In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [47]
But Hana’s favourite place of spells was the Geranium Bakery, and one Saturday afternoon she took him there to meet her friend Nicholas. She guided Patrick among the other workers and sacks of flour and rollers towards Nicholas Temelcoff, who turned towards her and stretched his arms out wide. It was a joke, he was covered in flour and did not really expect to be embraced. He shook Patrick’s hand and began to show them around the bakery, Hana scooping bits of raw dough with her finger and eating them. Temelcoff was meticulously dressed in jacket and tie but wore no apron so that the flour dust continued to settle on him as he moved through the bakery. He pulled chains that hung from the ceiling to start rollers moving on the upper level. He brought a small doll out of his pocket and handed it to Hana – and this time she embraced him, her head on his chest. The two men had said no more than four polite sentences to each other by the time Patrick left with the girl.
One night Hana pulled out a valise from under the bed and showed him some mementoes. There was a photograph of her as a baby – with her first nickname, Piko, scrawled in pencil on it. Three other photographs: a group of men working on the Bloor Street Viaduct, a photograph of Alice in a play at the Finnish Labour Temple, three men standing in snow in a lumber camp. A sumac bracelet. A rosary. These objects spread out on the bed replaced her father’s absence.
So he discovered Cato through the daughter. The girl had been told everything about him, told of his charm, his cruelty, his selfishness, his heroism, the way he had met and seduced Alice. “You didn’t know Cato, did you?” “No.” “Well he was supposed to be very passionate, very cruel.” “Don’t talk like that, Hana, you’re ten years old, and he’s your father.” “Oh, I love him, even if I never met him. That’s just the truth.”
She was totally unlike Patrick, always practical. When he returned from the steambaths on the first Saturday she had inquired about the price and he saw her trying to work out if it was worth it. “I would have paid anything,” he muttered, and he saw she could not understand or accept such extravagance in him. She thought him foolish. In the same way, her portrait of her father lacked any sentimentality.
– Who were those people in the bridge picture, Hana?
– Oh she must have known them.
* * *
Alice was in sunlight on the grass slope leading down from the waterworks, looking out onto the lake, her hand keeping the sun out of her eyes. “I had to learn I couldn’t trust him. Not that he ever wanted me to. You must realize that Cato was not his real name, it was his war name. And who knows who he was with or what he was doing on a Wednesday or a Friday. He was self-made. He worked hard, he spoke out. On Thursdays he came shimmering along on his bike, dropped his tackle in the hall as if he were a hurried fisherman, and said, Let’s go!”
– How long did you stay together?
– Till he died. We were always breaking up. He thought his life was too complicated. We spent half our time worrying with each other about this. And then on Wednesday nights I would dream out the next afternoon on our bicycles along that stretch of road, in April flood or summer dust. You could blindfold me now, Patrick, and I would be able to take you there, fifty yards off the road, across a creek – lots of mud here, turn right – this is where we always got our