Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [188]
Realizing that he had gone too far, P —— then insisted that I come to his wedding, if only for old-times’ sake. Boogie would be there, he said, as if that were an added incentive. My first instinct was to respond with an emphatic no, but honouring my writerly bounden, the unending quest for grist for the mill, I acquiesced. After all, I had never witnessed Jewish nuptials before, so I elected to suffer it in the name of ontology. As might be expected, there was no lack of comestibles or usquebaugh. But given that even in Paris P —— would seek out restaurants in the Jewish quartier that served gefilte fish, and chicken soup with matzoh balls, globules of fat floating on the surface, I was surprised that the culinary fare was not of ethnic origin, but, instead, nondescript. As I anticipated, there was hardly a Burbank with a Baedeker to be seen, but many a Bleistein with a Cigar.
Snatches of conversazioni from my notebook:
“Oh, you’re a writer. How interesting. Should I know your name?”
“What do you think of Sholem Aleichem? Mind you, I expect you don’t understand Yiddish. Such an expressive language.”
“You ought to read my daughter’s letters from camp. Laugh, you could die.”
“Have you ever appeared on the best-seller list?”
“The story of my life. That would make some book, but I haven’t got the time to sit down to it.”
I caught sight of the bride at the dessert table, where melon balls and berries spilled out of the maw of a sculptured ice dragon. She heaped her plate impossibly high and then balanced a chocolate éclair on top of the fruit. I was immediately put in mind of how “Rachel née Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws.”
Small wonder the groom seemed so melancholy, imbibing endlessly, and in constant pursuit of an attractive young woman, who was doing her best to avoid him. In later years, however, she would become his third wife, rather, I’m told, than abort his child.85 But that evening, not yet entrapped, she said she was an unqualified admirer of my first novel. “Had I known you were going to be here,” she said, “I would have brought along my copy for you to inscribe.”
We took to the dance floor, where P —— (his betrothed in his arms, licking chocolatey fingers clean) contrived to bump against me twice, his elbows to the fore. Ironically, this only thrust me closer to my partner, and, interpreting her body language, it appeared she found this far from displeasing.
11
The hard-fought referendum of October 30, 1995, did not disgrace la belle province’s time-honoured election traditions. I watched the proceedings on TV with the rest of the gang at Dink’s. It was a squeaker all right: NO to independence, 50.57: YES, 49.43. But within days we learned that it wasn’t quite so close. The scrutineers, all of them appointed by our separatist government, had rejected something like 80,000 ballots, just about all of them from strongly federalist ridings. The ballots were adjudged unacceptable because the X was too dark, or too faint or crooked, or exceeded the perimeters of the square.
When I was in seventh grade Mrs. Ogilvy once turned her dynamite bum to our class and wrote on the blackboard:
CANADA IS ——
a dictatorship
a post-colonial democracy of limited culture
a theocracy.
None of the above answers apply. The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule. Buoyed by this thought, I hurried home, and had just poured myself a nightcap when the phone began to ring. It was Serge Lacroix. He had to see me urgently.86
Something like six months earlier, after sitting through a McIver of the RCMP episode that Serge had directed, I had turned to Chantal and said, “I don’t believe this. We’ve got to dump him. Would you fire him this