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By Root 525 0

three tycoons who fly in for weekends in their own little seaplanes. But back in the old days I recall our then-pristine waters disturbed only once by an airplane. It was one of those damn water bombers that were being tested in 1959, I think it was, and it roared in on the lake, gulping up God knows how many tons of water, and lifted off to drop its load on some distant mountain. Why, when I first came out here there were only five cottages on the lake, including mine, but they now number more than seventy. To my amusement, I have come to fill the quaintsy office of the old codger of the lake, invited to neighbours’ cottages to regale their children with tales about the days when the speckled trout were plentiful and we were without electricity or telephones, never mind cable TV or satellite dishes.

I stumbled on my Yasnaya Polyana by accident. Invited out to a friend’s cottage on another lake one weekend, back in 1955, I took a wrong turn and found myself on a loggers’ road that came to an abrupt stop at what appeared to be an abandoned lodge high on a hill overlooking the lake. There was a FOR SALE sign with an agent’s name banged into a post on the sinking porch. The front door was locked and the windows were boarded up, but I managed to pry one open and climb inside, scattering squirrels and field mice. The lodge, I discovered, had been built as a fishing retreat by a Bostonian in 1935, and had been on the market for ten years, which didn’t surprise me, considering the appalling shape it was in. But I was smitten on first sight, and acquired it, and the surrounding ten acres of meadow and woods, for an astonishingly cheap ten thousand dollars. For the next four years, I camped out there in a sleeping-bag just about every weekend in summer, making do with paraffin lamps and delicatessen, mouse traps laid down everywhere, quarrelling with the slo-mo local contractors who were making it habitable. I installed a gas generator in my third year, but didn’t get round to having the cottage winterized, or putting up the outbuildings and boat-house until Miriam and I were married. I maintain the elaborate tree-house, where the kids used to play, to this day. For my grandchildren, perhaps.

Agitated, I now began to stride up and down my living-room floor. Somebody was coming to interview me at eleven, but I could no longer remember who. Or why. I had left myself a Post-it note, but now I couldn’t find it. Yesterday, seated in my Volvo, preparing to turn into Decarie, I was suddenly at a loss as to how to gear down to third. Pulling over to the curb, I rested, then rammed the clutch home, and practised shifting gears.

Wait. I’ve got it. The young woman coming to see me is the hostess of “Dykes on Mikes,” on McGill University’s student radio, and is working on a Ph.D. thesis about Clara. This will not mark the first time I have been interrogated about her. There have been visits, or letters of inquiry, from feminists as far afield as Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Cape Town, and that city in Germany where Hitler led the march on Parliament. You know, the British prime minister with the umbrella was there. Peace in our time is what he promised. Damn damn damn. It’s the city where they have the famous beer festival. Pilsner? Molson’s? No. It sounds like the name of the little people in The Wizard of Oz. Or like that painting The Shout25 by … by Munch. Munich. Anyway, my point is, the martyred Saint Clara’s admirers are legion, and have two things in common: they take me for an abomination and fail to understand that Clara intensely disliked other women, whom she considered rivals for the male attention she thrived on.

Hanging over my mantelpiece to this day is one of Clara’s overcrowded, tortured pen-and-ink drawings. It depicts a gang-rape of virgins. An orgy. Gargoyles and goblins at play. The chortling satyr drawn in my image clutches a nude Clara by the hair. She is on her knees and I am forcing myself into her open mouth, taking advantage of her scream. I have been offered as much as $250,000 for this charming tableau, but nothing could