts his head and looks at me. With my fingers I go over the sharp outlines of his face, and touch his eyes and the unruly blackness of his hair.
“Nick –”
“Hello. Was that – I mean, did you, Rachel?”
“Yes.” This is not true, but it is true in every way that is important to me now.
Thought has to return, but it hasn’t the power to threaten me, not yet. What if? I should be concerned. And yet the knowledge that he will somehow inhabit me, be present in me, for a few days more – this, crazily, gives me warmth, against all reason. After that, though, I’ll know definitely I’m once more alone in myself. I cannot really believe I could have a child, that it would be possible. Yet Stacey told me once she never believed it for the whole nine months, with the first one, and only knew it was really true when the child was there to be seen.
Nick lights cigarettes for us both and lies beside me with his head on my breasts, and we are lazy and do not have to get up yet, and through the window I can see the grey light of the evening.
“I could at least make some coffee for you,” he says at last. “I’m a hell of a host.”
Host. It seems an unusual word, under the circumstances.
We dress and go back down to the living room, and when the coffee is ready we sit together within the mammoth half-moon chesterfield.
Now I can’t think of anything to say. He talks so easily, when he wants, yet he does not seem bothered by silences. I’m the opposite.
“There’s no samovar.”
“What?”
“They have an ikon, your parents, but no samovar.”
As I’m speaking, I can feel how uncalled-for a comment it is. Not everyone who came from that part of the world would arrive complete with a samovar, for heaven’s sake. Now I would give anything not to have spoken.
“What a disappointment,” Nick says. He is laughing, but only just. “Well, to tell you the truth, my grandma started out with a samovar, but she never got it as far as this.”
“Why not?” How relieved I am, that he is doing the talking now. I’m interested, and yet it is the sound of his voice I like best, just to sit here beside him, in this security and hear his voice, whatever it happens to be saying.
“She traded it to somebody on the boat, and no one knows what she got for it. She used to claim it went for medicine for my dad, but he says he was the only one of all the steerage passengers who wasn’t sick. Personally, I think it probably went for vodka to make the trip endurable. Naturally, she wouldn’t say. But nobody would’ve blamed her.”
“They must have been terrible, the immigrant ships.”
“They were. My dad still talks about it sometimes. He can’t help it. It was the great traumatic experience, the new life beginning in a reeking hold with everybody retching all over everybody else, and cockroaches the size of bats, if he is to be believed. I used to get annoyed at him for talking so much about it. I was a relatively clueless kid in some ways. You can imagine, though – having to sit attentively while you heard the details for the millionth time. Well, maybe you can’t imagine. I guess immigrant ships would be a little bit out of your line.”
For some reason this angers me, although it’s quite true. With my father, it was the Great War, but he didn’t speak of it.
“My grandfather came over on an immigrant ship, as a boy. Perhaps he used to tell my father. Or maybe he didn’t – I don’t suppose that would have been his way. None of it filtered down to me. So then I forget, and feel apologetic towards people like your family, that they went through all that. But so did mine – only it was longer ago, and the memory’s gone now.”
“How odd you are, Rachel. Why should you feel apologetic?”
“I don’t know.” And yet it was he who made me feel like that, saying it would be out of my line, as though things had been easy for the people I came from, easy back into pre history and forward forever. What does he know about it?
“It was a funny thing about that trip, you know,” he is saying. “I guess all the ships were the same. Lots of the people who’d come over on the same boat kept in touch with one another for years and years afterwards. When I went to Winnipeg to college, my grandma said I had to look up a family that she and my dad had come over with. She used to hear from the Podiuks every Easter and Christmas, and my dad saw them occasionally when he went to the city, but she never went so she never saw them. Such good people, she says. My dad is translating all this for me, sternly, so I’ll get the full picture. Fine people, she says, the best. All she knows of them is holding Mrs. Podiuk’s head, or Mrs. Podiuk holding hers, while the old tub wallowed, but never mind – the voyage makes them kin for ever. Of course, quite right – so it did, but I didn’t see that then. They’ll welcome the boy, she tells my dad – he’ll be like their own son to them. This prospect didn’t exactly fill me with delight. I didn’t know the Podiuks from Adam, and I didn’t want to. But the first week in Winnipeg, off I went – seventeen, you know, and with this strangely faulty sense of direction – I was always getting on the wrong streetcar and ending up at the opposite side of the city from where I’d intended to go. I finally found the place, a little brown stucco house on Selkirk Avenue, and here were all these thousands of young kids mobbing around the front door. Somehow the sight of them stopped me and I just stood there staring until they got really suspicious and started yelling “Whaddya want, mister?” What I wanted was to get the hell out. It seemed crazy to be looking someone up just because your grandmother had come over on the same boat. I asked them where Mr. and Mrs. Podiuk were, and they said – all together, you know, like a Greek chorus, this gruesome chanting – Dead, dead, dead. I didn’t wait to see if the next generation of Podiuks was in residence. I just beat it. All I could think was how relieved I was. I was actually relieved they were dead, so I didn’t have to see them. You know?”
He’s easy to laugh with. Then I see that his eyes have changed, and eve
“I talk too much,” he says. “You should interrupt me. Do you like teaching, Rachel?”
He has asked only out of politeness. I wish he hadn’t. I’d rather listen to him talking. There isn’t much to say about myself, nothing that can be spoken. And yet, now when he puts his head down on my lap and props his long legs over the chesterfield’s rim, I feel as though I might talk to him and he would know what I meant.
“I like it – yes, but there’s something about it I can’t get used to.”
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe it doesn’t affect you. Your classes are older, and when they move on, they soon move right away and you don’t see them any more. But mine are only seven, and I see them around for years after they’ve left me, but I don’t have anything to do with them. There’s nothing lasting. They move on, and that’s that. It’s such a brief thing. I know them only a year, and then I see them changing but I don’t know them any more.”
His face looks momentarily troubled. I shouldn’t have said all that. What will he think?
“You get pretty attached to them, I guess, Rachel?”
“Oh – well, I realize one isn’t supposed to, and of course I don’t with all of them, but there are some you can’t help liking better than others, and then you feel – I don’t know – it seems kind of futile.”
I saw James on the street a few days ago. I was thinking of Nick at the time, so I could almost not mind when James zoomed past me without seeing me. Why should he see me? By the time he has finished grade school he’ll have had eight teachers. He can hardly be expected to take much notice of that number, for evermore.
Nick frowns, looking at me now.
“It isn’t a very good situation for you, Rachel.” Then, unexpectedly, he jumps to his feet. “I think there’s a little rye left – have some?”
“All right. I – I didn’t really mean anything much by what I said about the kids, Nick. You must’ve thought it sounded peculiar.”
“No,” he says. “I didn’t think it sounded peculiar at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
But he wants to change the subject. He brings our drinks, and then goes rambling around looking for cigarettes.