Olympia (4 page)

By late August, Olga Korbut was wowing the whole world and Uncle Günter was up to eight coffee breaks a day. He wanted to stay down there. Working and standing around. My mother and father wanted him out. Monika had taken to borrowing the Chrysler and disappearing every day. I guessed she'd had enough of waiting for Günter. She drove to the Elora Gorge, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Detroit. She went to Toronto a couple of times a week, to London, to Kingston, and Wolfe Island. When she was gone, when an event Ruby and I didn't much care for came on TV, we went out to the backyard, hung our feet over the side, and watched our uncle stand around at the bottom of the pool. On the grass we played under the sprinkler to bring home to him our desperation, our need of water. I thought the pool would remain dry forever. I walked around the house all day, drinking water from a glass. Günter had become a fixture down there, his trowel, the cement mixer my father had reluctantly borrowed from a friend from work, the three moon-eyed bubbles of the level watching his slow dance among the forgotten artifacts at the bottom of a dried sea.

One day, after playing in the sprinkler, we sat on the deck with our glasses of water and listened to Günter speak to us. Neither of us understood a word. For the whole afternoon he told us what sounded like stories. We sat there, embarrassed to stop him, forced to listen to the end of his ramblings, sipping, forever sipping. Sometimes as he spoke he became angry and then immediately fell silent, or laughed and slapped an open palm against his thigh. We sat at the edge of the hole in the ground and watched him move like a lion in a pit among his tools, picking up things and examining them, holding them up to the sun as he spoke. Clouds of dry cement dust rose from below and slowly enveloped us and caked our throats. He covered palm-sized patches of wall as if throwing a white cloth over an old movie set from
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
.

On a Saturday after supper, after Günter and Monika had been with us for three weeks, my parents left me in charge of Ruby. They took Günter into the city to go dancing at Club Edelweiss, a German-Canadian restaurant where my father sometimes played accordion with a band, or soloed for small parties. When my uncle reluctantly agreed to go, Monika suddenly developed a headache. She said she was tired from her day of sightseeing. She sat on the front porch with Ruby, a glass of wine in her hand, and waved when the car pulled out of the driveway. I went around the back and climbed into the pool for the first time.

I crawled around in the shallow end like Günter had that first day, exploring. I kept my eyes open. I didn't know what to expect. But I wanted to go deep. I wanted to find out something about my mother's brother. I knew nothing but the war stories, the outstretched hands reaching for freight trains. In
Decisive Decades
, our school history text, I'd read about the Potsdam Conference, the great shifting of borders after the Control Council agreed to deport more than six million Germans beyond the Oder-Neisse line. I knew this was the uprooting of my mother's people. But about Günter himself I saw now that I knew very little. On my haunches I slid down the dusty incline to the deep end and felt the sides of the pool squeeze the world into a box of evening sky above my head. At my feet extension cords twisted like snakes, trowels sharp and weapon-like, a sawhorse, the three-foot level, a half-used bag of cement, and an old red toolbox.

“You don't want to be anything like him, do you?”

I looked up. The sun was settling behind the apartments across the street from the house. A last shaft of light spiralled between the buildings and lit up Monika's face at a ninety degree angle, collecting in the glass in her right hand. “What's down there for you?” she said.

“I dropped something.”

“Well, get it quick and get back up here or he'll rub off on you,” she said. Then she walked away.

In the kitchen the next day, while I was getting a handful of cookies for Ruby and myself, Günter came in and said in his broken English, “I need help. Come here.” I didn't answer him. He poured himself a glass of lemonade, drank it down, and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him into the backyard, jumped down into the shallow end, and felt the cookies in my pocket snap into little bits.

“You a smart boy?”

I nodded. “But I'm not very good with my hands.”

“Hold this.” He handed me a trowel. “Make so.” He started smoothing plaster along the north wall of the deep end. I watched him for a minute. He started whistling. Then he stopped and turned to me. “
Ja?
”

I stooped over, took some plaster onto my trowel and stepped up to the nearest wall. I remembered what Monika had said about him rubbing off on me. But he was my mother's brother. What harm?
How would you want him to treat the both of you in his country?
my mother had asked us in the car on the way to the airport to pick them up.

“You watch too much TV,” he said.

I was spreading the plaster in broad arcs. I stopped and turned around. “The Olympics are important,” I said. “It's the Family of Nations.”

“Okay,” he said, “get lost.”

On a Saturday into the fourth week of the visit—during which not an ounce of rain had fallen from the sky—my mother told us that she'd had enough. We were going to Kelso, she said. We were going to find water. We were going to bathe in clean cool water.

The artificial lake is the main attraction at the Kelso Conservation Area. There are two beaches on the south shore, divided by a grassy hill on top of which sits a parking lot and, on the opposite slope, the outfitters where my father and I had, on a couple of occasions, rented a sailboat. No matter how hard the sun comes down on you there, no matter which shore you stand on, you can always hear the traffic going by on the 401 just beyond the poplar and spruce trees on the north hill. There are rainbow in the lake, too, but I'd never caught anything other than rock bass and sunfish, though I'd always wanted to catch a trout. That Saturday I brought my fishing rod along with me, just in case.

After we got organized in the parking lot, unloaded the picnic baskets and towels and umbrella and magazines and my fishing rod, the six of us walked down the wooden stairs to the beach like three distinct couples. Monika, her large floppy sunhat flapping like a bird, walked a step ahead of her husband. He looked sullen. He hadn't spoken in the car the whole way up. My mother seemed nervous. She swung the picnic basket about grandly from hand to hand, distracting attention from something. I thought maybe she was thinking about her brother. Then I wondered if it was the memory of last summer that was bothering her, if she was worried about my father. If this trip to water would trigger the memory of his mother's drowning. But my father joked with Ruby and me as we walked down the wooden stairs. On the way here he'd worn a pair of black sunglasses. Ruby said he looked like a gangster. Halfway down the stairs he turned around to us, his rolled-up towel hidden clumsily under his baggy summer shirt like a bag of money, and said in a terrible Italian accent, “Meester Capone wantsa you to doa littlea favore fora la Familia,” and Ruby laughed and jumped up for his glasses like a little barking dog. I carried the rod and tackle and the second lunch basket. We'd all changed into our bathing suits at home.

We found an empty stretch of sand at the far end of the first beach, close to an old man and woman. Someone's grandparents, I imagined. But they were alone. No kids. No grandchildren. Their loose skin covered their bodies like a translucent wrap. My father and I smoothed out the hot sand with our bare feet. We laid out our towels side by side, six in a row like the stained-glass windows of a church. We peeled off our street clothes, settled down, and waited to get hot enough to go in. I sat down beside Monika. Ruby went down to the water and waded in up to her knees to check the temperature.

Monika's legs stretched out beside me. She was wearing a bikini. Her long brown hair shone in the sun. My mother always wore a one-piece. No mothers on the beach wore bikinis. No other women had long hair. Monika had never had a baby. Her stomach was flat and her legs were still slender. She was twirling a lock of hair between two fingers, eyes closed. Her right knee was raised slightly in the air, her breasts pulling apart from the centre of her chest in a way that made me want to keep looking.

“Have you caught fish in here?” she said without opening her eyes.

“Some,” I said. I saw my uncle watching me over the rim of his sunglasses. I turned away and faced the lake.

There were a lot of people swimming, splashing around on inflatable mattresses and dinghies. I got up and walked alone along the edge of the water but I couldn't get Monika out of my head. I wondered if Günter had seen what I was thinking. I watched the red and green sailboats out on the lake, their white hulls pulled up on the wind, shining against the water. They picked up speed and skimmed across the small lake, lowered because of the drought, and then, trapped, tacked back against the wind. I tried thinking about sailing, about the fishing I would do later that afternoon, about gymnastics. I tried to think about the Olympics. But Monika kept coming back to me. I entered the shade of the woods and leaned my back against an elm and looked for Monika's pink skin in the crowd in the distance. I waited under an overhanging branch hoping, impossibly, that she'd come to me. I hoped she'd leave my uncle and join me. I put my hand down the front of my bathing suit and conjured the sight of Monika in the lawn chair, her long legs crossed like I thought only movie stars crossed their legs, the glass of wine hanging low to the ground before she raised it to her red lips. I closed my eyes and saw her on the beach in her bikini, her breasts pulling away from her, one towards me, the other off on its own, its hard dark eye staring down a lucky admirer. I cleaned my hands on the grass at the base of the elm, then moved out from the shade of the trees. The warmth of the sun spread over my back. In the distance I saw my aunt take my sister by the hand and lead her over the sand to the water. They both bellyflopped once they were up to their thighs, still holding hands, and came up a moment later in a white froth. I was still trembling. My underarms were drenched. Everybody was in the water except my uncle and me. My father called when he saw me and waved for me to come in. Uncle Günter sat watching all alone up on the beach, his sunglasses pulled up over his face. I wondered if he knew what I'd just done.

After lunch I took my fishing rod and tackle to the other end of the lake and fished the small stream that fed the reservoir. From there I could see the two beaches stretching out over the opposite shoreline, the hill rising between them like a broad nose. With my hands I dug up some worms, put them in the small plastic container I kept in my tackle box, and slid the first worm along a size-fourteen hook. I threw it out into a pool and let the worm sink to the bottom. I caught a trout for the first time in my life. Slick and spotted, he was beautiful. I killed him with my penknife and dropped him into a plastic bag. He wasn't a prize, but he was big enough to keep. In an hour I caught three more pan-size rainbows. Before leaving the stream I rinsed the blood off the fish. I carried the plastic bag in my left hand as I walked back to the beach. It thumped against my thigh with every step. By the time I got back a little puddle of blood had formed in the heavier corner of the bag.

When I held it up for everyone to see, Ruby made silly noises and plugged her nose. My mother peered down over the lip of stretched plastic. I told my father what I'd used, what part of the stream I'd fished, how each fish had hit. With a finger under the gill, I scooped up the biggest trout and held him in the air. Monika leaned on an elbow. I described how I'd moved each one to the top of the pool and enticed them to jump by lifting the tip of the rod against the sky. The old couple listened to my story from the next set of beach towels. My mother emptied out what was left in the cooler, a bit more egg salad and some juice, and laid out the trout side by side. I looked at the grandparents again after she closed the lid. The man was rubbing lotion onto his wife's shoulders. I watched how he warmed the cream in his large hands before spreading it over her skin. She faced the water. Her head moving gently with his rubbing motion. That's when I saw the numbers tattooed like dark crawling ants into the loose white skin of his forearm.

My mother sat in the shade of the umbrella. She was flipping through a magazine with Ruby, the one she always had lying around,
Pattern &
Design,
pointing out the dresses and sweaters she wanted to make for her for the fall. Monika was still in the sun. She was working on the last of the wine from lunch. After the fish went into the icebox she'd stretched out on her back. There was a line of sweat in the slight crease of her abdomen.

“The wind's good, Peter,” my father said. “What do you say?”

I grabbed my shirt and we started for the stairwell. But my heart sank when I heard Günter's rushed footsteps coming up behind us in the parking lot. I wanted my father to say that there wouldn't be enough room in the sailboat, which wouldn't have been stretching the truth that much. But I knew he wouldn't. Maybe he thought Uncle Günter was coming around. Maybe he was coming out of the brooding that had possessed him since he arrived because they were leaving soon. Maybe he was making it up to us.

My father put down the deposit and left his driver's licence with the man at the desk. We got number 45, a blue two-man Laser. Although I knew there'd be no problem with three people, I wanted the man at the desk to say that one of us would have to sit it out. New regulations on crowding. Even if it was me. But he only nodded his head and smiled. He helped my uncle and my father lift the boat off the racks. They carried it over the gravel driveway and nosed it into the lake. I followed behind with the life jackets and tossed them into the cockpit.

“Let's see if we can break the sound barrier today,” my father said once we got started. We began slowly, cutting through the water, tacking our way out of the shallow bay. There were other boats in the middle of the lake, small, no other blue ones except ours, different colours cutting across the water like coloured shark fins. As we made our way to tap into the stream of wind that swept across the middle of the lake, I noticed that Günter wasn't comfortable out here. In the sailboat or on the water, I couldn't tell. But I knew right off that he didn't know anything about sailing. He hadn't come swimming with the rest of us, either. But he followed my father's instructions without questioning—where to sit, how to move with the boat. He tried to show interest by asking after the boat's mechanics, pointing to the jib and boom and knocking his knuckles against the top of the centreboard. I wondered why he was out with us.