Irregular Verbs (13 page)

Finished, she planted Dasatan’s sword in the dirt and used it to lever herself to her feet. The onion patch had been trampled again, but only a bit; most of the Kamanai had learned to fear him, now. Good. They didn’t understand what she and Dasatan had made here. How could they? All the others had was a camp, one they moved from year to year. Here they had made a home.

Wiping the sword on her jacket, Ayusha set off for Svatyslan’s camp.

Kaman was not at all the way Yavan remembered it. He had noticed felled trees when they first entered the wooded lands; then, instead of their having to seek out young ai Kamanai to guide them to where the amber lay, they were met by a group of them, who told them to follow to the camp.

“Thanks be to the Lady,” Kuyuban said. “The sooner we find some guides, the sooner we can be home and rich. Eh, Yavan?”

Yavan nodded. This was Kuyuban’s first time leading one of these journeys; he did not know how brief an amber fortune was. For Yavan it had been only five years since he had last taken up his staff to find the god’s blood.

“This way,” one of the ai Kamanai said. Following, Yavan was surprised to see a wooden stockade wall and gate blocking the path. This, too, was unusual: he had never known the ai Kamanai to make anything they couldn’t take with them when they moved to new forage grounds. A bit nervously, he followed through the gate, which a man on the other side opened and closed. Inside was more familiar—a gathering of tents—but there was one large wooden building, with smoke coming out the roof. Yavan drew in a breath, disturbed by the change.

“Yavan, this isn’t what you described,” Kuyuban said to him under his breath.

“No, it isn’t,” Yavan said.

Their guide opened the wooden building’s door and stood aside. “The Kisar will see you now.”

That was something else new, Yavan thought as he and Kuyuban were led inside the wooden building. Ai Kamanai had never had any leaders more formal than the heads of families. The inside of the wooden building was dark, lit only by a smouldering fire pit in the middle, and the place smelled of pine sap. A man was waiting for them, facing away, and as he turned Yavan saw he was wearing a sword. Yavan looked over at his companion: unused to life here, Kuyuban had not noticed the steel, did not know what it meant.

“Friend of the ai Kavatai,” Kuyuban said in Kamanai, beginning the standard formula, “I am Kuyuban, son of Kadanim, of the ai Daneyanim. We have brought gifts to show our friendship.”

This was normally the time to awe the natives with the trade goods, but the Kisar stopped him short. “Things have changed,” he said in thickly accented Kavatai. He took a step closer and Yavan got a good look at him: clean-shaven, shorter than most ai Kamanai but wearing a bearskin jacket that made him look enormous, and wearing that sword buckled at his belt. A piece of red amber larger than any Yavan had ever seen was fixed to the pommel. “You will not go into our woods to take our treasures from the ground. We have what you want, but you do not have what we want.”

He reached into his pouch, drew out a handful of amber, some pieces even larger than the one on his sword. The stone on Yavan’s staff glowed in sympathy; so, too, did the one on the pommel of the Kisar’s sword.

“We have jewellery that would please any woman,” Kuyuban said—still using the formula, but shaken. “Ribbons, and thread—”

“Take that back with you,” the Kisar said.

Kuyuban’s composure finally broke, and he said, in Kavatai, “What do you want, then?”

The Kisar smiled. “Steel,” he said.

Seeing Kuyuban frozen, Yavan nodded quickly and began to back away. Kuyuban nodded too.

“Before you go—a message,” the Kisar said, just as they began to turn away.

“For who?”

“You. All of you.” The Kisar rested his hand on the pommel of his sword, a message in itself to Yavan. “Those other things you offer—we will want them, too, in time. But when we want them, we will not barter for them. We will take them.”

“‘You speak very politely now,’ Mokos said, ‘and I accept your offer. For years uncounted I have been the Lady of this land, its soil and its snow; but until now I never had a Lord to join together the men that dwell here, to make them all one family within a single tent. You shall be Kisar, the first; and to you and those that follow you I give my dark soil, to work and to bring forth its fruits. The whole of this land, from the frozen sea in the north to the shining river in the south, shall be home to you.’

“And so they wed; and at their wedding feast they gave as a gift to all Kaman the dark soil, and became the mother and father of all the people of Kaman, and commanded them to give up their scattered homes and come together to be one people. I was there; I was the last to come and the last to go; I drank the last bowl of soup, and the last drop still sits in my beard.”

So the old man finishes his story, and he looks at us as though he expects that to explain all. Perhaps, for a savage like him, such stories do; to us he is useless.

Now that he has finished speaking we can hear that the screaming has stopped. The bridges are burning, and they have not crossed. Bayakul, our sister across the water, is gone, but we have been spared.

“Do not worry, men of the south,” the old man says from the darkness. “You are safe on this side of the river. This is your home, and we would not destroy it.

“It is a good thing, to have a home.”

Four stars

Dinner for two $120–$160 with wine, tax and tip

Wheelchair accessible

Don’t be fooled by Long Pig’s name—it’s not another Szechuan hot pot place on the Spadina strip. Chef Nimith Keo is well-known from his stints as head chef at Chimayo Bistro and Aubergine, both fondly recalled restaurants, but it’s Long Pig he’ll be remembered for. It’s a fascinating, eclectic mix of haute and low, a fusion (how overused that word, how appropriate here!) of cuisines including his native Cambodian as well as Mexican, Caribbean and even Polynesian; it’s also quite possibly the best restaurant in town.

The decor at Long Pig is sparse but elegant, reflecting the chef’s Buddhist principles: a mural of the Angkor Wat temples covers the wall and a few bronze figurines are clustered around the entryway but otherwise the watchword is clean and clear, with white tablecloths, bamboo chairs and a simple place setting, a single wooden fork and spoon for each diner.

Unlike at Aubergine, where Keo was famous for the wonders he worked with bean curd and vegetables, the common theme running through Long Pig’s menu is meat. After the
amuse-bouche
—tiny, succulent bones like short ribs, braised in a chili-fired sauce, one per diner—we begin with a gently fragrant broth of ginger and scallions, into which has been shaved flecks of dried pink meat that taste surprisingly, but pleasantly, like Spam.

Our server informs us that after the ribs and soup we are to use the wooden fork only to eat the remaining dishes. We find this more than adequate to eat the plate of greens that comes next, a mound of bok choy and Chinese broccoli in which no meat could be seen but which have been soaked through with a deep umami taste (ground bones and marrow, the server informs us). Skepticism arises, however, at the sight of the dish that follows, which the menu refers to as “two-legged mutton”: a steamed lotus leaf stuffed with sticky rice and thick chunks of dense, deeply pink flesh. Our faith in Keo is rewarded, though, and the meat falls to pieces at the first prodding of our forks. As with the broth there is a hint of corned beef, intensely meaty and just a bit gamy, but this is a subtle and complex experience to which the canned product stands as a boardwalk portraitist does to Rembrandt. Unfortunately the most intriguing item on the menu—a Mexican dish with pre-Columbian roots called “Precious Eagle-Cactus Fruit”—is not available that night; in fact, we are told it will only be served on the restaurant’s last day of operation. We make a mental note to return on that unhappy day.

To our surprise Chef Keo himself comes out to discuss our choices with us. He explains the thinking behind Long Pig’s menu. “In my childhood, in Cambodia, we had nothing,” he says. “Under the Khmer Rouge everyone who had any kind of Western education was killed or had to run away. When I ran away I met a man who had been trained as a French chef. We were eating grass, worms—anything at all to survive. If we had any meat, any kind at all, we would be grateful for it, but for him it was always not just something to eat but ingredients, things you could make into something more. When he was finished cooking you would not know you had a worm or something worse in your mouth. We all gave what we could, and since I was too small to give I learned from him how to cook what we had. We lived many months like this, and in the end only I survived.

“This makes me very mindful of food,” he goes on. “Do you know what is meant by
mindful
? Then when I come here as a refugee I see people are not mindful of food at all, shovel it in their mouths like coal in a furnace. When I became a chef I want people to eat mindfully—not to eat as though they are starving!

“As a Buddhist, I did not feel comfortable cooking with meat. As I am progressing in my practice I feel this more strongly, which is why I left Chimayo Bistro. But as I am progressing as a chef, I feel the absence of meat puts a limit on what I can do.”

As fondly as we recall Aubergine, after the meal we have just eaten we cannot disagree. “It is then I recall the first part of the step-by-step discourse of the Hinayana, which we call dana, ‘giving.’ Ordinarily in
dana
we are giving away the things that belong to us, which helps us to release our hold on this illusion of reality; also the receiver is changed, made more mindful by the gift.

“Thinking on this for a long time, I remembered the gift my teacher the French chef gave me. I saw then how I could be a good Buddhist and a good chef, and serve meat that is given freely, without suffering.”

I confess that I am not fully able to appreciate the theological underpinnings of Chef Keo’s cooking, but I thank him deeply for the gift he has given us with Long Pig. As he wheeled himself away from the table and I turned back to my plate of two-legged mutton, it occurred to me that in this city where chefs hop like fleas from kitchen to kitchen, a place as “mindful” as this is one to savour. Head down to Long Pig while you still can.

“Don’t you know where those are from?”

I paused, glanced down at the cardboard crate that held the grapes I was about to pick up. It had a grinning cartoon devil on it and the words
PRODUCT OF HELL
.

Half-shrugging I turned away. Half the things on the shelves had that sticker on them, and if they didn’t odds were they had an ingredient or two from there.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “They have grapes grown here, you know. Organic.”

I turned back to her, spread my arms so she could see the threadbare coat I was trying to make last another winter. “Do I look like I can afford anything organic, artisanal or locally made to you?” I asked.

Ms. Ethics was undeterred. “You shouldn’t buy them at all then,” she said.

“Listen,” I said, “if you want to pay ten dollars a pound for mouldy grapes that’s your business, but leave me alone, okay?” She wasn’t the first person I’d heard this routine from, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first person she’d said it to. Every now and then there was a fuss about all the cheap imports that came from Hell, but the boycott had never really caught on. Most people didn’t much mind where the things they bought came from as long as they were good and cheap, so every time the people that made them started asking for better pay or anything like that the factories just moved—from Mexico to Thailand, Vietnam to China and finally to Hell, where nobody ever asked for a break or a raise. It wasn’t like the SAY NO TO LIMBO campaign, anyway, with all those pictures of the un-baptized babies hooking rugs. I mean, people go to Hell because they deserve it, right?

I’m not sure what I was expecting—for her to leave in a huff, maybe, or else keep hectoring me. Instead she just turned away, shaking her head. “I used to believe that,” she said, as though she’d read my mind.

I didn’t give the business any more thought until I heard her voice again, outside in the parking lot. I kept walking, thinking I might fool her into thinking I hadn’t heard her call after me.

“Hey,” she said again, and I stopped. It was no use: she wasn’t going to let me go without giving me another piece of her mind.

I turned to face her. “What?” I asked, shivering in the damp cold.

A pained look crossed her face and she glanced away. “I’m—I just wanted to say I’m sorry, for bothering you in there. It was none of my business.”

“Oh.” Now I really felt like a jerk. She looked tiny out here, swamped in a ski jacket the same grey as the sky above her and the concrete below. Strands of straight black hair trailed out from under her red toque. “Don’t worry about it,” I said after looking at her a second too long. “You’re right. I should think more about what I’m buying.”

“No—you shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. She looked around quickly, taking in all corners of the nearly empty parking lot. “Did you drive here?”

Here we go, I thought. If she didn’t like the grapes, she’ll hate the Microbus. I half-shrugged, turned and patted the VW’s side, still recognizably red after all these years. “I know it’s not very efficient,” I said, “but it’s recycled—I’m the fourth guy to own it. That’s gotta be worth something, right?”

She laughed. “You must have a big family.”

“Just me,” I said, praying I might dodge another bullet. “See, I don’t really have a regular place—what I mean is I’m on the move a lot, so . . .”

“You live in your car?”

This was it: I was about to shoot back up to Public Enemy Number One. “It’s a bus,” I said. “A Microbus.”

“That is
so cool
.”

I admit it: I fell in love with her in that instant. “It’s not that great.”

She leaned past me, peered into the VW’s windows. “So you just keep all your stuff in there and go wherever you want?”

“What I’ve got. Mostly it’s just a few clothes and my guitar.” I shrugged. “I’m a . . . a musician. Sometimes.”

She nodded, turned to face me and held her hand out forcefully. “Margaret,” she said. When I gave her my hand she shook it forcefully. “Now you’re supposed to say your name.”

“Oh. Will. Will, I’m Will.”

“Will, I’m Will,” she said, nodding slowly. “So where are you headed next, Will?” she asked.

“Anywhere, I guess. Someplace I can play, I hope, or at least learn some new songs.” I shrugged, threw my shoulders. “Somewhere warmer than this, maybe.”

The smile vanished from her face, and she shook her head twice. “Warmth is overrated,” she said.

It probably won’t surprise you much to hear that she came with me that night, though it sure surprised me. Things weren’t too close in the Microbus, really—neither of us were more than a few inches past five feet tall, so we had plenty of space—and we were both able to keep our distance longer than you’d think. Before too long, though, we got closer in the way men and women will.

Only we never got too close, I guess, or I would have asked some of the questions I thought of later: questions like why she never liked to be any place where too many people could see her, or why she never would tell me much about where she had come from the day I met her, or how it was she was in a position to be leaving town with a stranger in a Microbus at all.

Maybe I was too startled by her being with me at all to question any part of it, or busy with what I jokingly called my career. Things had started to pick up in that area: word got around, maybe, that I put on an entertaining show, or else the tide of taste just turned briefly in my favour. For a few months the Microbus took us from town to town—mostly sad little places where the factory had closed, the jobs gone to Hell, and the people had nothing left to do but serve each other coffee.

One night we were at a club called Raskolnikov’s, an old-style coffee house where you could still see aging hipsters in goatees and berets. It didn’t look like much but it had a loyal clientele, and I knew this might be my biggest audience for a while. I spent a long time working on my set list—lots of trad folk and blues, songs some of them might have heard the first time on vinyl.

The stage was tiny, barely big enough for me and my guitar case, and the blue stage light was burnt out so that just the white and the red burned down on me. The crowd, not packed but generous, was seated at small round tables; I’d played to this sort of house before, so I knew I had to get their attention right off. I squinted into the lights, spotted Margaret sitting over by the door. She flashed me a nervous grin and I leaned into the mike, started up a fast version of “Reuben James” without saying anything. By the last chorus a few people were singing along, so I rolled right into “Rock Island Line,” eighty miles an hour, and then right after that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” three fast songs without a break. I was sweating by the end of that, I can tell you, and I barely had the breath left to introduce myself.

After that I let myself slow down a little, played “Lonesome Traveler” and “Joe Hill.” I’d been doing a lot more shows since Margaret joined me, and it was paying off now: for the first time I felt like I could ask for the audience’s attention and get it, like I deserved it, and after a half-dozen songs I had the attention of everyone in the room.

Almost. There was one man I could tell I wasn’t reaching, sitting halfway back. He didn’t look much like the rest of the crowd, leaning back in his chair and wearing a black dress shirt and a bright red tie. I did “Midnight Special” next, really throwing myself into it, but he still was just staring off into space. Except that I saw, when I looked real close, that it wasn’t space he was staring at: it was Margaret.

I let the rest of the show sort of slide from there, playing mostly slower songs and sing-alongs. Margaret didn’t say anything about him after the show, and I almost let myself forget about it. I knew that I didn’t have a right to ask her anything—I’d certainly never volunteered much about myself—but in the end I couldn’t resist.

“Who was that guy at the show?” I asked.

We were both lying on our backs in our doubled-up red sleeping bag, and neither of us moved. “What guy?” Margaret said.

“That guy. He was looking at you.” I rolled over onto my side to face her. “He had a red tie on, sitting near the back? He was staring at you the whole show.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She hadn’t turned to face me, still looking up at the ceiling, and I knew if I kept going I would cross the line—but I’ve never been able to keep to one side of that line. “He looked like he knew you.”

“I didn’t see him.” Now she rolled onto her side, but away from me, and I didn’t say anything more. Instead I just lay there in the darkness, listened to her breathe for a long time until I knew she was asleep.

In the morning I made some excuse to be out of the bus for a long while, and when I got back I was surprised to still find her there—but it was just that I hadn’t given her enough time: she was packing the few things she had when I opened the doors.

“Going?” I asked.

She didn’t look up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said—not bitter or angry, just sad. “I have to.”

“You don’t have to go now. I can drop you somewhere.”

Her eyes scrunched shut, and then she turned to me. Her cheeks were red and damp. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re coming to pick me up.”

“They?”

“I’m a fugitive, Will. From Hell. That’s where I had come from, when I met you. Now they’re—” She turned back to her bag, ran her hand across her eyes. “I can’t run anymore.”

“Is our life really worse than Hell?” I asked.

“It’s not that. I just—I don’t deserve this life. I don’t deserve you. I should be where I belong.”

“Wait,” I said, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder. “We can go, right now. Just keep running—”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She picked up her bag, stepped past me and out of the bus. “I have to go.”

I watched her as she walked away, waiting to see who it was that was going to pick her up; instead she just kept going until finally she faded into the distance, and I was alone.

For a few nights after that I tried to keep going, but it was no use. When I had lost people before it was always because I pushed them away; this time I hadn’t been given the chance. The more time passed, the more I felt sure that even if I didn’t deserve her, she didn’t deserve Hell.

You wouldn’t think it would be hard to find your way into Hell: enough people have told me to go there. I kept on playing shows, hoping to see the man with the red tie again, but I never did. I looked through all the articles in the magazines and the newspapers that talked about how bad the conditions there were, but none of them said how to get there. I even talked to the organizers of one of the boycott groups, but they couldn’t help either.

Finally I got an idea. I parked the Microbus in the parking lot of one of those big stores, the ones where the Good Sams park their RVs, and staked the place out. I felt a bit bad about leaving the old VW behind—it had carried me a lot of miles, probably more than I deserved—but there was no way it could go where I was headed.

After five days camping there I hit paydirt: a big truck full of cheap sneakers pulled up, and I wandered near enough to the loading dock to see the boxes all had the little devil logo on them. I had worked a loading dock or two in my time, so I knew when my chance would come—once the guys were done they huddled in the dock for a smoke break, leaving the truck open so that it would look like they were still unloading it. Patting the Microbus goodbye I crept up to the truck and climbed inside, moved to the back where the shadows were deepest and crouched down low.

A long time seemed to pass before they finally closed the truck, but eventually I felt the engine starting and we began to move. I don’t really know how long I was in there, though it was long enough for me to get some bruised ribs; the roads got worse and worse as we drove, until finally the truck came to a stop. There were two sharp raps on the side, and a second later the truck door opened up. I blinked at the light, saw someone peering in.

“Come on out,” he said. I got to my feet, walked stiffly to the door and climbed out. We were stopped at some kind of border crossing; there was a traffic gate in front of the truck, with a booth at the hinge end of it. I supposed it was the man in the booth who had spoken: he was standing by the truck, now, dressed in a grey military-style shirt and pants and a dark red baseball cap. He was blind, his eyes nothing but dark sockets. “We don’t take hitchhikers.”

I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the light, but there wasn’t much around to look at: the road we were on ran through an endless plain on either side of the gate, the sky a dull grey overhead. “I’m not escaping,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody gets in here unless they deserve it.”

I remembered an old story then, about one time a musician got a special exception in this place, so I started up with “Black Is the Colour”:

Black is the colour of my true love’s hair
Her lips are rosy something fair
If my love no more I see
My life it swiftly will leave me.

When I had finished the third verse a tear ran from out of his left eye socket. He nodded, went back into his booth and raised the gate.

I can’t really say now what I was expecting Hell to be like: fire and brimstone, I guess, lakes of sulphur and pits of burning coals. It wasn’t like that, though, at least not where I was. Instead it was just like a town, one of those little ones you pass through and wonder how anyone could live there, only it went on forever. It didn’t have any shops, or restaurants, or clubs or coffee houses—all it had were jobs, the ones it had taken away from all those other little towns. There were the farms where the grapes and other things were grown, sneaker factories and t-shirt sweatshops, stock boiler rooms and call centres—it’s always dinnertime when you call from Hell. Somewhere, in all this, was Margaret.

I never saw any demons, either, or even the man with the red tie. In fact I never saw anybody but us sinners, hard at work. Nobody had to make you get to do your job; any time you went to take a break the bad feelings would rise up in you and make you realize you didn’t deserve it, and you got back to work. There’s no rest for the wicked, they say, and all of us in that place were surely wicked.