Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [30]
Then?
He came into the police station, in a sort of outfit—an invented uniform, really—with a hose and a tank attached to his back, saying he was sorry he was late. ‘I was supposed to be here earlier,’ he said. ‘I have to do this quickly, because I have three other jails today.’ My mother, at the desk, had no idea what he was talking about. No one had said anything to her about his visit. He said, ‘You will have to sign this when I finish.’ He brought out some forms with carbon paper between them. This was shortly after the war, and you could hardly move with the red tape then. ‘All men, are they?’ he asked, and was told there was one woman, and he pretended to worry about that. ‘Then you might have to help.’
What he needed to do, he told her, was DDT the cells, hose them down, and hose the prisoners too, which meant they had to push all their belongings and clothes out of the cells so they wouldn’t get sodden. ‘Sodden?’ She asked him what that meant. ‘Damp. Damp. Wet. Like flooded.’ ‘Ah. Je comprends.’
Je comprends, Anna said, lying beside him in the bed.
So my father explained all this to the male prisoners while my future mother explained it to the woman. The men had to undress completely and push their clothes forward, through the bars. My father (not yet a father) took the clothes and carried them into the front office, then went and sprayed the DDT, essentially for lice and ticks—there had been a serious outbreak, he told them, that was tumbling through the region, two prisoners in another jail had even died. After spraying the cells, now devoid of sheets and books and papers, he sprayed the men’s bodies, front and back. He then told them to stand still for ten minutes before they got dressed.
Meanwhile my mother had to get the woman prisoner to disrobe, and bring her clothes to the front office—as my father would have to check them for ticks and lice, and sprinkle DDT powder on them. The woman did not have to be hosed down, because, my father said, strangely the creatures never settled on women—a fact that my mother found peculiar, but if the man knew, the man knew. So my father sorted out the clothes, got the crucial piece of paper or whatever it was from the male prisoner’s pocket and put it in the female prisoner’s shoe, and everyone got settled back into their cells. He thanked the prisoners, he told the woman there had been three ticks in her clothes, he shook the hand of my mother and left.
He had made my mother sign the papers. She’d apparently needed to put down her age, other professions, and where she lived. She was a ‘traveller,’ she had told him then, what they used to call gitans, Gypsies. She was a ‘manouche.’ Of course, the guards at the police station did not know this—she would hardly have been allowed to work there if they had known. She didn’t really have an address, just a location she’d pointed towards, near the southwest edge of the town. Her family lived in a caravan. In this way my father met the enigma that was Aria.
No one was aware of what had taken place. The returning jailer held his nose at the smell of what seemed to be disinfectant. Maybe twenty-four hours later there was a cry of complaint from one of the prisoners. But by then my father had come courting, and had asked for ‘Aria,’ whose name he knew from the filled-out forms. He had been journeying up from Italy after the war ended, and had found himself in Belgium, where it was easier to obtain money the way he usually did. He’d been injured but now seemed to be back at his old criminal activities.
So he stayed with her and married her?
They never married, but she was his wife, yes. He stayed and lived in the caravan with her. My mother told me he had had another wife, before the war, but she referred to it only once. The war was a chasm for most. There was one life before and one life afterwards. Many decided not to go back to what they