In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [15]
For Nicholas language is much more difficult than what he does in space. He loves his new language, the terrible barriers of it. “ ‘Does she love me? – Absolutely! Do I love her? – Positively!’ ” Nicholas sings out to the forty-foot pipe he ferries across the air towards the traveller. He knows Harris. He knows Harris by the time it takes him to walk the sixty-four feet six inches from sidewalk to sidewalk on the bridge and by his expensive tweed coat that cost more than the combined weeks’ salaries of five bridge workers.
The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment – a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store – all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady’s ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency.
But it was a spell of language that brought Nicholas here, arriving in Canada without a passport in 1914, a great journey made in silence. Hanging under the bridge, he describes the adventure to himself, just as he was told a fairy tale of Upper America by those who returned to the Macedonian villages, those first travellers who were the judas goats to the west.
Daniel Stoyanoff had tempted them all. In North America everything was rich and dangerous. You went in as a sojourner and came back wealthy – Daniel buying a farm with the compensation he had received for losing an arm during an accident in a meat factory. Laughing about it! Banging his other hand down hard onto the table and wheezing with laughter, calling them all fools, sheep! As if his arm had been a dry cow he had fooled the Canadians with.
Nicholas had been stunned by the simplicity of the contract. He could see Stoyanoff’s body livid on the killing floor – standing in two inches of cow blood, screaming like nothing as much as cattle, his arm gone, his balance gone. He had returned to the village of Oschima, his sleeve flapping like a scarf, and with cash for the land. He had looked for a wife with two arms and settled down.
In ten years Daniel Stoyanoff had bored everyone in the village with his tall tales and he couldn’t wait for children to grow up and become articulate so he could thrill them with his sojourner’s story of Upper America. What Daniel told them was that he had in fact lost both arms in the accident, but he happened to be rooming with a tailor who was out of work and who had been, luckily, on the killing floors of Schnaufer’s that morning. Dedora the tailor had pulled gut out of a passing cat, stitched Daniel’s right arm back on, and then turned for the other but a scrap dog had run off with it, one of those dogs that lounged by the doorway. Whenever you looked up from cutting and slicing the carcasses you would see them, whenever you left work at the end of the day in your blood-soaked overalls and boots they followed you, licking and chewing your cuffs.
Stoyanoff’s story was told to all children of the region at a certain age and he became a hero to them. Look, he would say stripping off his shirt in the Oschima high street, irritating the customers of Petroff’s outdoor bar once more, look at what a good tailor Dedora was – no hint of stitches. He drew an imaginary line around his good shoulder and the kids brought their eyes up close, then went over to his other shoulder and saw the alternative, the grotesque stump.
Nicholas was twenty-five years old when war in the Balkans began. After his village was burned he left with three friends on horseback. They rode one day and a whole night and another day down to Trikala, carrying food and a sack of clothes.