“Well, best of luck, Charles.” Shevchenko excused himself and escaped.
“How’s the post office?” asked Cyril.
Chuckie seemed to enjoy that; he seemed to be having a fine old time at his grandmother’s wake. “The post office is a mill for churning paper. Same way the stock exchange is a mill for churning money. But not to worry, the system unwittingly produces its own gravediggers.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“Depends on which side of the barrier you stand. Like you, you’ll be in trouble.”
Cyril waited, intrigued. He’d always found Chuckie the more interestingly erratic of his two nephews. “How so?”
“The artist draws the carpenter’s chair and thus his picture is twice removed from reality. The Republic.”
Cyril hadn’t exactly read much Plato. Drive out the lying poets or something. “Is that what’s coming?”
“Like an avalanche.”
“Ever hear from your mother?”
He grinned. “Yesterday. Sent her regrets. She and Yvonne are doing fine down in Rio. She’s nursing and Yvonne got herself a part in a Brazilian soap opera.” Chuckie reached with his glass and clinked Cyril’s and then went off for a refill.
It was four in the afternoon when Cyril got home from the wake. He wandered the house then out into the yard where he clipped seven yellow roses from the garden, fit them into a vase with some water and sugar, and carried them across the alley to his mother’s grave. Her stone was warm from the sun. He kept his palm on the granite for a long time as if the heat was a sign of her soul’s lingering presence.
He looked up at the maple tree, thinking of the cat. Maybe he hadn’t seen it at all, maybe he’d imagined it. The thought disappointed him. Now he saw only leaves. He could see the appeal of watercolours to participate in all that light and colour, even though colour had never been his chief interest. What intrigued him were lines, the cracks in sidewalks and old roads, the fissures in walls and in stone, the grain of wood, the wrinkles in aging faces, the lines in the palm of a hand—lines which held the secrets of the future. Looking closely at his own skin revealed a mesh of fine lines. Hair was lines, veins and arteries were lines, as were spiderwebs and tree branches, and the thread that made up his clothes. Whenever he looked up he saw hydro lines and telephone lines, maps and charts were lines. To draw, to follow the line unwinding from a pen, was for him the most natural thing in the world, and the most exciting.
The cemetery was framed on three sides by houses and Cyril could recite the name of every owner going back forty years. He’d never told anyone, not even Gilbert, but he sometimes saw the ghost of Old Man Hunt two doors down, cutting his lawn with a steel-wheeled push mower. Hunt had survived the Battle of Vimy Ridge only to die while doing the lawn one spring morning in 1957, right in front of twelve-year-old Cyril who was raking Hunt’s grass for a quarter. The old guy dropped face down in the strip of newly mown lawn as though he’d ploughed a path from the battlegrounds of France to a cemetery in Vancouver. Hunt had been a joker, always plucking nickels from kids’ ears and singing Cockney songs, and for a moment Cyril had thought he was faking, especially since only minutes before he’d told him a joke about a parrot.
“Bloke goes into a pet shop. Wants a bird, see. I got this fine parrot right ’ere, says the proprietor. Bloke looks at it. Does it talk? Not yet, it’s young, you can teach it. He buys it and takes it ’ome and the next morning wakes up to this croaky voice saying, Shit it’s cold, shit it’s cold. Goes into the living room and there’s the parrot: Shit it’s cold. Well this chap, ’e’s very conservative, ’e is. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t swear, doesn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Marches that bird back to the shop. Owner says no problem, next time the bird starts up you grab him around the neck and give him a good hard shake. He’ll stop. Guaranteed. So the next morning our man he wakes up to the bird complaining, Shit it’s cold. Shit it’s cold. The chap’s ’aving no part of this. He opens the cage and grips the parrot round the neck and gives him a good shaking about. Parrot says, Fuck, it’s windy too!”
TWO
CYRIL HAD BEEN home from the wake nearly three hours before remembering that he had his drawing class that evening. Late, but desperate for diversion, he grabbed his stuff. Over the years students had come and gone but Cyril had remained. Novak was leaner and more saurian than ever, his grey hair long and lank, the lids of his eyes like canvas flaps. This evening he wore bare feet and sandals, black jeans, a red shirt buttoned at the cuffs and loose at the collar. Cyril arrived to find him deep in conversation with Richard.
Short, lean, with a dark beard and round metal-frame glasses over darting eyes, Richard was intensely ambitious. He’d graduated from art school—a fact concerning which he regularly reminded Cyril—and was taking Novak’s class purely for the models and the feedback. Richard was big on feedback, especially giving it. He pronounced Cyril’s work ‘alternately erratic and cautious’, and he argued with Novak—politely but adamantly—in defence of his vision. That he had a vision impressed Cyril, who wasn’t sure if he himself had one. Maybe he was just too close to his own work to be able to see his own vision. Richard’s vision consisted of crabs: crabs on pillows, crabs on the hoods of cars, crabs on a woman’s belly, crabs falling from the sky in parachutes, crabs lurking in brassieres, crabs behind executive desks, crabs in churches preaching from altars with their claws raised in exhortation. There was no denying that they were impressive crabs, they reeked of sea and rage and occasionally of yearning. These crabs dreamed. If Cyril drew a crab it would not look like a Richard crab; he knew because he’d experimented. His crabs were good, but were they idiosyncratically him? Would someone say they were distinctly Cyril Andrachuk crabs? The question bothered him more than he cared to admit. Cyril wasn’t sure he liked Richard, and it bothered him that Novak clearly liked him a lot. Their arguments were not fights but a spirited crossing of swords that seemed to exhilarate them both.
Now Novak addressed the class.
“Okay, my friends. I have worked a miracle for you. Bow your heads in gratitude. Kneel. Light candles, burn incense, give coins and virgins. For behold: Novak has done it again.”
An anticipatory murmur moved through the group; Cyril’s reaction was closer to dread than anticipation. Over the years Novak had arranged half a dozen group shows, only the first of which Cyril had participated in. A couple of times he’d congratulated himself on staying out of them, especially when the scorn had come pouring down like a river of mud on their heads, but the last show had been a success, young Richard had sold all his work and been approached by an agent. Novak had been courted as well. He’d been interviewed and now had his own show scheduled. Furthermore, his popularity as a teacher had soared, and instead of one session a week he now taught three.
“But not the school gallery. No, no. This time you play for keeps. This time we take the tips off our swords. This time we draw blood. At The Arena. Maybe Ms. Preston she is going senile,” he admitted, referring to owner and curator Pamela Jean Preston. Last month Novak had shown her slides of their work and she’d gone for it. “She has a gap in her schedule,” Novak explained. “One night. A Sunday. Not much, but maybe enough.”
Richard led a round of applause and Novak bowed deeply to the left, to the right, and to the middle.
The Arena was notorious. A recent show had featured a thousand and one human teeth in all their stained and carious decay. Another show was a display of evisceration photos. Then there had been the fire-walker, some mad man who walked naked over hot coals while reciting at length from the Epic of Gilgamesh.