And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Read online

  It was this unbelievable story that prompted a Parisian homebody to make the long trip to lose himself in the wide-open spaces of the Canadian North.

  ‘I wondered whether the people were either idiots or committed pranksters. You have to be nuts to defend the swastika these days.’

  If he had thought it was just an idiotic prank, Léonard Mostin wouldn’t have set out on the adventure.

  ‘The truth is I was bored with my novels. I couldn’t stand my own writing anymore. My fifth novel was going to be as stuffy as the previous ones, and I was suffocating with anxiety at the idea of shuffling around in it for years because I had nothing else to do.’

  So he left in search of some sort of epiphany that might await him at the end of the world in a community of jokers or lunatics who took pleasure in perverting history. He would find a novel ripe for the picking, funny and forceful, an impressive lark; not knowing what direction it would take nor how it would end, he would be kept in suspense in his little apartment on Rue de l’Éperon.

  Léonard Mostin did not go unnoticed in Swastika or in Kirkland Lake, the neighbouring town where he was staying. People still remember him clearly; they told me about him in amused disdain. A string bean walking the streets with a hesitant step and asking a string of questions of anything that didn’t move. Swastika, obviously, was what interested him, the origin of the name and what people thought of it, and he left with little more than that ‘Swas’ was a great place to live. I got essentially the same answers when I questioned the people of Swastika.

  Swas. Not once did he hear them utter the word Swastika, only the diminutive. He concluded that their unconscious held some shame. But the word came back, the whole word, crisp and resonant, when he ventured to ask whether they would take up the sign war again if required. ‘Swastika is our name.’ That was the answer, and it was offered with the hint of a challenge.

  Pride in the swastika had indeed existed. There were still traces of it in the amused smiles his questions were met with, but the townsfolk had no intention of letting anyone root around in a collective unconscious that belonged to them and them alone. Léonard Mostin was used to witty conversationalists in cafés, not people of few words who let silence say the rest. He would trip over his awkward English when he tried to get more out of them.

  Pride and shame, strange bedfellows. There was a novel in it, but how would he find it if they kept blocking his path. His plans were unravelling, appearing increasingly nonsensical, and every evening he would find himself in his cold, faceless little room wondering what he was doing there. He would have left a lot sooner if he hadn’t met Bernie Jaworsky at the municipal museum in Kirkland Lake. That’s when his unformed project changed course.

  I have come now to my friend Bernie, to whom I owe my understanding of the foolishness of any fictionalization and who was the driving force behind this chronicle.

  Bernie Jaworsky, seventy years old, maybe older, a retired teacher, a historian in his spare time, and my most faithful companion on this journey. Despite the age difference, we got along as if we had always known each other. There is something in us that vibrates at the same frequency. I thought it was because we were both teachers, biology for him and English for me, he at the high school in Kirkland Lake and I at the comprehensive in Senneterre. But there’s a lot more to it than our occupation, a lot more than this investigation Bernie has followed from a distance. There is a little note that I hear in him and that he must hear as well. We have the same emotional tone, a little disjointed, a little remote; in that we are alike. I call him and he immediately knows what’s going on, whether I’m having doubts, whether I’m lost in the morass of accumulated information, or whether I simply need to hear my voice in his.

  I met him at the Kirkland Lake municipal museum. He’s almost always there. Bernie is a local history buff. He published Lamps Forever Lit, a book about fatal accidents that occurred from 1914 to 1996 in the mining camp at Kirkland Lake, which includes the mines in Virginiatown, Matachewan, and Swastika, and many more. The accident that took Albert Comeau, Gladys’s husband, is included, described through the strict objectivity of facts. No emotion in the description of the fatal fall, no outrage at the absence of security at the mine, no finger pointing, no calls for justice or reparations. Bernie Jaworsky stuck to the unflinching reality of facts. It is this refusal to let himself be carried away by emotion that makes him an invaluable ally. A great deal of aimlessness was avoided thanks to his keen sense of reality.

  In fact, he described Léonard Mostin this way: ‘That man has no common sense.’

  Léonard Mostin had also wound up at the municipal museum. It seems the roads of all travellers meet there. At the museum, they thought he was a Jewish historian, because of his interest in the swastika. There, as elsewhere, his eager questioning soon started bothering the museum’s volunteers, who out of desperation turned to Bernie, also a volunteer at the museum and the last-ditch reference for lost causes.

  Bernie is a serious man, hard-working, conscientious, a man who dedicated his life to work and family, not one given to fun and games. He appreciates a good joke, but it would never occur to him to make one. When you see a smile dance on his lips, you know he has thought of something funny and that he is hesitant, doesn’t dare, wonders whether, and in the end keeps the story to himself.

  I saw the smile doing its little dance. He pressed his lips together to hold in what was funny, and then, no longer able to contain himself, went for it.

  ‘The man looked like a child waiting for Santa, he had put so much hope in me. I knew this would take hours. There was no way I could let him be scandalized by a name that has made its place here and that doesn’t deserve all the fuss being made of it. So I did my spiel about the swastika: its Neolithic origins; its cosmic dimension in the East; its modern meaning; Coca-Cola, which used it in its advertising; Lindbergh, who had it on the hub of his propeller; and the Swastika Gold Mine, which had been our good fortune long before Hitler hijacked the symbol. I ended with the words I always use in these sorts of situations. ‘We have a sense of history, but we also have a sense of our history.’ I could see it wasn’t enough, that I needed something else, that he needed a riddle to solve, a shadowy corner, a cantilever to tip. So I told him a story that I’ve never believed but that made the rounds at some point here, and that some people believed.’

  The story is deliciously mischievous, and it is incredible that anyone believed it. It said that Leon Trotsky spent three weeks in this back of beyond, walking the streets of Swastika and Kirkland Lake, notebook in hand, jotting down his observations about the living conditions of miners. In spring 1917, right before the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Hoaxes don’t stand up to historical fact for long. Léonard Mostin realized this in reading Trotsky’s autobiography once he got home. Which I also read, and in which I found no trace of the celebrated revolutionary in Northern Ontario.

  This hoax is just Swastikans thumbing their noses at anyone who doubted their existence up there in their village. And yet there were people who believed it. I even saw it on the official website of the city of Kirkland Lake. Then it disappeared from the site; people eventually no longer believed it or were secretly ashamed.

  Léonard Mostin, who had believed it, was not at all offended or ashamed at having been duped. When I met him in his mouse hole, he was having a grand old time with a novel that combined war, love, betrayal, vengeance, redemption, and Indigenous legends in a country at the end of the earth, where people were stricken with a strange illness that rendered them mute; it featured Hitler, Churchill, Trotsky, a young Cree man in love with a flowery young white woman, an old woman who carried death within her, and a Ukrainian who had come to spit on his grandfather’s grave.

  Bernie’s comment: ‘He probably should have stuck to the story about the Ukrainian.’

  He doesn’t like the idea of a story that blends fact and fiction. He’s afraid that people he has known for a long time, friends or neighbo
urs, will find themselves twisted or caricatured in it; he’s afraid he will be too, disguised or, worse, under his own name; he doesn’t trust the imagination of a man who does not have a firm footing in reality; he thinks that what he told him about the Ukrainian is worth more than any of his foolish imaginings and that Gladys never, ever carried death within her.

  On this point, he is intractable. Gladys does not deserve to be portrayed that way. Yes, death paid a violent visit fifty years ago when her husband fell at the Lake Shore Mine, and it was a constant presence during all those years when her daughter slashed her wrists over and over again. But, and he insisted on this point, Gladys did not carry death within her.

  Bernie is not close to Gladys. He saw her from time to time when she came to run errands in Kirkland Lake, said hello to her the way you do in small towns where everyone knows each other without really knowing each other, was vaguely aware of her story before really delving into it for his book.

  Bernie met with her twice for the entry about her husband, and even though both times it was about the circumstances surrounding her husband’s accident, at no point did death weigh heavily in the conversation. On the contrary. He told me that ‘she was much more interested in sharing her small pleasures than cataloguing her sorrows.’

  ‘Her small pleasures?’

  ‘Trinkets, plaques, figurines, macramé, the house was full of them, a real candy jar.’

  Gladys was living good years, it seemed to him. He met with her at her home, and he could see how she took care of it. A house full of flowers, both inside and out, a nicely arranged deck in the back, frilly curtains in the windows, sunny water-colours on the wall, glass beadwork mobiles, and other trinkets she made herself. She had been living with her daughter for years at that point. The daughter didn’t say a word to him when he arrived or when he left, just stared at the TV, headphones in her ears, never looking toward the kitchen, where the conversation was taking place. Lisana seemed calm and clearly absent, shut away in her world, ‘practically to the point of being autistic,’ but absolutely not the mad, threatening woman the neighbours had described to me.

  He had all the information he needed to write up Albert Comeau’s entry, except for the names of the pallbearers at the funeral. The entries sometimes got into these minor details. The book covers 310 fatal accidents over a period of eighty-two years. It took him four years, a long and fastidious piece of work, almost obsessive in its precision. Each entry briefly introduces the miner (nationality, previous employment, etc.), describes the operations that led to the accident and the injuries that were the cause of death, provides the results of the investigation, and ends with the funeral and the burial.

  Research for Albert Comeau’s entry was almost complete. In fact, he had a first draft. Working at Lake Shore Mine for just one year, Albert Comeau had fallen from the top of a sixty-foot raise climber. He was killed instantly (cervical fracture), and the death was certified by Dr. Marvin Casey. The investigation concluded it was an accident. The funeral took place at St. Pius Church in Swastika, and he was buried at the Kirkland Lake cemetery. All he was missing was the names of the pallbearers.

  Aside from this missing information, the point of his visit to Gladys was to check his draft, three tightly condensed pages. She read it and reread it slowly and earnestly, lingering on a word, coming back to it, spreading the sheets before her, smoothing them with her hand, caressing them, then, with a weary smile in which you could read all the years lived without her beloved, she spoke these words: ‘My Albert will be much better off in a book than in a cemetery.’

  ‘Gladys didn’t carry death within her; she was a mountain of will and energy, a monument to life.’

  And he burst into tears.

  ‘I’m the one who has carried too many deaths, too many deaths for too long.’

  Then he calmed down.

  ‘Don’t let him do it. Don’t let that crackpot mix our lives up in with whatever hare-brained things he invents. Take notes so you don’t forget anything, don’t overlook anything, because one day you will have to write this story.’

  I promised, I wrote everything down, recorded everything, saved everything, and I now find myself with a story that takes off in every direction. Too many facts gathered, too many anecdotes collected, too much of everything. A massive forest to clear. If one day there are readers for this story, may they forgive me the mess. Because I’m only at the beginning, and I can already feel the dangling threads.

  Bernie my friend, I have too much stuff. How do you contain the ebb and flow of the ocean?

  Recorded here anecdotally and extraneous to this chronicle, the story of Stefan Malinowsky, as told by Bernie Jaworsky.

  ‘I don’t know how he managed to make the trip without speaking anything but Ukrainian. All I know is that he was staying at the Super 8 motel, that he showed my book to the woman at the front desk of the motel, saying my name and repeating it until she decided to call me. When I arrived, he opened the book and pointed to the entry for Wasil Malinowsky, better known here as William Maloney.’

  Bernie is of Ukrainian origin, and he managed, with what remains of his mother tongue, to understand that the man was the grandson of this Wasil Malinowsky, and that he was most humbly asking his help to find his grandfather’s grave. He was a man of around fifty, solidly built, stocky, with a crewcut and features like someone with Down syndrome, having given little thought to his clothes, humble but determined. Bernie was impressed that a man would come from so far and after so many years to visit the grave of a grandfather he clearly didn’t know. According to the entry in Lamps Forever Lit, Wasil Malinowsky, who died in 1948 at the Chesterville mine, had left his native Bukovina in 1931, well before the birth of a string of grandchildren in the Carpathian Mountains.

  Stefan Malinowsky had gone to the cemetery the night before and couldn’t find his grandfather’s grave. And for good reason. It was an unmarked grave, without even a flat grave marker bearing the name of the deceased. But Bernie had no trouble finding William Maloney’s grave. He was a regular at the cemetery, his book having taken him there often. He still returns to honour his dead, to honour the living who come to put flowers on the graves of their dead, and he has a detailed map that allows him to move between the cemetery plots as confidently as through the streets of his town.

  Wasil Malinowsky aka William Maloney was resting beneath his rectangle of grass, forgotten by everyone but this man who had made the journey to bring him the respects of his family so far way. Bernie stood at a respectful distance but was close enough to hear the astonishing things the grandson said to his grandfather.

  ‘I am the son of Zenovia Holubec and Josef Malinowsky, the son you never held in your arms, never looked upon with your eyes, brother of Nikola and Yawdoha, the children of Baba, my grandmother, which makes me your grandson, and I do not bring you my respects. I have come to give you news of your family, who do not send their respects, who wish you all the ill you deserve, that you may now be suffering the torment that Satan reserves for his creatures, that is what we all wish you in memory of Baba, our sweet, gentle Baba, the cousin you married, put to work, impregnated three times, abandoned on the third to follow your friend Alex Susla, who was going to find his fortune in Canada, because you didn’t want a third child with a flat face. Admit that you fled our flat faces, that you fled the scorn of the villagers, that you fled like a scoundrel, and once you arrived in Canada, you changed your name, you took up with a village woman, that you had four healthy children with her, whom you raised like a good father should, while we in Lekechi passed on the gene in the most abject poverty and universal contempt until I arrived, me, your grandson, almost free of the curse. Years later, the granddaughter of your friend Alex Susla came to get to know the land of her ancestors and told us the whole story and left us the book that enabled me to come stand on your head and spit on you. Here, Grandfather, is the spit of Baba, Nikola, Yawdoha, Joseph, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren, who are
many and without a defect among them.’

  The man was speaking in a monotone voice, without emotion. Bernie felt like he was attending a ceremony with a long-established ritual. The man was officiating calmly and solemnly. Once the speech to the dead man was done, he thoroughly cleared his throat and forcefully projected a thick, long snake of spit onto the grass. Bernie shivered (in disgust or astonishment, he doesn’t know). But the ceremony was not at an end, because the man, with the body language of an officiant, unzipped his fly and soaked the perimeter of the rectangle of grass.

  The outrage toward the deceased was spent, which Bernie sensed in how the man’s shoulders slumped – his entire body, in fact. In the cold breeze of that fall day, the man was teetering with fatigue. Bernie softly approached him and, without a word, they left the cemetery.

  Bernie drove him back to his motel. It is a few kilometres from the cemetery to downtown Kirkland Lake. The man, slumped in the seat, was silent, lost in thought. When they arrived at the motel, he recovered his spirits and, remembering his manners, thanked Bernie and bid him farewell. He was leaving the next morning for the long journey home. Bernie offered to drive him to the station the next day, but he declined under the pretext that he had already reserved a taxi, which only added to the mystery of the Ukrainian travelling in Ukrainian.

  Bernie often comes back to this story, to the fact that he didn’t drive the Ukrainian to the Swastika station, which he regrets terribly because he thinks if he had, things would have been different. He would have run into Gladys, could have kept her there, prevented her from getting lost on the rails. It is a feeling shared by everyone directly or indirectly connected with Gladys. They feel responsible for a word, a gesture, a look that they had or didn’t have, lost forevermore in the series of missed chances that allowed Gladys to wander off on her own.