IN THE TUNNEL under Lake Ontario two men shake hands on an incline of mud. Beside them a pickaxe and a lamp, their dirt-streaked faces pivoting to look towards the camera. For a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent. Then Arthur Goss, the city photographer, packs up his tripod and glass plates, unhooks the cord of lights that creates a vista of open tunnel behind the two men, walks with his equipment the fifty yards to the ladder, and climbs out into sunlight. Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap. Men burning rock and shattering it wherever they come across it. Filling hundreds of barrels with liquid mud and hauling them out of the tunnel. In the east end of the city a tunnel is being built out under the lake in order to lay intake pipes for the new waterworks. It is 1930. The cut of the shovel into clay is all Patrick sees digging into the brown slippery darkness. He feels the whole continent in front of him. They dig underneath one of the largest lakes in North America beside a hissing lamp, racing with the speed of their shadows. Each blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms into the shoulders as if the body is hit. Exhaustion overpowers Patrick and the other tunnellers within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. Then an hour more, then another four hours till lunch, when they have thirty minutes to eat. During the eight-hour shifts no one speaks. Patrick is as silent as the Italians and Greeks towards the bronco foremen. For eight hours a day the air around them rolls in its dirty light. From somewhere else in the tunnelthere is the permanent drone of pumps attempting to suck out the water, which is constantly at their heels. All morning they slip in the wet clay unable to stand properly, pissing where they work, eating where someone else left shit. As the muckers move forward with their picks and shovels, the gunnite crew sprays a mixture of concrete and sand onto the walls, which would otherwise crumble after a few hours of exposure to the air. And if they are digging incorrectly – just one degree up, burrowing too close to the weight of Lake Ontario during this mad scheme by Commissioner Harris to collect lake water 3,300 yards out in the lake? They have all imagined the water heaving in, shouldering them aside in a fast death. Whenever the tunnellers reach large walls of rock or shale beds the foreman clears the tunnel and the transportation mules are herded back. Then Patrick separates himself from the others. He removes his belt that has the buckle, pats his wet clothes for any other sign of metal, and hoists the box of dynamite onto his shoulder. With a lamp he walks towards the far reaches of the tunnel alone. There is no sound here – no wind, no noise of work. He hears only the slosh of his feet tromping through water, his own breathing in the darkness. At the end of the tunnel he holds the lamp up against the dark wall, trying to imagine the structure of the rock in front of him, the shape, its possible fissures. He puts the lamp down and augers out holes for the sticks of dynamite. Only at these times are his eyes close to what he digs into all day. The burn of the lamp spills against the wet earth as he works. Once it revealed the pale history of a fossil, a cone-shaped cephalopod, which he sheared free and dropped into his pocket. Although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time Patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. He is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. He carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs tumbling over themselves slowly in the air. He sidewinds the powder fuse, which will burn at two minutes to the yard, and ignites it. He picks up the lamp and begins his walk back to the others. There is no hurry, there is no other light in the tunnel but this one lamp and as he moves his shadow shifts like a giant alongside him. When he reaches the others at the shaft he hears with them the crumple of noise as the shale displaces and the rock splinters into shards and flints in the far darkness under the lake. As the day progresses heat rises in the tunnel. The men remove their shirts and hammer them into the hard walls with spikes. Patrick can recognize other tunnellers on the way home by the ragged hole in the back of their shirts. It is a code among them, like the path of a familiar thick bullet in the left shoulder blade. At the end of the day they climb from the tunnel into the desert of construction which had been Victoria Park Forest, where the waterworks is now being built. They see each other's bodies steaming in the air. Patrick embraces the last of the light on the walk home. In the dry air the clay hardens on clothing, whitens his arms and hair. He takes a knife and cuts free the mud between his boots and trouser cuffs, brushes the blade over the laces to loosen them. In his Wyatt Avenue room he drops all his clothes in a corner, feeds theiguana, and crawls into bed. He picks the clothes up again at six in the morning hard as armour and bangs them against the wall of the fire escape till they crack apart and soften, the dust in the air around him. At the Thompson Grill he eats breakfast in ten minutes. He reads no paper, just watches the hands of the waitress break open the eggs. As he goes underground the humidity will fall back into his clothes quick as rain. Carrying three lanterns, the crew of nine men walks towards the end of the tunnel. Already they can smell each other and the sweat from the previous days, the lamp wick raised to burn out odour. They can hear the mules and pit-horses who live down here, transporting the dug earth and mud barrels to the ladder. When these creatures were lowered down the shaft by rope they had brayed madly, thinking they were being buried alive. Patrick and the others walk silently, remembering the teeth of the animals distinct, that screaming, the feet bound so they wouldn't slash out and break themselves, lowered forty feet down and remaining there until they died or the tunnel reached the selected mark under the lake. And when would that be? The brain of the mule no more and no less knowledgeable than the body of a man who dug into a clay wall in front of him. Above ground, like the blossoming of a tree, the excavations and construction were also being orchestrated. The giant centrifugal pumps, more valuable than life, were trolleyed into place with their shell-shaped impellers that in Commissioner Harris' dream would fan the water up towards the settling basins. Cranes lowered 800 tons of steel sheet piling rolled in Sault Ste. Marie. Trucks were driving in the bricks from Cooksville. From across the province the subcontractors brought in their products and talents to build a palace for water. Richie Cut Stone Company, Raymond Concrete, Heather & Little Roofing and Sheet Metal, ornamental iron from Architectural Bronze and Iron Works, steel sashes from Canadian Metal Window and Steel Works, elevators from Otis-Fenson and Turnbull, glazing from Hobbs Glass, plasterers from Strauss & Scott, overhead doors from the Richard Wilcox Canadian Company. The Bavington Brothers sent painters, Bennett and Wright were responsible for heat and ventilation, the linoleum came from T. Eaton Company, the mastic flooring from Vulcan Asphalt. Mazes of electricity were laid down by Canadian Comstock, Alexander Murray composed the floor design. The tiling and terrazzo were by Italian Mosaic and Tile Company. Harris had dreamed the marble walls, the copper-banded roofs. He pulled down Victoria Park Forest and the essential temple swept up in its place, built on the slope towards the lake. The architect Pomphrey modelled its entrance on a Byzantine city gate, and the inside of the building would be an image of the ideal city. The brass railings curved up three flights like an immaculate fiction. The subtle splay on the tower gave it an Egyptian feel. Harris could smell the place before it was there, knew every image of it as well as his arms west wing, east wing. The Depression and the public outcry would slow it all down, but in spite of that half of it would be completed within a year. "The form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal," Harris liked to remind his critics, quoting Baudelaire. He was providing jobs as he had in the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct, the St. Clair Reservoir, the men hired daily for grading, clearing bush, removing stumps, and riprapping the sides of streams. The Commissioner would slide these facts out, bounce them off his arms like oranges to journalists. But Harris was building it for himself. For a stray dream he'd always had about water, water they shouldhave taken across the Bloor Street Viaduct as he proposed. No one else was interested in water at this time. Harris imagined a palace for it. He wanted the best ornamental iron. He wanted a brass elevator to lead from the service building to the filter building where you could step out across rose-coloured marble. The neo-Byzantine style allowed him to blend in all the technical elements. The friezes depicted stylized impellers. He wanted herringbone tiles imported from Siena, art deco clocks and pump signals, unfloored high windows which would look over filter pools four feet deep, languid, reflective as medieval water gardens. But first he needed to finish the spear of tunnel a mile out under the lake and organize the human digging and the human-and-mule dragging of pipes all the way out there for the intake of water. This was the other tentacle of his dream. The one that reached out and clung to him in a nightmare where faces peered out, working in that permanent rain of condensation. He had sent Goss and his photographers down but he had not entered the tunnels himself. He was a man who understood the continuity of the city, the daily consumptions of water, the speed of raw water through a filter bed, the journeys of chlorine and sulphur dioxide to the island filtration plant, the 119 inspections by tugboats each year of the various sewer outfalls, and the approximate number of valves and caissons of the East Toronto pumping stations, and the two miles a year of watermain construction – from the St. Clair Reservoir to the high-level pumping station – and the construction of the John Street surge tank. . . . This was choreography in 1930. In those photographs moisture in the tunnel appears white. There is a foreman's white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. And all else is labour and darkness. Ash grey faces. An unfinished world. The men work in the equivalent of the fallout of a candle. They are in the foresection of the cortex, in the small world of Rowland Harris' dream as he lies in bed on Neville Park Boulevard. Such a strange dream for him. The silence of men coming out of a hole each within an envelope of steam. Horses under Lake Ontario. Swallowing the water one-and-a-quarter miles away, bringing it back into his body, and spitting it out clean. *** Patrick ate most of his meals at the Thompson Grill on River Street where the waitress, through years of habit, had reduced to a minimum the action of pouring coffee or flipping an egg. He could spot the oil burns on her wrists, the permanent grimace in her eye from the smoke. If she looked at those who ate here it occurred when they were not aware of it. She seemed self-sufficient, something underwater in the false yellow light of the narrow room against the street, the flawed glass creating shadows in the air. There was something transient about her though she had been there for years. Most of the chewers at the Thompson Grill had that quality. Patrick would sit at an uncleared section so he could watch the fingers of her left hand pluck up the glasses and cups while the other hand, the muscles in intricate movement under the skin, swabbed the counter clean. It was several months before he became aware of the tattoo high on her arm, seeing it through a tear in the seam where the cotton had loosened.
He came to believe she had the powers of a goddess who could condemn or bless. She would be able to transform the one she touched, the one she gripped at the wrist with her tough hand, the muscles stiffening up towards the blue-black of the half-revealed creature that pivoted on the bone of her shoulder. His eyes wanted to glimpse nothing else. He pinned the note, saying Waterworks – Sunday 8 p.m. to the wall above his bed in case he forgot, though it had been his only invitation in two years. "The cheese stands alone," he'd sing to himself, while buying groceries along Eastern Avenue. Patrick loved that song. He found himself muttering "The farmer takes the dog . . . the farmer takes the dog" among the Macedonians, as if perfecting a password. The southeastern section of the city where he now lived was made up mostly of immigrants and he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bulgarians, were his only mirror. He worked in the tunnels with them. He had discovered the Macedonian word for iguana, gooshter, and finally used it to explain his requests each evening at the fruit stall for clover and vetch. It was a breakthrough. The woman gazed at him, corrected his pronunciation, and yelled it to the next stall. She came around the crates and outlined the shape of a lizard. Gooshter? Four women and a couple of men then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of languages between them. His obsession with vetch had puzzled them. He had gone at one point into the centre of the city, bought some, and returned to the Macedonians to show them what he needed. The following week, a store owner had waved it to him as he came down Eastern Avenue. Vetch was fee-ee. But now they were onto serious things. A living creature, a gooshter, had been translated. He was surrounded. They were trying to discover how many he had. Was raising them one of his professions? They knew where he lived, of course, had seen his yellow light looking down on Wyatt Avenue, knew he was alone, knew down to the very can of peaches what he ate in a week. Peaches on Friday. They had sent someone to find Emil, who spoke the best English, and when the boy arrived he said, "Peaches on Friday, right?" Patrick felt ashamed they could discover so little about him. He had reduced himself almost to nothing. He would walk home at dusk after working in the lake tunnel. His radio was on past midnight. He did nothing else that he could think of. They approved of his Finnish suit. Po modata eleganten! which meant stylish! stylish! He was handed a Macedonian cake. And suddenly Patrick, surrounded by friendship, concern, was smiling, feeling the tears on his face falling towards his stern Macedonian-style moustache. Elena, the great Elena who had sold him vetch for over a year, unpinned the white scarf around her neck and passed it to him. He looked up and saw the men and women who could not know why he wept now among these strangers who in the past had seemed to him like dark blinds on his street, their street, for he was their alien. And then he had to remember new names. Suddenly formal, beginning with Elena. The women shook his hand, the men embraced and kissed him, and each time he said Patrick. Patrick. Patrick. Knowing he must now remember every single person. And now, because it was noon, the King Street Russian Mission Brass Band fifty yards down the road, they invited him to lunch which was set up on tables beside the stalls and crates. He was guest of honour. Elena on one side of him, Emil on the other, and a table of new friends. He was brought a plate of cabbage rolls – sarmi, Elena said, and suddenly the awful sulphurous odour he hadsmelled for the last year since moving was explained. Emil was describing the technique of soaking cabbage leaves in a solution of salt and water and a bit of vinegar and leaving it there for days. Patrick ate everything that was put in front of him. During coffee, Kosta, the owner of the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, sent along a question to Emil. Emil asked two or three others first to see if this question was apt. Then he turned to Patrick. "What else can you do?" The table was silent. Elena put her hand on his and sent a qualifier via Emil. "It does not matter if you don't do anything." The others down the table nodded. - I used to be a searcher. I can work dynamite. Emil's translation created an even greater silence. Patrick could hear every note of the Russian Mission Band down the street. Then Kosta jumped up and yelled something at Patrick. His face looked at him with anger, full of passion. Emil turned to Patrick now, having to yell above the sudden din at the table. "He says 'Me too, me too."' Kosta grabbed a round loaf of bread, leapt free of the bench, and booted it down the road in the direction of the Russian Mission Band. Later that afternoon when Patrick was showing the iguana to the street, the man Kosta said, "The waterworks at eight, Sunday night. A gathering. " Then he drifted away, not allowing Patrick to reply or question the invitation. An hour after dusk disappeared into the earth the people came in silence, in small and large families, up the slope towards the half-built waterworks. Emerging from darkness, mothlike, walking towards the thin rectangle of the building's southern doorway. The movement was quickly over, the wave of bodies had seemed a shadow of a cloud over the slope. Inside the building they moved in noise and light. It was an illegal gathering of various nationalities and the noise of machines camouflaged their activity from whoever might have been passing along Queen Street a hundred yards away. Many languages were being spoken, and Patrick followed the crowd to the seats that were set up around a temporary stage. He saw Kosta, who was busy greeting and shepherding people, and he watched him until Kosta caught his eye. Patrick waved and Kosta raised his hand and continued with what he was doing. Patrick felt utterly alone in this laughing crowd that traded information back and forth, held children on their laps. The four-piece band was playing by the stage. It was a party and a political meeting, all of them trespassing, waiting now for speeches and entertainment. Patrick found a seat and took a sip from his flask. Almost immediately the electric lights were turned off, leaving only the glow from oil lamps on the edge of the platform. The puppets arrived on stage in a mob, their wooden bones clattering. The semicircle of oil lamps cast yellow onto this section of the pumping station – onto the generators, the first few rows of the audience, the mosaic tiles, and brass banisters. Patrick looked up and saw the grid above them on the upper level, hardly visible, where the puppeteers must have been lying in darkness. The forty puppets moved into the light, their paws gesturing at the air. The males had moustaches and beards, the females had been given rouged faces. There was one life-sized puppet. This giant in their midstwas the central character in the story, its face brightly coloured: green-shadowed eyes and a raccoon ring of yellow around them so they were like targets. All of the puppets looked stunned. Feet tested air before each exaggerated step was taken on this dangerous new country of the stage. Their costumes were a blend of several nations. It was five minutes into the dance before Patrick realized that the large puppet was human. And this was only because the dancer moved out of his puppet movements and began to twirl in gestures impossible for wood. The large figure began to distinguish itself from the others. It became a hero not by size but by gesture and the detail of character. Perhaps it was an exceptional puppet of cloth as opposed to an exceptional human being. Behind the curled moustache it was perturbed and nervous – ambitious, scared, at times greedy. It varied its emotions from fear to desire. The other puppets included a prune-faced rich woman, a policeman, the sly friend, the family matriarch. The hero linked them all. There was no noise, no drum-beat or song. Just the clattering of their feet, just the wooden hands touching each other gently the way fingernails touch glass. The puppets ranged all over the stage or huddled together as a chorus, warning the hero of his ambition, gesturing him down with laws. The human puppet, alien and naive and gregarious, upset everything. The face, in spite of the moustache, was dark and young. He wore a Finnish shirt and Serbian pants. A plot grew. Laughing like a fool he was brought before the authorities, unable to speak their language. He stood there assaulted by insults. His face was frozen. The others began to pummel him but not a word emerged – just a damaged gaze in the context of those flailing arms. He fell to the floor pleading with gestures. The scene was endless. Patrick wanted to rip the painted face off. The caricature of a culture. His eyes could not move away from that face. The audience around him was silent. The only sounds on stage were grunts of authority. They were all waiting for the large puppet to speak, but it could say nothing. The thick eyebrows, the big nose, the curled moustache – all of which parodied them – became haunting. When the figure wheeled now the sweat on the pink brocade shirt made it blood-red along the spine and shoulders. It stamped a foot to try and bring out a language. The other puppets shifted like bamboo to the side of the stage. The figure knelt, one hand banging down on the wooden floor as if pleading for help – a terrible loudness entering the silent performance. The audience began to clap in unison with the banging hand, the high hall of the waterworks echoing. Patrick was unable to move, his eyes locked upon the crouched figure, the manic hand. If it was not stopped it would burst. That was absurd. He wanted the hall to be quiet, the figure's terror stopped. He could see the yellow-ringed eyes, the shirt bloody from the darkness of sweat, the mask of the painted face looking up like a dog. Patrick stood up and stumbled over feet until he reached the aisle. He wanted to be out of here, out of this building. He was covered in the heartbeat of applause which started to come faster. Each footstep as he moved released the terrible noise. He was among members of the band, the silent band which sat there waiting for the next act when they would be required to play. He saw the huge instruments on their laps, which in their curls and convolutions looked like frozen organs of the body. He climbed up, slipping at first because he still couldn't remove his eyes from the face and the banging white hand. He stepped over a lamp. Then he was up there on stage, and as soon as he approached the exhausted figure he saw up close that the performer was much smaller, that it was a woman. He knelt and held her by the shoulders, his arm on her damp back. He leaned forward, caught the hand stilltrying to smash down again like a machine locked in habit, a swimmer unable to stop. He swerved the palm away from the floor and brought it slowly down to her thigh. Then he looked up, through the halo of light into the sudden silence. There was a crowd standing on the upper level as well. Hundreds more than he had thought. He looked back at the woman, the costume made of false silk, a cheap glittering material from the streets, drenched in sweat. This close he could recognize nothing of the figure he had seen perform. It seemed washed out, exhausted statuary. One tear of sweat cut a path through the thick makeup. Now the eyes, hidden in the circles of paint, focused on him, then reacted with shock. She bent forward. He felt his hand slide against the sweat of her cheek. He had forgotten where he was. She pulled herself up, her arm on his shoulder. She walked downstage slowly towards the kerosene lights, spreading her hands wide and then clapping them. A slow beat. There. There. There. Then, with her arms out, the crowd cheering, she raised her swollen hand and now everyone was standing yelling at her. She brought her fingers to her lips and the audience became quiet. She threw the name of the next performer into their midst like a bell, and a man walked into the light carrying an umbrella. The crowd was immediately with him. Patrick began to move backwards to the makeshift curtain. He looked down embarrassed and when he looked up again she had left the stage. Backstage he would be an outsider. He recalled the touch of that hand on his shoulder as she pulled herself up. And the voice he had recognized. He tried to remember the washed-out face, its features under the makeup. Behind the curtain there were just a few performers in half – light – one kerosene lamp on the floor. How should he enter a room where a giant takes off its head? Where a dwarf stands up to full height. The Macedonian juggler he had watched perform half an hour earlier with absolute abandon was packing the thirty hard oranges neatly into his suitcase. No sofas, or arches of light, just performers cleaning up. A man putting on his socks. Someone reading The Racing News. At the far end of the hall he saw an Indian walking a puppet towards a corridor, as if escorting someone frail. Patrick went after him. The man turned right along the Venturi corridor and disappeared behind another curtain. Here among the strangely shaped pipes and meters the air was humid. A great cheer went up from the audience. As the man came out Patrick caught his arm and asked him where the puppet dancer was. The Indian jerked his head towards the curtain and handed him a flashlight. He walked into pitch darkness. When he turned on the flashlight he saw swaying feet. He moved the light up the brocade robe – a king hung up there, the strings and wood handle attached to a pipe. Three or four ceiling pipes held all of the puppets in mid-air. He swung the amber beam from side to side, and everywhere he turned, the light picked out faces and arms that no longer looked like puppets but relaxed humans, a shadow conference. It was a king's court, silent – a custom of the East. Whenever the royal gong struck, the court of the Moghul prince Akbar remained frozen at whatever they were doing. It was the whim of a monarch during which time he moved among his retainers and subjects to study their dress and activity. Movement meant execution. He walked into kitchens, armouries, bedrooms where lovers would lie frozen on the verge of touching, walked past dining-tables where the court sat hungry or bored looking at the cooling food, stepped into the quarters of falconers where only the birds moved and fussed on their perches.
So Patrick moved in this darkness, the eye of the flashlight swallowing the colours, the room turning under his gaze like a jewel. What had been theatrical seemed locked within metamorphosis. He wanted to put his hand up and unbutton a blouse, remove a shoe. He moved quickly towards a figure but it was only a queen draped over a chair, sitting the way a queen would sit. He heard the cheers from the hall once more. Patrick switched off the light and stood there. His eyes remembering scarlet, the puff of a blue sleeve, the flat brown feet pathetic as a peacock's under such grand costuming. A broken ochre hand. A splash. He turned to face the sound. He moved forward, one hand in front of him to hold away the costumed bodies, lifting his feet up high so he would not trip in the darkness. He thought, I am moving like a puppet. He touched an arm in the darkness not fully realizing it was human. A hand came from somewhere and held his wrist. "Hello, Patrick." He turned on the flashlight. She was waiting for the light, like a good actress, ready to be revealed. "No one is allowed here while I wash. I knew it had to be you. . . . " She was wearing a singlet and had been washing herself from a bowl, her hands now squeezing out a cloth in the basin and wiping her face, streaks of flesh across the paint. One line of colour remained that seemed to show her frowning. Behind her a puppet slowly pivoted. He could smell the candle she must have blown out as soon as she heard him enter. "You can help with the paint on my neck. " Patrick did not speak. The light moved down her arm to the bowl, illuminated her hand which wet the cloth, squeezed it, and moved forward to give it to him. She saw his right hand reach to take it from her. His hand began to wipe her neck. He removed the brown paint, turned her around and slowly wiped the vermilion frown-mark by her mouth, the light close on her face. He rinsed out the cloth again and holding her forehead steady wiped the targets off her eyes, cloth over one finger for precision, the blue left iris wavering at the closeness ... so that it was not Alice Gull but something more intimate – an eye muscle having to trust a fingertip to remove that quarter-inch of bright yellow around her sight. They were now many hours into the night. In her room on Verral Avenue. He had just seen the sleeping child. - I wasn't married, she said. Her father is dead. He was like a comitidjiis.A chetnik. Do you know what that means? He shook his head continuing to look out the window into the rain. He felt there was space in her small rooms only when he looked out. -Open it, Patrick. If it's raining the cat will want to come in. They are national guerrillas. Political activists. Freedom-fighters in Bulgaria and Turkey and Serbia. They were tortured, then some of them came here. They have a very high level of justice. She smiled, then continued. -They are very difficult to live with.
-I think I have a passive sense of justice. -I've noticed. Like water, you can be easily harnessed, Patrick. That's dangerous. -I don't think so. I don't believe the language of politics, but I'll protect the friends I have. It's all I can handle. She sat on the mattress looking up at him, the cat purring in her lap as she dried it with a towel. -That's not enough, Patrick. We're in a thunderstorm. -Is that a line from one of your tracts? -No, it's a metaphor. You reach people through metaphor. It's what I reached you with earlier tonight in the performance. -You appealed to my sense of compassion. -Compassion forgives too much. You could forgive the worst man. You forgive him and nothing changes. -You can teach him, make him aware ... -Why leave the power in his hands? There was no reply from him. He turned away from her, back to the open window and the rain. -You believe in solitude, Patrick, in retreat. You can afford to be romantic because you are self-sufficient. -Yes, I've got about ten bucks to my name. -I'm not talking about money. Working in the tunnels is terrible, I know that. But you have a choice, what of the others who don't? -Such as. -Such as this kid. Such as three-quarters of the population of Upper America. They can't afford your choices, your languor. - They could succeed. Look at -Come on, Patrick, of course some make it. They do it by becoming just like the ones they want to overtake. Like Ambrose. Look at what he became before he disappeared. He was predatory. He let nothing cling to him, not even Clara. I always liked you because you knew that. Because you hated that in him. -I hated him because I wanted what he had.
-I don't think so. You don't want power. You were born to be a younger brother. She stood up now and began pacing. She needed to move her arms, be more forceful. -Anyway, we're not interested in Ambrose anymore. To hell with him, he's damned. The power of the girl's father was still in her. Patrick couldn't tell how much of a role it was. She spoke slowly now. -There is more compassion in my desire for truth than in your 'image' of compassion. You must name the enemy. -And if he is your friend? -I'm your friend. Hana there sleeping is your friend. The people tonight in the audience were your friends. They're compassionate too. Listen, they are terrible sentimentalists. They love your damn iguana. They'll cry all through their sister's wedding. They'll cry when their sister says she has had her first kiss. But they must turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses. And the smell of the tanning factories goes into their noses and lungs and stays there for life. They never get the smell off their bodies. Do you know the smell? You can bet the rich don't know it. It brutalizes. It's like sleeping with the enemy. It clung to Hana's father. They get skin burns from the galvanizing process. Arthritis, rheumatism. That's the truth. -So what do you do? -You name the enemy and destroy their power. Start with their luxuries – their select clubs, their summer mansions. Alice stopped pacing, put a hand up to the low slope of the ceiling and pushed against it. - The grand cause, Patrick. He knows he will never forget a word or a gesture of hers tonight, in this doll-house of a room. He sits on the bed looking up at the avid spirit of her. -Someone always comes out of the audience to stop me, Patrick. This time it was you. My old pal. -I don't think you will convert me. -Yes. I can. -If it was valuable to some cause for me to kill someone would you want me to do it? She picked up the cat again. -Would the girl's father have done that? -I don't think I'm big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another.
It had stopped raining. They climbed out onto the fire escape, Alice carrying the sleeping girl, the air free and light after the storm. She was smiling at the girl. He felt he was looking at another person. -Hana is nine years old. Already too smart. Not enough a child, and that's sad. -You've got a lot more time with her. -No. I feel she's loaned to me. We're veiled in flesh. That's all. They looked out over the low houses of Queen Street, the metal of the fire escape wet around them, cool, a shock to their arms on this summer night. The rain had released the smells from the street and lifted them up. He lay back like the child, a raindrop now and then touching his shirt like a heartbeat. -I don't know, she whispered, near him. He reached to where she was and she put her hand against him. The sky looked mapped, gridded by the fire escape. Above and below them a few neighbours came out onto the frail structures, laughing with relief at the cooler air. They would wave now and then, formally, to Alice and her companion. He was suddenly aware that he had a role. A bottle of fruit whiskey on the end of a long piece of twine swung from side to side in front of them. Alice caught it and pulled it in. "To impatience," she said. She drank, offered him some, and then holding the rope let the bottle down to another level. In this way it moved among the others. To the south they could see the lights of the Victory Flour Mills. The Macedonians, who disliked the raindrops on their hair, asked their wives to pass them their hats through the window, and felt more secure. They saw Alice's man who worked in the tunnels. They sat among their families, looking towards the lake. The vista was Upper America, a New World. Landscape changed nothing but it brought rest, altered character as gradually as water on a stone. Patrick lay back again beside Alice and the girl Hana. - You should sit up, she said after a while. You will see something beautiful. A rectangle of light went on below them. Then another. The night-shift workers were starting to get up. They could be seen in grey trousers and undershirts, washing at their kitchen sinks. The neighbourhood was soon speckled with light while the rest of the city lay in sleep. Soon they could hear doors closing on the street below them. Figures filed out, Macedonians and Greeks, heading for the killing floors and railway yards and bakeries. -They don't want your revolution, Patrick said to Alice. -No. They won't be involved. Just you. You're a mongrel, like me. Not like my daughter here. But like me. -So what do you want? -Nothing but thunder.
Alice and Hana were still on the fire escape, curled up together, when he left. He closed the door on them quiet as a thief. He would have to go back to his room, take his clothes out into the alley and beat the hardened mud out of them, then walk to work. It was about five A.M., his head and body buzzing, overloaded with false energy. Later, he knew, he would be unable to lift his arms above his head, would stagger under the weight of a pickaxe. But for now the dawn in him, the sun, wakened his blood. He remembered Clara in the Paris hotel talking about how Alice had been after the child's father had died. "Hana wasn't born yet. But Cato died and I think she went into madness, into something very alone. He was killed up north when she was pregnant." In the Thompson Grill, the counter radio was already playing songs about the heart, songs about women who let their men go as casually as a river through their fingers. The waitress with the tattoo gave him his coffee. The music this morning threw him across eras. He was eighteen again and he fell into a girl's arms, drunk and full of awe during his first formal dance, painted moonlight on the ceiling, the floating lights through the scrims that bathed the couples translating them. He had stepped up cocky and drunk onto the sprung floor and was suddenly close enough to see the girl's lost eyes, undisguised by the colours, and he too was lost. A chameleon among the minds of women. -What did you think of my friend? - I liked her. -She's a great actress. -Better than you, is she? -By a hundred miles, Patrick. -Yes, l liked her. His mind skates across old conversations. The past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it. The girl's eyes that night when he was eighteen were like tunnels into kindness and lust and determination which he loved as much as her white stomach and her ochre face. He saw something there he would never fully reach – the way Clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way Alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted faces, both of these women like the sea through a foreground of men. These were days that really belonged to the moon. He was restless and full of Alice Gull. When the tunnel at the waterworks was completed, Patrick got a jobat Wickett and Craig's tannery. His flesh tightened in this new dry world, his damp stiffness fell away. All day he thought of her as he cut skins in the Cypress Street leather factory. Jobs were still scarce and it was only through Alice's friends that he was hired. Patrick's shoulder nudged the bolster that released rolls of leather onto the floor and he waded into the brown skins with the pilot knife, slicing the hides in straight lines. When his line was finished he would stand breathing in the cold air till someone else came off the cutter's alley. He was no longer aware of the smell from the dyers' yards. Only if it rained would the odour assault his body. He was one of three pilot men. Their knives weaved with the stride of their arms and they worked barefoot as if walking up a muddy river, slicing it up into tributaries. It was a skill that insisted on every part of the body's balance. Alice would smell the leather on him, even after he had bathed in the courtyards when work was over, the brief pelt of water and steam on the row of them standing on the cobblestones. They were allowed only ten seconds of water. The men who dyed the leather got longer but the smell on them was terrible and it never left. Dye work took place in the courtyards next to the warehouse. Circular pools had been cut into the stone – into which the men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals. In the round wells four-foot in diameter they heaved and stomped, ensuring the dye went solidly into the pores of the skin that had been part of a live animal the previous day. And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies. They had leapt into different colours as if into different countries. What the dyers wanted, standing there together, the representatives from separate nations, was a cigarette. To stand during the five-minute break dressed in green talking to a man in yellow, and smoke. To take in the fresh energy of smoke and swallow it deep into their lungs, roll it around and breathe it up so it would remove with luck the acrid texture already deep within them, stuck within every corner of their flesh. A cigarette, a star beam through their flesh, would have been enough to purify them. That is how Patrick would remember them later. Their bodies standing there tired, only the heads white. If he were an artist he would have painted them but that was false celebration. What did it mean in the end to look aesthetically plumaged on this October day in the east end of the city five hundred yards from Front Street? What would the painting tell? That they were twenty to thirty-five years old, were Macedonians mostly, though there were a few Poles and Lithuanians. That on average they had three or four sentences of English, that they had never read the Mail and Empire or Saturday Night. That during the day they ate standing up. That they had consumed the most evil smell in history, they were consuming it now, flesh death, which lies in the vacuum between flesh and skin, and even if they never stepped into this pit again – a year from now they would burp up that odour. That they would die of consumption and at present they did not know it. That in winter this picturesque yard of colour was even more beautiful, the thin layer of snowfall between the steaming wells. Below-zero weather and the almost naked men descend into the vats at the same whistle and cover themselves later with burlap as they stand waiting. The only virtue to winter was the removal of smell. They did not want a cigarette then, they could hardly breathe. Their mouths sent forth plumes. They stood there, the steam coming through the burlap. And whenthey stopped steaming they knew they were too cold and had to go in. But during October, as Patrick watched them during his break from the hide-room, they desired a cigarette. And they could never smoke – the acid of the solutions they had stepped into and out of so strong that they would have ignited if a flame touched them. A green man on fire. They were the dyers. They were paid one dollar a day. Nobody could last in that job more than six months and only the desperate took it. There were other jobs such as water boys and hide-room labourers. In the open cloisters were the sausage and fertilizer makers. Here the men stood, ankle-deep in salt, filling casings, squeezing out shit and waste from animal intestines. In the further halls were the killing-floors where you moved among the bellowing cattle stunning them towards death with sledge hammers, the dead eyes still flickering while their skins were removed. There was never enough ventilation, and the coarse salt, like the acids in the dyeing section, left the men invisibly with tuberculosis and arthritis and rheumatism. All of these professions arrived in morning darkness and worked till six in the evening, the labour agent giving them all English names. Charlie Johnson, Nick Parker. They remembered the strange foreign syllables like a number. For the dyers the one moment of superiority came in the showers at the end of the day. They stood under the hot pipes, not noticeably changing for two or three minutes – as if, like an actress unable to return to the real world from a role, they would be forever contained in that livid colour, only their brains free of it. And then the blue suddenly dropped off, the colour disrobed itself from the body, fell in one piece to their ankles, and they stepped out, in the erotica of being made free. What remained in the dyers' skin was the odour that no woman in bed would ever lean towards: Alice lay beside Patrick's exhausted body, her tongue on his neck, recognizing the taste of him, knowing the dyers' wives would never taste or smell their husbands again in such a way; even if they removed all pigment and coarse salt crystal, the men would smell still of the angel they wrestled with in the well, in the pit. Incarnadine. "I'll tell you about the rich," Alice would say. "The rich are always laughing. They keep saying the same things on their boats and lawns: Isn't this grand! We're having a good time! And whenever the rich get drunk and maudlin about humanity you have to listen for hours. But they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards. They do not toil or spin. Remember that ... understand what they will always refuse to let go of. There are a hundred fences and lawns between the rich and you. You've got to know these things, Patrick, before you ever go near them – the way a dog before battling with cows rolls in the shit of the enemy." In Kosta's house he relaxes as Alice speaks with her friends, slipping out of English and into Finnish or Macedonian. She knows she can be unconcerned with his lack of language, that he is happy. She converses with full energy in this theatre of the dinner table, her face vivid; a scar, a mole will exaggerate when not disguised by the content of conversation. He in fact pleasures in his own descant interpretations of what is being said. He catches only the names of streets, the name of Police Chief Draper, who has imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak this way in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city. The broncos will have them arrested as many already have been in various rallies in High Park or in the Shapiro Drug Store clash with the Mounties in the previousyear. He watches each of her friends and he gazes at the small memory painting of Europe on the wall – the spare landscape, the village imposed on it. He is immensely comfortable in this room. He remembers his father once passing the foreign loggers on First Lake Road and saying, "They don't know where they are." And now, in this neighbourhood intricate with history and ceremony, Patrick smiles to himself at the irony of reversals. Before the meal, Kosta's wife had come up to him, pointed to one of the pictures and named her village, then she had pressed the side of her stomach with both hands sensually to make clear to Patrick that she would be serving liver. If only it were possible that in the instance something was written down – idea or emotion or musical phrase – it became known to others of the era. The rejected Carmen of 1875 turning so many into lovers of opera. And Verdi in the pouring rain believing he was being turned into a frog – even this emotion realized by his contemporaries. Patrick listens now as Alice reads to him from the letters of Joseph Conrad – an extract which she has copied. She has already asked him who he likes to read and he has mentioned Conrad. "Yes, but," she says rising as the child cries, "have you read his letters?" In the other room she comforts the girl Hana out of a nightmare. "Wait," she continues, "I've got something to show you." Very excited now, as if she fears he will get up and leave before she can present this gift. She too likes Conrad. She likes his theatrical style. There are some novelists whose work actors love but who could not write a simple scene for the stage. They write the scenes actors dream, and Conrad was that for Alice. -Listen: "An idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense. " -Ha, he laughs. -He's complaining about Tory views on Spanish liberal insurgents of the 1830s, based in London. "Of course I do not defend political crimes. It is repulsive to me by tradition, by sentiment, and even by reflection. But some of these men struggled for an idea, openly, in the light of day, and sacrificed to it all that to most men makes life worth living. Moreover a sweeping assertion is always wrong, since men are infinitely varied; and harsh words are useless because they cannot combat ideas. And the ideas (that live) should be combatted, not the men who die. " It was a letter Conrad had written to a newspaper. So Patrick listened to his contemporary. -How can I convert you? she would ask in the darkness of the bedroom. -The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human. -These are my favourite lines. I'll whisper them. "I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal.... Let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects."-Say it again. In the darkness he can see just the faint aura of her hair. *** On Saturday afternoons the dye washers and cutters, men from the killing beds, the sausage makers, the electrocuters – all of them from this abattoir and tannery on Cypress Street – were free. After bathing under the pipes they walked up Bathurst Street to Queen, the thirty or so of them knowing little more than each other's false names or true countries. Hey Italy! They were in pairs or trios, each in their own language as the dyers had been in their own colours. After a beer they would continue up Bathurst to the Oak Leaf Steam Baths. Paying their quarters they were each handed a towel, a sheet, a padlock, and a canvas bag. They stripped, packed their clothes and salaries into the bag, locked it, and strung the keys around their necks. There was a sense of relaxation among all of them. Hey Canada! A wave to Patrick. It was Saturday. In the whitewashed rooms they sat naked within the steam, brushing a scab, considering a scar on the shoulder. Someone he had never spoken to caught his eye and both of them were so tired they could not turn away their gaze, just watched the other bluntly. He knew nothing about the men around him except how they moved and laughed – on this side of language. He himself had kept his true name and voice from the bosses at the leather yard, never spoke to them or answered them. A chain was pulled that forced wet steam into the room so that their bodies were separated by whiteness coming up through the gridded floors, tattoos and hard muscles fading into unborn photographs. They shifted, stood up, someone began to sing. The wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. For the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the Saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station. He lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall onto him. Soon this arm would become the arm Alice kissed. They were all being released from the week's work and began to allow themselves ease, the clarified world of passion. The music of La Boheme, the death of Mimi, hovering over their unprotected bodies, the keys hanging from the cords around their necks. *** Then it was her hand in the doorway touching his heart, against his ribs, aware through her fingers of his weariness. In the small room where he could take three steps and touch the window. There was Patrick and Alice and Hana. If it was warm they would eat on the fire escape. Or if Alice was working he and Hana walked over to the Balkan Cafe where they sat on wire chairs and were served by long-aproned waiters. They ordered bop and mania, Hana telling him in her clear, exact voice what the names meant. Bop was beans. Mania was stew. As he watched Hana, her face drifted into Alice's and back again as if two glass negatives merged, then moved apart. It was not so much the features as the mannerisms of Alice that he witnessed in her daughter. He was at ease with the precise Hana and the way she seriously articulated herself among strangers. Thatvoice knew what it wanted and knew what it was allowed. He wanted to pick Hana up and embrace her on the street but felt shy, though in games or in a crowded streetcar her arm lay across him as if needing his warmth and closeness. As he did hers. But his relationship with Alice had a horizon. She refused to speak of the past. Even her stories about Hana's father, though intricate, gave nothing away of herself. She was never self-centred in her mythologies. She would turn any compliment away. Her habit of sitting pale and naked at the breakfast table, cutting up whatever fruit they had into three portions, or sitting down with fried eggs made him once whisper to h............