The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (31 page)

“How did she do it?” Aymeric asked.

“She knows someone.”

They fell silent, admiring the empty chair.

“Who wants the last strawberry tart?” said Monique. When no one answered, she cut it in three.

“We will have to rearrange the space,” said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out.

Aymeric said, “Try to find out what she did with that snuffbox. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding present.”

“I’ll look again in the oven,” Monique said.

“Ask her carefully,” said Aymeric. “Don’t frighten her. Sometimes she remembers.”

Robert went on tracing invisible lines.

Walter came back in September to find his kitchen under occupation, full of rusted sieves and food mills and old graters. On the stove was a saucepan of strained soup for the old woman’s supper; a bowl of pureed apricots stood uncovered in the sink. He removed everything to the old woman’s kitchen.

I was brought up so soundly, he said to himself. He had respected his parents; now he admired them. At home, nothing had made him feel worried or tense, and he hadn’t minded his father’s habit of reading the newspaper aloud while Walter tried to watch television. When his father answered the telephone, his mother called, “What do they want?” from the kitchen. His father always repeated everything the caller said, so that his mother would not miss a word of the conversation. There were no secrets, no mysteries. What Walter saw of his parents was probably all there was.

After cleaning his rooms and unpacking his suitcase, Walter called on Robert. He had meant to ask how they had spent their holidays, if in spite of the old lady they had managed to get away, but instead he found himself telling about a remarkable dream he’d had in Switzerland: A large badger had burst into the gallery and taken Walter’s employer hostage.
Trout Face had said, “You’re not getting away with this. I’m not having anybody running around here with automatic weapons.” It was not a nightmare, said Walter. He had seen himself, aloof and nonchalant, enjoying the incident.

Robert said he would look it up. That night he made a neat stack of the books Walter had lent him – all that he could still find – and left it outside his locked front door. He wrote on the back of a page torn off a calendar, “Dream of badger taking man hostage means a change of residence, for which the dreamer should be prepared. R.” He rewrote this several times, changing a word here and there. In the morning, after starting the record and opening all the windows, he sat down and read his message again. He kept running his finger over the note, as he had traced new boundaries on Walter’s table, and seemed to be wondering if there was any point in trying to say the same thing some other way.

1984

I first met Mavis Gallant in Montreal in 1950. We were introduced by John Sutherland, the editor of
Northern Review
, the pioneering Canadian “little magazine” where one of her earliest short stories was published. At the time, there were no more than fifty bookshops from coast to coast in Canada, and most of them were really no more than glorified stationery stores. Notable exceptions to that rule were Burton’s and Classics in Montreal and Britnell’s in Toronto. The indigenous writers we knew of and respected were Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Roger Lemelin, Hugh MacLennan, and Gabrielle Roy, and beyond them there seemed to be only thousands of miles of wheat and cultural indifference. The commonly asked questions put to those of us who were starting out were, “Under what name do you write?” as if the act itself was suspect, or, “Yes, but what do you do for a living?” or, “Good grief, you mean to say you are going to become a
Canadian
writer?”

In these cornucopia days of Canadian best-sellers, Canada Council grants, reading tours, prizes, and at least some newspaper book pages that are not an embarrassment, it is worth remembering that there was a time when any serious writer who sold more than a thousand copies in Canada of his or her novel or short story collection was doing amazingly well. Back
in those days S. Morgan-Powell, the resident critic of the Montreal
Star
, denounced both
The Naked and the Dead
and, later,
The Catcher in the Rye
as “dirty books,” which seems charming in retrospect, and William Arthur Deacon, the more influential critic of the Toronto
Globe and Mail
, was equally picayune. Changes were in the wind. The audacious Jack McClelland, back from the war, had just inherited the reins at McClelland and Stewart, and the admirable Robert Weaver was beginning to establish himself at the CBC. Between the two of them, they contrived to sponsor writers who would yank Canlit into the twentieth century, but we had no way of knowing that yet.

John Sutherland, a dedicated but fierce man, set the type for
Northern Review
, circulation 400 or so, on a flat-bed press in his basement. I first encountered the short stories of Ethel Wilson in its pages, and – once Sutherland had veered sharply to the right – the poetry of Roy Campbell, who had supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Patrick Anderson was a regular fixture at
Northern Review
parties, as were an unhappy Stephen Leacock Jr., F.R. Scott, and, on occasion, Irving Lay-ton, who was seldom without a briefcase stuffed with copies of his most recent poetry collection for sale. But I did not meet Mavis at one of those rambunctious, hard-drinking evenings that often ended in a brawl. When Sutherland discovered that both Mavis and I were bound for Paris, he arranged for the three of us to get together for lunch. Mavis was already a local journalist of repute, a glamorous figure, and I was still a college student, ostensibly cocksure but actually awash in printed rejection slips. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Mavis’s photograph on top of her column in the Montreal
Standard
, as the Saturday edition of the
Star
was then called. Mavis, looking decidedly saucy in her beret. The first of what would become an increasingly brilliant flow of her short stories had already been accepted by
The New Yorker.

We met regularly in Paris, going to dinner or the theatre, Mavis tolerant of my foolish, wispy beard. Then I drifted on to Ibiza and London, and years would pass before we managed to get together again in Paris, New York, or Montreal.

It amazed me that Canadian recognition of Mavis Gallant as one of our most gifted writers was so long in coming, most likely because, to her credit, she never ran with the Canlit hounds, but instead chose “exile, cunning.” Once, during the ’70s, Mavis, who had come to Canada on a university reading tour, phoned me in Montreal. She had been astonished by the hostility of Canadian cultural nationalists who demanded to know why she wrote stories about damn foreigners and why she continued to live abroad, as if that were an act of treachery.

There is a story I cherish about Mavis. Once, I’m told, a naive young Canadian reporter asked her, “Why do you live in Paris?”

To which Mavis replied, “Have you ever been to Paris?”

Mavis Gallant’s prose is impeccable, her intelligence daunting, but what is most impressive to me is the ease with which she assumes so many diverse identities in her stories, getting the social nuances and inner-life details exactly right, settling for nothing less than a character’s tap-root. Possibly it should come as no surprise that in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” she should faultlessly render a feckless international civil servant, the butt-end of a once prosperous Presbyterian family, adrift in Geneva, filing photographs for an obscure
UNESCO
agency – Peter Frazier of the Ontario Fraziers. After all, she must have endured more than one such emotionally frozen bore in her formative Canadian years, never mind obligatory expatriate dinner parties in Paris. “If he had been European he would have ridden to work on a bicycle, in the uniform of his class and condition. He would have worn a tight coat, a turned collar, and a dirty tie. He wondered then if
coming here had been a mistake, and if he should not, after all, still be in a place where his name meant something.” Instead, oh dear oh dear, one day he finds himself reduced to working “for a woman – a girl,” Agnes Brusen, a Norwegian out of small-town Saskatchewan, who hangs her university degree on a wall of their shared office that contains two desks, filing cabinets, and a map of the world as it was in 1945. “It was one of the gritty, prideful gestures that stand for push, toil, and family sacrifice.” Eventually, Peter of the Ontario Fraziers is liberated. He leaves for a job in Ceylon after “somebody read the right letter, passed it on for the right initials …”

Given that Mavis is a first-rate storyteller, I suppose it might also be expected of her that, writing in the first-person in “An Autobiography,” she should so movingly portray a Parisian woman who teaches botany to the children of the newly rich in a Swiss school in the immediate postwar years. Two of her pupils are German, and in one damning, typically understated paragraph Mavis tells us more about the new Germany than most writers can manage in a chapter of flat statement. The girls’ “parents certainly speak English, because it was needed a few years ago in Frankfurt, but the children may not remember. They are ignorant and new. Everything they see and touch at home is new. Home is built on the top layer of Ur. It is no good excavating; the fragments would be without meaning. Everything within the walls was inlaid or woven or cast or put together fifteen years ago at the very earliest.”

What is truly remarkable is that in “The Latehomecomer,” writing again in the first person, Mavis can so convincingly imagine young Thomas Bestermann, a German soldier, returning to his forlorn mother’s house in a ravaged Berlin, after having been detained overlong as a prisoner of war in France.

Years ago, V.S. Naipaul complained that he could not write any more novels set in England because he did not know what
an Englishman did when he went home at night. But in this superb story, Mavis, seemingly without effort, never striking a false note, appears to convey precisely how people talked, and what they felt, in a working-class home in Berlin, circa 1950.

Mavis is an astute, unsentimental observer of the expatriate life. Never guilty of an unnecessary sentence, or redundant adjective for that matter, her beautifully composed stories can also be read for the considerable pleasure of their incidental observations. In “The Moslem Wife,” a tale of two British hotel-keepers on the Riviera, she notes: “The Riviera was no place for Americans. They could not sit all day waiting for mail and the daily papers and for the clock to show a respectable drinking time. They made the best of things when they were caught with a house they’d been rash enough to rent unseen.”

She is also blessed with a sure grasp of Ontario. In “In Youth Is Pleasure,” a charming story about a young woman returning from school in New York to the Montreal where she was born, she writes: “The first time I ever heard people laughing in a cinema was there [in New York]. I can still remember the wonder and excitement and amazement I felt. I was just under fourteen and I had never heard people expressing their feelings in a public place in my life. The easy reactions, the way a poignant moment caught them, held them still – all that was new. I had come there straight from Ontario, where the reaction to a love scene was a kind of unhappy giggling, while the image of a kitten or a baby induced a long flat ‘Aaaah,’ followed by shamed silence. You could imagine them blushing in the dark for having said that – just that ‘Aaaah.’ ” In this story, incidently, she conveys how dreadfully easy it is for an intelligent, young single woman to be dismissed and, on occasion, importuned in a man’s world, and she manages this without once stooping to flat statement or feminist cant.

“The Moslem Wife” and the other stories in this volume present some of the many fictional worlds of Mavis Gallant. But, remember, this collection, rich and far-ranging as it is, should count as no more than an introduction to the work of one of our wisest and most gifted writers.

DRAMA
What Is To Be Done?
(1983)

ESSAYS
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews
(1986)

FICTION
The Other Paris
(1956)
Green Water, Green Sky
(1959)
My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel
(1964)
A Fairly Good Time
(1970)
The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories
(1973)
The End of the World and Other Stories
(1974)
From the Fifteenth District:
A Novella and Eight Short Stories
(1979)
Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories
(1981)
Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris
(1985)
In Transit
(1988)
Across the Bridge: New Stories
(1993)
The Moslem Wife and Other Stories
(1994)

Margaret Atwood

The Edible Woman