“I hardly need to be persuaded.”
He laughs. “I’ll have the champagne ready. Congratulations on your birthday, by the way.”
The dinner progresses around her, laughter and conversation, and much clinking of glasses. Her thoughts drift in and out of the present. Over dessert, Ansel looks across the table at her, as if to say, What is it? What’s wrong? She feels, for a brief moment, a wave of claustrophobia, and she stands up and begins clearing away the dishes.
Glyn rises to help her, and the two go into the kitchen, plates and coffee cups balanced precariously. When the dishes are safely stowed in the sink, Glyn leans against the counter, her expression concerned. “Thinking about work?” she asks.
Gail does not answer right away. She reaches up to the cupboard, brings down the bottle of port, and then enough glasses for everyone. As she opens the bottle and begins pouring, she tells Glyn about Jaarsma’s phone call. Glyn is editing the documentary, a co-production for CBC-Radio and Radio Netherlands, but so far she has stayed in the background, allowing Gail time to research and gather tape. “When this project is finished,” Gail says, “I think I’ll take some time off. Sit back for a while. I’m a bit run down, is all.”
They touch glasses, Glyn’s infectious smile warming the room. “For years we’ve been planning to celebrate New Year’s on the Gulf Islands,” she says. “Why not this year? Rent a little house on the Pacific, do the Polar Bear Swim. Ansel must have vacation time coming up?”
“Yes,” Gail says, sipping her port. “I think he does.”
“You’re exhausted. The curse of the freelancer.” She reaches her fingers out, brushes a strand of hair from Gail’s forehead. “Remember Prague? We sat under the stars together, knowing we were at the start of something, some grand adventure. Were we right or wrong, back then? You and I, what a pair of romantics.”
That night, after everyone has gone, Gail leaves Ansel in the living room and goes into her office, shutting the door behind her. The curtains are open, and outside the street lamps glow, laying circles of light on the empty road.
She is surrounded by equipment worthy of a museum. Reel-to-reels, cassette recorders, record players. Lately, she has been working with Mini Discs and digital editing programs, but she cannot bring herself to dispose of the old tape, the old equipment. “They still work,” she says to amused colleagues. “They still do what we asked of them.”
She collects tape the way others collect records or rare books, safeguarding them with a feeling of reverence. She has fragments spliced together, dozens of conversations gathered on a single reel. Soundscapes, features, interviews. On days when her mind wanders, she randomly loads a reel onto the player, puts the earphones on, listens. For Gail, the devotion lies in more than the words spoken. It is the words spoken at a specific moment in time, in a particular place. A child singing in the background, a pause in the telling, an old woman wetting her lips, smoothing her dress. A man who forgets the presence of the microphone, who begins a conversation with himself. “And after that, nothing was ever the same. I wanted to go back, I needed to see him, but I couldn’t.”
Before going to bed, Ansel knocks on the door of her office, pushes it open. “It’s your birthday,” he says, casually. “Surely you can take the night off.”
She saves the document she is working on, then turns to face him. “Jaarsma broke the code,” she says. “That’s what he called to say.”
His eyes light up, happy for her.
“I’ve decided to go to Amsterdam. I set aside part of the funding for this, the plane ticket and travel, hoping everything would turn out.”
She can see him wanting to say something, to argue against her going. Her response begins to take shape in her mind, I have to do this. I need to be away. But he does not fight her. Instead, from where he stands, he wishes her good night, then closes the door softly behind him.
Alone again, she opens files, then closes them once more. She thinks of another love affair two decades before, the feel of another man’s hands on her body, the pull of desire. All this, a lifetime ago. At twenty-one, Gail had begun graduate work in the Netherlands. There, not even halfway through her M.A. in history, she took a leave from the University of Leiden, gave up her apartment, and travelled east. She was restless, tired of reading about realpolitik, about her thesis topic, Japanese militarism in the 1930s, anxious to make something concrete of her life. And she was in love. A floundering, impossible affair. The man, a professor of languages, was handsome, brilliant and married. So she cut her ties and applied for a visa to the Eastern Bloc.
By spring, she was living in Prague, in a tiny two-room flat, working afternoons in a haberdashery. Her roommate, Glyn Madden, was a radio producer. At thirty-six, divorced and at loose ends, Glyn had sold her house in Wales and gone off in search of adventure, which, they both agreed, had proven to be more elusive than it first seemed. They traded books between them, drove across the border to Germany in search of English-language novels, came home with strange, tattered copies of Karl May westerns. They walked at dusk, joyous, alive, up to the Prague Castle. The apartment they shared was in Na Kampa, and at night they sat at the window, staring down at the miniature heads gathered around the café tables. They took turns changing the records on Glyn’s turntable: Abbey Road, Joni Mitchell, REM.
Each month, her mother sent her a small package of famous B.C. smoked salmon and a long, descriptive letter, filled with stories. Gail’s father, she wrote at one point, had started a community garden in Strathcona. Every Sunday, children clustered around him, each one wearing tiny rubber boots, holding tight to a miniature spade. Business in the restaurant was steady, she said, and her father had decided to come on as a part owner. He is well, though he misses you. We both do. Gail went home only once each year, at Christmas time. It was the most she could afford, and she did not want to rely on her parents for money. “Too stubborn,” her mother would say, holding her at the airport when she left. “Too independent.” But the words, Gail thought, were filled with pride, too, that they had raised her to be so free, so fearless in the world.
In Prague one morning, Glyn had woken her at 4:00 a.m., holding a cassette recorder and a microphone. “Join me,” she had said, her voice low and robotic, leaning over Gail’s bed, eyes shining in the darkness.
“What is this? Star Wars? Spaceballs?”
“Let’s go. We’re late.”
They loaded their bicycles into Glyn’s van, then drove two hours east. Through the countryside, a Thermos of coffee between them, they watched the sun rise over the fading hills. In Brno, thousands of runners were gathered for a marathon. Glyn wired her to a cassette recorder, placed a microphone in her hand and headphones over her ears. The starting gun went off, and Gail, flustered, immediately dropped the recorder on the ground. On the tape, afterwards, she could hear Glyn laughing. But when she replaced the headphones, Gail heard details that she had never heard in life. Whispered conversations, the rhythm of hundreds of shoes striking cobblestone.
She hurriedly unlocked her bicycle and began pedalling after the runners. On the tape, later on, she heard the bicycle bell ringing ever so slightly as the wheels rattled over the stones. She heard runners drinking as they went, dropping the plastic cups on the road, and the light jaggedness, like cut glass, of their breathing.
That was the moment of revelation. Her degree fell by the wayside, and Glyn found her a job at Radio Netherlands, which had a small outpost there in Prague. They worked side by side each afternoon, pulling tape. Switching from grease pencil to razor blade, the reel of tape sliding back and forth, her right foot maneuvering the pedals. A swift diagonal cut, then a thumbprint of splicing tape to bind the pieces together. She laid the outtakes over her right shoulder, and then her left, in a carefully ordered fringe. Afterwards, they would eat dinner in the studio, potato dumplings soaked in gravy, washed down by bitter black coffee. Among her reels of tape, she has a recording Glyn made in 1989, in Wenceslas Square, when hundreds of thousands of people, laughing and crying, jingled their keys in unison to symbolize the fall of the Soviet regime and the opening of the door to democracy.