My October (35 page)

The students in the auditorium didn't need a window to know that summer had arrived. The air hummed. It was Friday afternoon. The school day was nearly over, and so was the school year. Everyone wanted to be outside. The younger boys, especially, were having a hard time sitting still. Boy energy. Hannah loved to watch it. A gang of them in the row ahead of her had folded their programs into airplanes and were pitching them in every direction. Their teachers were sitting in the first
row with Monsieur Bonnaire. Occasionally, one of them would turn his or her head toward the back of the auditorium and call out a warning, but discipline had clearly relaxed.

A television crew from Radio-Canada came into the room and stood discreetly by the door. Serge Vien, who was seated a few rows behind Hannah, got up and greeted the two men, one of whom was carrying a camera. Hannah turned away from the stage to watch, grateful for a distraction. The presentations were almost over. She had been here for nearly two hours, sitting on a narrow folding seat, breathing recycled air. On the stage, a girl with a long ropelike braid was reading a prize-winning paper about the environment. Hannah tried once more to listen. The girl had developed an ambitious recycling plan for the school, with a detailed collection schedule, for the greater social good. She exhorted everyone to separate their waste plastic and paper and glass, but she wasn't a good motivator. She didn't look up from her page even once, and she ran her words together in a rapid, enervating monotone.

The Radio-Canada cameraman crouched in the aisle next to Hannah, taking a series of establishing shots. Serge Vien, who seemed to be in charge of the event, hovered at his shoulder. He caught Hannah's eye and smiled. He had cut his hair and lost weight. He looked happy, she thought, almost handsome. She smiled back at him.

The cameraman was scanning the podium with his camera. He didn't pause when he reached the girl with the braid. He swung around to take in the audience, catching a couple of paper planes in mid-glide. Then he lowered the camera and stood there, restless and half attentive like the rest of them.

Hannah was nine rows up from the stage. Lyse had chosen
the seats because Hannah had been late, buying the red roses that lay on the floor at her feet encased in clear plastic. The first time she'd received a dozen red roses was the day Hugo was born. Luc had bought them for her, an unexpected romantic gesture she would never forget.

People were clapping. The girl with the braid was finally done. Without looking up, the girl fled the stage, hugging her notes to her chest. Hugo was in the first row with the other speakers. Hannah watched him rise. In the aisle, the man from Radio-Canada rose too and took aim with his camera.

There was no common theme for the talks today. Some of them, like the one on the environment, were scientific. Others dealt with people, or the arts. Some of the speakers had just started high school; others were about to graduate. Serge Vien organized this event every year, apparently, picking the best projects across all disciplines and grades. The sole criterion was excellence.

Hugo ascended the stairs to the stage, his school shirt too big for his narrow frame. He looked younger than fourteen, so slender and small. On her last visit to Toronto, Hannah had studied the internment camp photograph more carefully. The resemblance was striking. In the photo, Alfred had exactly the same slight build, the same dark, intelligent eyes. Her father's genes had come down the bloodline intact, it seemed, skipping over Hannah but replicating quite uncannily in her son.

Serge Vien went back to his seat, from which he manned the computer for the video projection. Luc sat beside him. They had become surprisingly close over the winter, spending a lot of time in each other's company. The Radio-Canada team had spotted Luc. That, Hannah supposed, would settle the matter. The camera would stay pointed at him now, regardless of what
Hugo did or said. Heads began to turn. The boys in front of Hannah left off shooting their paper planes and swivelled in their seats to point. Hannah kept her gaze firmly fixed on her son, her mind willing the media people and everyone else in the room to do the same.

She couldn't alter things by wishing. She couldn't snap her fingers and conjure up another, less noteworthy, father for Hugo, but at least she could give him her own undivided attention. Lyse was facing forward too. Graeme White was in the next seat: her
ami de coeur
, as Lyse now called him.

On the stage, Hugo was battling technical problems. The microphone was one of those small, ultra-finicky devices, and it had been angled too high. The speakers shrieked, and Hugo, startled, dropped his cue cards. As he bent to retrieve them, a ripple of laughter spread across the hall.

Someone from the technical crew came onstage to adjust the microphone, but he had difficulty too. The boy sitting right in front of Hannah began to bounce up and down in his seat. Other boys copied him, and soon the whole row was bobbing. Paper planes whizzed again. Hannah fanned herself with her program. The lectern was too high. It came up to Hugo's nose. There was no way he could put his notes down on it.

Lyse leaned over and patted Hannah's leg. “He'll be fine,” she whispered. “You'll see.”

In the end, Hugo didn't even use notes. The techie gave up on the conventional mic and clipped a portable one to Hugo's collar, slipping a battery pack into his pocket. Hugo stepped away from the lectern. He paused for a second, gazing out at the room. “Whoa,” he said, shielding his eyes with his arm. “It's bright up here.”

His ease took her by surprise. It was as if speaking to seven hundred people came naturally to him.
Le dor va dor.
From generation to generation. Hugo had his father's gifts.

The cameraman, she noted, was no longer pointing his camera at Luc. He'd swung it around to the skinny kid in the baggy shirt, his hands in his pockets, calmly addressing the crowd.

“This project began as a punishment,” Hugo said in a French that struck just the right note between conversational and formal. “When Monsieur Bonnaire proposed it, I can't say I was thrilled. That's because the idea came from the outside, from the principal and teachers at this school.”

He paused, looking down for a moment at his school shoes. Then he looked up again. “But now I see how lucky it all was. It gave me a chance to find out about something important, and I'm not just talking about Quebec history, which happens to be my subject today.”

He paused again. “Before I begin, there are a few people I would like to thank. And, ironically, also an institution. I'd like to thank Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste for forcing me to do this work in the first place.”

A few students laughed, but this time the laughter wasn't snide.

Hugo was scanning the auditorium. “That man over at the projector,” he said, pointing, “was the instigator. I'd like to thank Monsieur Vien for his help with this project, but most of all for sharing his passion for history with me.”

People started to clap, but Hugo held up a hand until the noise abated. “I also want to thank my father, Luc Lévesque, who travelled to England with me and shot most of the footage
you're about to see. He had never held a video camera before. He put in a lot of time and effort. But beyond his technical support, he was just there.”

This time Hugo let the crowd clap. He squinted into the room, nodding when he located Luc. “Other people were there for me too,” he continued after the applause. “My
maman
,” he said, shielding his eyes from the glare and finding Hannah, “and also her
maman
, my grandmother Connie Stern, who couldn't be here today, but who gave me the idea for this presentation.

“I'm not going to say much more, except to warn you that, unlike all the other speakers today, I'm not actually going to speak. It's a change from the usual rules, I know, but there is a reason. I can't use my own words here. The story isn't mine. It belongs to a man who has been silent for thirty-one years. Most of you know his name. You may even think you know his story. But in three decades, he hasn't given us his perspective.

“So, here it is, ladies and gentlemen. His voice. His words. The story of Mr. James Richard Cross, told in his own language.”

He signalled to a boy standing at the light switch and the room went black. A screen above the stage lit up and white cliffs gleamed, towering over a choppy sea.

In the darkness of the auditorium, Lyse's hand reached out and squeezed Hannah's fingers. The footage was exhilarating. They watched as the camera soared, coasting like a bird on the wind, and descended, zeroing in on a lone figure walking on the cliff.

Lyse leaned over so her lips were right up against Hannah's ear. “How did they do that?” she whispered.

“With a hang glider,” Hannah whispered back. It had been Luc's idea. He had noticed some local boys gliding on the cliffs
and simply walked over and asked if they'd mind strapping his camera to a wing.

The figure on the cliff came into sharper focus. His back was curved, his hair white. He walked too slowly to be a young man, although there was resolve in his step. Every so often, he paused to toss a stick for a rangy Irish setter.

A narrator's voice began to speak. Her son's. In English, but French subtitles appeared at the bottom of the frame, translating his words into neat French print for those who did not understand. The man lived in a retirement town called Seaford, two hours south of London by car, and a stone's throw from the chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel.

The man was eighty years old. He had endured, the voice told them, much as the ancient cliffs on which he walked each day had endured, withstanding storms and the pounding elements.

The next images were interiors. Now the old man was inside a cottage, pouring cups of tea from a brown teapot. There was no introduction. The man just started speaking. “My name,” he said, looking straight into the lens of Luc's camera, “is James Richard Cross. My friends and family call me Jasper.”

He seemed quite ordinary, sitting there in a plaid flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, talking about his life and offering Hugo, who was conducting the interview off-camera, tea and cookies. This was the man who had once dined with Hannah's parents in Montreal, the man who had played such a strange role, at once pivotal and peripheral, in the history of her family and her nation.

He spoke of his childhood in Ireland, of going away to university and eventually landing a job as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office in India and Malaysia. Some decades later, when he was nearing fifty, he was stationed in Canada.
He introduced Barbara, his pleasant-looking wife, who stood at the threshold of the living room, not venturing to step over it, watching the interview proceed with round, attentive eyes. He talked in loving tones about their daughter, an only child, who had been a student in Montreal at the time of what he referred to as “the incident.” She now lived in London, making the drive south to Sussex to see her parents at least once a month.

He described the events of October 1970 in detail, as if they had just occurred, and spoke about the effect his abduction had had upon him. Every time he read about a kidnapping in the news, he said, regardless of where it had taken place or who the perpetrators were, it brought him right back, forcefully and viscerally, to October 1970 in Montreal.

He described the room on Avenue des Récollets in the city's north end where he had spent fifty-nine days in captivity. He described how he had been forced to sit with his back to his captors. How he had been forbidden to look at them. If he turned reflexively at a noise, say, or an unexpected movement behind him, they panicked. The woman in the group, whom he knew now to be Jacques Lanctôt's sister, Louise Cossette-Trudel, would scream threats and cock the gun. He had been convinced that he would die.

The scene changed again, and Cross was back on the cliffs. But this time, the camera was at ground level, pointing directly at him. The day was clear and bright. He was walking, shoulders hunched into the wind coming off the water. He recounted how, for the two months of his captivity, he had travelled in his mind back to Ireland, all the way back to his boyhood, anchoring himself in memory. This was how he had survived. Every day, he set himself the task of retrieving a piece of his past. It did not have
to be anything spectacular. The pink and grey bark, for instance, on the trees around his family's home. He did not know the trees' name, but he could picture them, clear as day, with their disturbing and beautiful skin-tone colours. His favourite way to pass the time was thinking about a walk he used to take every day when he was young, from his childhood home to the schoolhouse a mile or so away. It was a form of mental gymnastics, he explained. A discipline to keep him sane, a distraction from his plight, from the soiled mattress on which he was forced to sit, patterned with thin black lines that made him think of prison bars. He got very good at it, picturing, eventually, every turn in the road, every house that bordered it, every memorable rock and tree. Hour after hour, he played his game, reconstructing the private, inviolable world of a lived past.

Hugo never once entered the frame. He was only a voice, interjecting discreetly when Cross had finished with a given subject. Hannah pictured him sitting across from the old man, watching intently, encouraging him with his intelligent brown eyes. His English was perfect, not betraying any hint that he had been raised and schooled in French.

The subject of conversation had switched to politics now. How did Cross see his role in Quebec's history?

The old man joined his fingertips and pressed them to his lips. After a moment's thought, he lifted his head. “I've been a pawn,” he said, looking at the camera. “A pawn in your history. Maybe now, I'll be a face. Not the British diplomat, not the imperialist, but a man. A husband. A father. A human brother.”

The picture froze as he finished this sentence, and then the credits started to roll. Cross's name came first, right in the middle of the screen, and floated up slowly over his head.
Hugo's name came after it. Luc was listed simply as “the cameraman.”