Turn Us Again Read online

  At our Halifax home, there was a thin hedge on one side of our yard, shielding us from our neighbours, while the other side was open. My father hated the suburbs, though I didn’t realize it until we moved to the country and he started to eulogize about how wonderful it was to own land because of the privacy it bestowed. He hated the inquisitiveness of the neighbours. He thought they were an ignorant, boring lot. Many of them were professionals, doctors and lawyers, and each house sported big shiny cars out front. I wondered what they thought of the cars that decorated our driveway. They were invariably old and shabby and covered in dents, since my father was an awful driver. I do not remember a single journey that wasn’t punctuated with doubt. We always had to take a run at hills and suffer through tense moments at the summit when the car slowed. My father used to rock back and forth in his seat, and command me to do the same, in the belief that our motion would propel the car over the top of the hill. He continued this practice even after someone pointed out that each rock consisted of a forward and backward movement, so that even if the forward thrust aided the car, the backward one must retard its progress.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t propel it over the top of the hill,” my father explained to me next time he had to engage my help in rocking, “but it encourages the car.”

  I held my breath until we had cleared the summit — then I demanded to know how a metal object could be encouraged.

  “Facts prove it. Propelled or encouraged, the fact is that we’ve never had a car with any power, yet none of these ancient relics has ever stalled on a hill. I’ve even noticed that the speed picks up a little when we start our rocking. Good little car.” And my father would pat the dashboard with affection.

  Many of our neighbours were unashamedly flagrant with money, and my father both despised them and felt alone. In those days there was nothing in Canada he could identify with; everything in England was better. The culture, the history, the education. The North American culture was money, he said, and the calibre of his fellow professors was horrendous. He had no friends, he could not go to the pub for a drink because the drinking establishments were for young people, and the beer was terrible. All of these things I remember.

  Things changed when we moved to the countryside when I was about ten. I remember his immediate, intense love for the little wooden house and the seven acres of woods surrounding it. His passion was infectious, and I also fell in love. The unique beauty and wonders of Canada were lauded at every meal.

  “Where else can one live in the midst of the wilderness and still travel half an hour along an empty highway to work in the city?”

  “Nowhere!” I answered him joyfully.

  “Where else can a man provide for his family with his bare hands, while holding down a full-time day job at the same time?”

  “Nowhere,” I answered with less enthusiasm. My ten-year-old eyes, even before they matured into teenager eyes, viewed his attempts to ‘feed his family’ with suspicion. For one thing, we were surrounded by country folk who cultivated vast gardens with the greatest of ease. My father led a life of such indolent laziness and excess (especially with the bottle) that he could not bend over to tend his beloved garden. Instead, he would sit down beside a weedy patch, cross his legs before him, and settle in for half an hour of pleasant digging or weeding. It didn’t look very professional to me, and indeed the results were modest compared to the vegetables overflowing the barns and porches at my friends’ houses during harvest time. I was sometimes pressed into taking home plastic bags of produce, but my father never seemed to notice the comparison. He would unpack the dirt-covered potatoes, plump ripe tomatoes and long, thick carrots with great joy.

  “Look,” he would say in delight, “straight from the ground. There is nothing fresher. How can the taste of this carrot be so different from carrots bought in the store?”

  Sometimes I would pick up a strong, Aryan carrot and one of my father’s twisted specimens, which had given up the growth fight at a mere two inches, and regard them with great concentration, but my father never paid the slightest attention to me.

  His greatest success was in the zucchini department. He obtained vast amounts of dung from an accommodating neighbour, shovelling it into the back of our long-suffering car and scraping it out beside his garden when he got home. My mother could never get the smell of horseshit out of that car. Unlike the carrots, the zucchinis grew and grew and grew. I didn’t like zucchini to begin with, and I suspect my mother didn’t either, because she failed to develop innovative ways of cooking it. She shoved it in the oven, spread a little butter and salt on it, and always served it in a lump beside the potatoes and meat. Father never complained. Even if we’d had it five times in a row, he would hold up a glistening forkful of yellow flesh and say, “Fresh zucchini from Daddy’s garden. Do I provide for my family or do I provide for my family?”

  Mother and I would gag silently.

  When I was about fourteen he discovered that providing for his family without the grunt work of gardening was even more satisfying. He developed a passion for picking — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, mushrooms. Mushrooms were the worst. He bought some books (or more likely, he asked for books for his birthday, being stingy that way) so that he wouldn’t poison us by mistake, and then disappeared into the woods for hours, returning with little bags of goodies.

  “These are chanterelles,” he would tell me, separating a small pile of dirty fungus from another. “Delicacies in the finest restaurants.”

  He asked for recipe books as well, and swept Mother out of the kitchen so he could cook his delicacies with the required skill and finesse. Hours later, he would emerge with a plate of shrunken mushrooms, and we would all have to gather around and sample them, closing our eyes, judging the taste, identifying varieties. For a teenager, I was accommodating with these quirks of my father. I never refused to comply with his desire for cooperation. I believe I was happy that he was happy. However, the end did come, during one memorable meal. I was perhaps full or just a tiny bit sick of mushrooms, so I found myself pushing them around my plate, squeezing them with my fork, trying to make little patterns in their soft flesh. Something long and white and squiggly emerged from under my fork. I started squeezing in earnest, and more white squiggly things appeared.

  “They’re full of worms!” I screamed in utter disgust, thrusting my plate away from me.

  “That cannot be! I cleaned them,” protested my father, still doubting even when presented with hard evidence. “I don’t think that’s a worm. It doesn’t look anything like a worm, does it Mother? It’s just the white entrails of the mushrooms.”

  After that, he would try to reassure me that he’d cleaned them with extreme care, but I never sampled another mushroom.

  That day with the blueberries, I don’t know what happened to change his happy ‘providing for family’ mood. Maybe I said or did something rude, I don’t remember. Father was always very keen on politeness. Anyway, at some point I guess he must have grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. I yelled out in pain long before the twisting merited such a reaction. I suppose I was surprised. I remember that he didn’t credit my yell, because he continued to twist until it really hurt. At this point I was writhing on the ground and my mother was yelling at him to stop. I don’t think he twisted it hard, but even a little twist can hurt, and I was always a coward. There was an element of fear, not knowing just how far he’d go. But he stopped long short of breaking my wrist, or even spraining it. I don’t even remember that he was that angry. He had an odd expression on his face, but it wasn’t his bug-eyed furious one. Although this is hazy, I remember the actions of my mother with great clarity. She grabbed me by the arm and frog-marched me back to the house, scattering our carefully picked blueberries as she went.

  “We’ll fix a sling of some sort on your hand, so he’ll think he’s hurt you. That will scare him.” My mother sounded spiteful, revengeful. And I i
dentified with her, giggling with excitement. I wanted him to be scared, and apologetic, and metamorphose into a small, meek man tip-toeing around the house. Why? Why did I want to ‘punish’ him for twisting my arm, and why was my mother the instigator of this childish reaction? What had he done the previous times I had seen him shrink into himself, with shame?

  I jerk back to the present as the plane begins its descent into Heathrow. I haven’t solved the Weird Feeling mystery suffocating me since the reception of my father’s fax. Of course, it would be strange for anybody to see a parent after twenty years’ separation. But curses and twisted arms somehow don’t explain the tension agitating my stomach. Still, I am pleased to have remembered so much, and I am confident that it will come to me. It’s all there — it just needs a little encouragement.

  The officious stewardesses wake everybody up, even those who have their seatbelts on already. They march back and forth, asking us to move bags, place seats in the upright position, return headsets, all about an hour before we land. Of course they stop at the little fellow slumbering next to me, and the mother tries to lift him oh-so-gently onto her lap. I want to help, but I am struck with shyness about putting my hands about the kid’s body, when we haven’t been introduced, so to speak. I want to say to the mother, you never know who is rooting for you. It might be those who are ignoring you most assiduously.

  The kid doesn’t wake, just grumbles a bit, and I engage in a dialogue with my courage about the advisability of asking the mother if she needs help with her bags on the way out. When the plane grinds to a stop, everybody leaps to their feet, as usual, while the young mother remains seated. She looks at me apologetically.

  “Can you squeeze past me? I’m just going to sit here till everybody has left.”

  That cinches the argument with my courage. “How are you going to take your bags when you are carrying a child? Can I help you in any way?” She smiles a delightful smile of gratitude, and I wish that I had used our seven hours of close proximity to better effect, instead of being concerned she would prattle and annoy.

  “That’s quite all right, thank you. The airline staff will help me with my bags.”

  I squeeze past her as gently as possible and stand sweltering in the close queue. For the fiftieth time, I grope in the inside pocket of my sports jacket and extract a grimy sheet of instructions on how to get to my father’s house. An hour on the tube from Heathrow, changing once, a fifteen-minute walk on the other side.

  Jenny had poured over the faxed instructions with great interest — I hoped she wasn’t planning any surprise visits, because she’d get a surprise herself — and started to laugh.

  “First you both hate answering the phone, and now you both share a phobia about taking taxis! You and your father are so alike, it’s hilarious.”

  I bent to look over her shoulder at the fax, “Do you mean his assumption that I’ll walk to his house? It’s just fifteen minutes.”

  “Carrying a months’ worth of luggage! Most people wouldn’t dream of lugging a suitcase on a fifteen-minute jaunt.”

  “Oh come on, you have to walk more than fifteen minutes just to get from one side of Heathrow to the other.”

  Jenny tumbled off her chair in mock hysterics, and I waited several minutes for her to enlighten me. At last, she lifted her head off the floor, “There are trolleys and moving walkways in Heathrow, but no taxis. If there were, people would take them.”

  Perhaps it is a bit odd, but I can’t bear taking taxis over short distances when I can walk. It feels like such a waste of money. On the other hand, I loathe exhibiting behavioural traits which might be classified as stingy. In fact, I do quite a lot to waylay any suggestion that I am tight with money. I’ll never forget my first encounter with racism, even though I was pretty young at the time. When I related the incident to my father, he said it wasn’t real racism, just an example of ignorance. I remember standing in the schoolyard with a couple of friends, when a fellow from Newfoundland called Troy approached us. I knew him well by sight though I had never talked to him very much. He proffered some chips to the assembly in general, and then became engrossed by the change in his hand.

  “Hey. That guy at the canteen gave me the wrong change. How much should those chips cost?”

  “I don’t know, man. A dollar or two?”

  “Well, what is it, a dollar or two? I gave that guy a fiver and he gave me two-fifty back.”

  “You should have counted it right away, you can’t go back now. He won’t believe you.”

  Troy waved his fist in the air, “That canteen guy jewed me! He probably does it all the time.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard the expression. It gave me a slight shock. “What did you say? He what you?”

  “He jewed me, man. He screwed me over. He stole my money on purpose.”

  “I’m sure it was a mistake,” I murmured, but the other boys had already lost interest. The expression was obviously a well-known one.

  My father was enraged, as I knew he’d be. “Did you tell him that it’s a racist expression?”

  “I don’t think he knew it was racist. What does it mean?”

  “It means that we are bringing you up in a place of inferior human beings, who seem as aware of what comes out of their mouths as a barking dog.”

  I had already been told a hundred times that we were superior and everybody else was inferior. It was a frequent rant. But I still didn’t understand the relevance of the expression.

  “Why ‘jewed’? What’s stealing got to do with being Jewish?”

  “Anti-Semites claim that Jews love money. Traditionally, Jews tended to work in money lending, mostly because Christians weren’t allowed to work in those professions. People started to resent their money and claimed they were stingy, stealing from others and hoarding it away.”

  “Are we stingy, Daddy?”

  “Of course we’re not stingy. Don’t be stupid. Stinginess is one of the most repulsive of human shortcomings.”

  I was determined never to be perceived as stingy. I shared my sweets, and later my cigarettes, with wild abandon. I bought my girlfriends extravagant gifts and surprised them with fancy getaway vacations. But generosity in my mind is defined by how much I give to others compared with what they give me, and doesn’t apply to myself at all. As a result, I am stingy with every aspect of my own life, from buying clothes to eating out. A taxi for a fifteen-minute walk is unthinkable.

  Thus I find myself trudging down the narrow sidewalk along Green Street, with a fine drizzle in my face, the suitcase getting heavier and heavier with each step.

  TWO

  Green Street doesn’t even feel much like England. If it weren’t for the quintessentially English drizzle, I might have been in Delhi. The streets are crowded with brown faces and bright saris. The shops sport Indian spices, Indian clothes, Indian take-outs. I had had no idea that I was coming to London’s ‘Indian town,’ or even that London had such a thing. It’s exciting, as though I am embarking on an exotic adventure. The crowded, bustling sidewalks please me, even though maneuvering through the throng makes my suitcase twice as heavy. I laugh at the traffic jams and the bus driver tooting at a hesitant car. I smile like an idiot at people and rejoice in the fact that nobody meets my eye, let alone smiles in return. This is a big city, not a little town like Halifax, where you have to smile and even mutter ‘good day’ if you have the bad luck to meet somebody’s eye. Where traffic rotaries are based on politeness, for God’s sakes.

  Oh London. Anonymity, black and white rules to keep the masses of humanity under control, and brilliant Indian take-out, by the smells of it. Chinese restaurants in Halifax produce food as authentic as unadventurous Nova Scotian palates permit. The rest of the world is barely represented, though one or two half-way decent Lebanese restaurants do survive, due to the Lebanese being the largest population after the English and French. But now I se
e the restaurants here, I can see that even the Lebanese in Nova Scotia have kow-towed to the majority. Most of them are selling donair, a strange combination of meat the likes of which I never saw during my visits to the Middle East.

  In London it will be the real thing, because the clients demand it. No need to go to India; it’s all right here in Forest Gate.

  I stop for little rests and gaze about me with the powers of observation granted to strangers in a foreign land. I notice that while the façade is colourful, the area is not really like India at all. Behind the shops, down the side streets, stretch the long, brick row houses where the majority of the urban population live. They are dull reds and greys, with tiny concrete courts at the front sporting garbage cans, maybe a stroller and a few toys. They don’t seem to have much grass or flowers, but I guess they have little plots around the back, because I remember row houses from my childhood and they went hand in hand with flowers. Everything grows so well in England, with its mild, moist temperatures.

  All the houses are identical, so I have to look at the numbers once I get to my father’s road. Of course there are no toys or strollers in front of his house. Instead of cement there’s a little patch of green. I stand looking at the house which has contained my father for the past few years, and a reluctance to enter overcomes me. All my joy at arriving in England and discovering a mini-India evaporates in one sweep. Such a medley of feelings, I can no longer tell if it is old stuff playing tricks with my adult self or a general repulsion for the old and infirm, who reach out to touch you as though young flesh gives them pleasure, without grasping what their elderly flesh might do to you.