Of This Earth (29 page)

Overwhelming as it was, Vancouver was in a way ridiculously simple: nothing to do for light or heat or water, just find a switch or sit on a toilet and everything happened. Gust’s car even had a starter inside it, you got in, stepped on the starter and the motor turned over, there was nothing to crank. It was a Schlarafenlaunt, a fool’s paradise, my mother said, all you needed to live here auls eene Mohd emm Schmäah, like a maggot in fat, was money.

And of course we had none. We intended to visit only for a few weeks, but suddenly we did not feel like leaving immediately, even though the little house was more crowded than our house in Speedwell when the entire family came home. And we stayed five months, because one day in November Pah walked across Nanaimo Road to the long foundry that belched smoke and blazed fire pounding steel opposite the Rice house and to Gust’s astonishment, for Pah spoke only a few words of English, the foreman understood what he wanted and gave him a job. Shovelling up messes on the foundry floor, helping lift what needed to be lifted: anybody could tell him what to do and he’d do it; exactly the kind of work my father would do well and faithfully, forever.

The job paid enough for us to live and save for the trip home, so Pah helped Gust finish the frame-and-tar-paper addition to the house where we could have two rooms to ourselves. One bathroom for ten was a dream for Speedwellers; true, the three-burner propane camp stove in our rooms was no wood oven spreading thick heat like a blessing, but it cooked, no wood-carrying for me, and we had enough to live and could pay the doctor, only a tram ride away, to help Mam with her strange, continuing stomach illnesses. Whatever they were, we children knew no more than the various pills and medicine bottles now standing on the shelf above the sink where we washed dishes and also our faces, with a twist of the wrist the water poured out, hot or cold, and not a slop bucket in sight. Despite the chill of our tarpaper rooms, and the cold I had to crawl into on my iron cot—which seemed so … thin, so alone, not deep, thick straw with Dan, already asleep, a muscled, breathing heater beside me under the quilt our mother had sewn with wool we all helped to card—despite that, Vancouver was continuously amazing. Drizzle, shifty fog, the creek in the ravine between Brant and Gladstone always running a brown stream under dark brush clotted with moss, snow that sifted through the air but melted on your hand or as it touched sidewalk or street, wet but
never icy—when the sun shone in the sharp air, November, January were unimaginable. City, sea, golden snow mountains.

Tony and little Eldo, grade two, led Liz and me to Lord Selkirk School a block west of Brant. Down a dip and over a small ravine bridge, then along 27th Avenue and there it was on Gladstone, four storeys of brick, shingles and enormous windows, with separate entrances for boys and girls, high double doors with long opening handles—no latches here, nor even knobs—and more than six hundred kids, maybe a thousand, how could I tell. There were any number of grade six rooms, you had to remember your code because each had a teacher all to itself who taught only your class, except when you went up to the auditorium in the top floor for gym. Several classes would be there at once, throwing balls, kicking them against the wall right inside the school! Some boys in grade six were really big, and the girls had so much curly hair you’d think they were women; and longer bare legs than I had ever seen. When the sun shone at recess, it seemed more children than there could possibly be on earth were playing in the schoolyard.

And across Gladstone Street, directly in line with the concrete walk from the school’s entrances, was a small store. Tony showed it to us first, even before we heard the school bell buzzing like an enraged wasp and we had to go line up. The store’s two front windows were packed with chocolate bars.

I had seen them for years. In Speedwell the maps of Canada and the world often hung down unrolled; even when you concentrated on the teacher, on the rim of your vision crouched the subliminal presence of haunting words:

and:

Not just words, worse, pictures of the chocolate bars themselves, four different kinds, floated on the blue of both Canada’s and the world’s oceans; only the unmarked, spinning globe, which both Miss Hingston and Miss Klassen insisted gave us the true picture of our earth in space, could stop us imagining that the entire Arctic Ocean above Canada and Alaska was overlaid by a monumental Neilson’s jersey milk bar,
all of Siberia by a Neilson’s
JERSEY NUT
. The ornate capitals were embossed in gold—really, how could you doubt it?

We believed, fervently, but throughout four years of war we never actually saw a single one of those map bars in Schroeder’s or Harder’s store or even in the rare spaces of Jacob Rempel’s store in Fairholme or Dart’s in Glaslyn: not one bar to touch, leave alone taste.

The Martens twins always claimed they had eaten a Neilson’s Milk Chocolate bar, once when they were very little. You had to peel away the white-and-golden paper to a skin of solid silver, unfold that and the deep brown chocolate revealed itself: divided into beautifully ridged rectangles so each person would have an exactly equal share, just count, nothing to quarrel about. And taste, it was …

Taste could not be described, especially by the twins, but for this I wanted no words; chocolate longing was a white-and-gold wash on the world’s blue oceans. Cocoa was listed in our ration booklets and there were times when a yellow tin of Fry’s Pure Breakfast Cocoa, complete with its royal coat of arms, stood momentarily on a shelf behind a store counter. If by a miracle it arrived in our house with the ninety-eight-pound sack of Robin Hood flour and Mam spooned that ineffable emanation into
fresh, hot milk and stirred—a resurrection out of the brown dust! In a church Christmas bag I had once found a brown bud. “Don’t chew!” Liz yelled at me, “suck, make it last!” And in June 1944 when Speedwell had a closing school picnic at Turtle Lake and in our class race I came in second by half a step to a snotty brown girl from Turtleview School—she must have practised for weeks running on the hard, ribbed beach—I had the choice of either half a Sweet Marie bar or half an O Henry. I’d never seen or heard of either, and I didn’t like my second name so I took half the Sweet Marie and the older boys snickered at me taking the “girlie” prize. Who cared, my mouth was full, as I showed them, and they were swallowing spit. The crunch, the texture, the taste—I would have eaten Sweet Marie again if they had named it Stalin.

But Vancouver didn’t need Neilson maps in school: the bars themselves lay piled up in the store window. All you needed to eat them was money.

They cost five cents. Which was the price of a quart of milk, my mother told me, delivered at the door, and the bigger bottles with the bulb on top for settling out the cream were eight. Dad earned twenty-five cents every hour in the smoking foundry.

There came a day when I persuaded Tony to let me help him deliver his weekly flyers in exchange for
half a nickel; he bought a Neilson’s Milk Chocolate for the two of us to eat hidden in the ravine, away from Liz and little Eldo. The Martens twins were right: you could divide it exactly rectangle by rectangle laid out on the silver paper; nothing to quarrel about. As for taste—even in all the years of staring at ocean and Siberia, I had not imagined it.

Mam was a superb worrier, and in Vancouver that’s what she did for Dan suddenly left alone to take care of everything for the whole winter on the farm in Saskatchewan. She wrote him many letters of course, which have not survived, but there is one city photo which she sent Dan with a German note on the back: “Here you can see a picture of when we go into town on Saturday, they come on the street as we walk and take our picture.”

The street photographer from Souvenir Snaps, 512 W. Hastings St., caught three of us in mid-stride. Mam with her best black hat and imitation fur coat buttoned up to her scarf; Pah on her left, wearing his Sunday suit, and me on her right, bareheaded and mouth open, something half-eaten in my right hand. As I explained in blotchy ink after Mam on the back of the picture: “I was just eating a bar.”

Pah walks as I remember him: eyes shaded by his hat-brim, mouth shut and head down; life and his place in it is what it will be. But Mam is smiling, in fact she looks truly happy, and it is possible she is. I don’t know when the picture was taken; perhaps the bright light on the clustered store signs stretching behind us and me capless means it was an early spring day, perhaps the cherry trees along Cambie
and behind our house were already in full bloom and soon we would have saved enough and be on the train travelling back to our Saskatchewan home in the snow where Dan, oama Betchla, poor bachelor, had worked so hard alone all winter.

Where we also belonged. As Mam always said, “Speedwell es goot jenaug fe daut Läwe daut wie läwe.” Speedwell is good enough for the life that we live.

But it may also be she truly liked Vancouver, that she liked the grey sea at English Bay as much as I did when we walked there. The long changing rooms below the street were of course closed, no one swam under glowering clouds, the swimming rectangles and diving platforms were heaved up on the beach for winter just below the enormous logs that lay about everywhere, some of them almost as thick as I was tall. Sometimes long dark men in nothing but swimming suits leaned against them, or lay sleeping in the pale sunlight. Soldiers, Tony said, they’re resting after the war.

The sand was hard, but yielding too, you ran sinking deeper than at Turtle Lake into bits of shells and seaweed and unrecognizable creatures stirred by the shifting edge of the sea. Giant posts stood out in the bay, a grey-and-white bird always crowned every one, motionless as a totem, and though I had seen
lake water disappear into horizon, this greyness was alive in a different way; the heavy dark sky and the sea created a smell where they touched, something breathable on the surface between them, there where you placed your naked feet; and the waves had no pattern, were tiny spurts and riffles to the headlands of the bay and far mountains, like snow flickering over the surface of a drift, yes, almost tiny pointed animals playing under the flexible skin of the sea.

But on the outer rim of Stanley Park, down on the shingle below Siwash Rock, the sea’s calm riffles swelled and smashed against the boulders, with foam cresting in tiny curls and fading away, innocently but heaving up to crash again. A huge bird dingy white flew by—a gull, Tony said, they eat anything—then slid sideways at me on the wind so close I jerked back, if I had lifted my hand its yellow bill would have gouged me. The blunt lines of ships perched far out between cloud and sea.

Perhaps my mother liked the sea, and also our many visits with Widow Pauline Fiedler, who lived now without her August just past the school on Gladstone with three unmarried sons, and her daughter Olga Racho with her five children settled nearby. Their father Gustav Racho had been left behind in Coaldale, Alberta, living, it was said, alone
like old George Stewart in Speedwell, but not begging; he was no possible king of England.