Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

“‘My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene,’” sings Mimi, one hand lightly stroking the back of her husband’s head.

Jack relaxes behind the wheel. She sings the second verse in German. He is tempted to slow down, make the drive last, there is something so full about these suspended times. When it’s just the two of them and their little family on the road between postings. No neighbours, no relatives, no outside world except the one whizzing past the windows. Two drifters, off to see the world… . Benevolent unknown world. Full tank of gas. A good time to take stock. You can see who you are. You can see what you have. You have everything.

He says to Mimi, “Sing it again, Missus.”

Farms, wide and prosperous, red barn roofs painted with family names, Irish, English, German, Dutch. This is the southern Ontario heartland. “The Golden Horseshoe …,” says Jack to his family. Bounded by three Great Lakes: to the south, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; to the west, Lake Huron. And although on a map its shape resembles more the skull of a steer, Jack is correct in adding, “It’s also known as the Southern Ontario Triangle.” The two descriptions conflate for Madeleine and she pictures a glittering golden triangle on a map, their blue station wagon seen from high above, crawling across it.

“Like the Bermuda Triangle?” she asks.

Her parents exchange a smile. “Nope,” says her father.

Mike turns to her and mouths the word stunned .

Jack explains that in the Bermuda Triangle things are thought to disappear mysteriously, planes and boats vanishing without a trace. The Southern Ontario Triangle is just the opposite. It is packed with people — at least by comparison to the rest of Canada. There are factories and farms, the soil as rich as the cities; orchards of soft fruit down in the Niagara Peninsula and, spanning the whole, vast fields of corn, tobacco, beets, alfalfa; dairy cattle, horses, hogs and high finance. Windsor waves across the water to Detroit; General Motors, pension plans, let the good times roll off the assembly line. The U.S. is, in some places, a stone’s throw away, its branch plants springing up to cluster on the Canadian side, reinforcing bonds across the world’s longest undefended border. As President Kennedy said last year in Canada’s Parliament, “Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.” The best of both worlds.

“How many more miles, Dad?”

“A few. Just sit back and enjoy the scenery.”

Cutting a swath through fields and woodlots are massive marching steel towers. Follow those mighty X-men and they will lead you to Niagara Falls — twelve million gallons per minute to fuel turbines that never stop, the engine of this province and the north-eastern United States. Pure power carried by those columns of upreaching steel, high-voltage honour guard, girders of the golden triangle.

“Are we there yet?”

“Almost.”

This part of the world was one terminus on the Underground Railroad, bordering as it does Michigan and New York State. There are still farms around here run by descendants of slaves who made that journey. People pass by and see a black woman driving a tractor and wonder where she’s from. She’s from here.

A certain amount of smuggling still goes on back and forth across the border — things and, sometimes, people.

Toronto is “the big smoke,” and there are major tourist attractions like Niagara Falls, but at the heart of the Triangle sits the medium-size city of London. There are a lot of insurance companies there. Big American corporations have regional headquarters in London, and products destined for the entire North American market are tested first on the consumers in this area. The manufacturers must think there is something particularly normal about the Southern Ontario Triangle.

“Dad,” Madeleine asks, “why don’t they change Kitchener back to Berlin now that the war is over?”

“Both wars,” he replies, “especially the last one, are still very much in living memory.”

In living colour.

“Yeah, but Germany’s not our enemy now,” says Mike, “Russia is.”

“Right you are, Mike,” says Dad in his man-to-man voice, parade-square clipped, “though you don’t really want to say Russia. Russians are people like anyone else, we’re talking about the Soviets.”

Soviets. The word sounds like a difficult unit of measurement: If Joyce has three soviets and Johnny has twelve, how many soviets would they have if… . Madeleine doesn’t press the issue, but feels that Kitchener probably knows that Kitchener is not its real name. The name change makes it seem as though bright shiny Kitchener has an evil secret: “My name used to be Berlin. Heil Hitler.”

Dad clears his throat and continues, “There’s an old saying: ‘Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.’”

Which is proof that, once your name is Berlin, you should keep it that way. But Madeleine says nothing. There is smart, and there is “being smart.”

There is a wall down the middle of the real Berlin now. It’s part of the Iron Curtain. Madeleine knows that it’s not a real curtain, but the Wall is real. Twenty-nine miles of barbed wire and concrete. The grown-ups say “when the Wall went up” as though it sprang up by magic overnight. “History in the making,” her father called it.

Before the Wall went up, the border ran down the middle of streets, through cemeteries and houses and apartment buildings and people’s beds. You could go to sleep in the U.S.S.R., roll over and wake up in the free world. You could shave as a Communist and breakfast as a free man. Maybe they could build a miniature wall through the middle of Kitchener if they changed its name back to Berlin. That’s not funny. Communism is not funny.

“Dad, are they going to blow up the earth?” she asks.

He answers with a laugh, as though it were the first he’d ever heard of the idea. “Who?” he asks.

“Are they going to press the button?”

“What button?” says Dad. What snake under the bed?

Mike says, “It’s not a button, it’s a metal switch and it takes dual keys, one for each guy, and one guy turns his key, then the other guy—”

“And the chances of that happening,” says Dad in his my-last-word-on-the-subject voice, “are virtually nil.”

“What’s ‘virtually’?” asks Madeleine.

“It means it might as well be zero.”

But it ain’t zero, is it, doc?

They drive in silence for a while.

“But what if they did press the button?” says Madeleine. “I mean, what if they did turn the keys? Would the earth blow up?”

“What are you worrying about that for?” He sounds a little offended. She feels somewhat ashamed, as though she has been rude. It’s rude to worry about the earth blowing up when your dad is right there in the front seat driving. After you’ve had ice cream and everything.

“Would your skin melt?” She didn’t mean to ask, it just slipped out. Picture your skin sliding off after it has melted. Nyah, pass me a wet-nap, doc .

“What makes you think that would happen?” He sounds incredulous, the way he does when she is afraid and he’s comforting her — as if hers were the most groundless fear in the world. It is comforting. Except when it comes to melted skin.

“I saw a picture,” she says.

“Where?”

“In a magazine. Their skin was melted.”

“She’s talking about the Japs,” explains Mike.

His father corrects him. “Don’t say Japs, Mike, say Japanese.”

“Would it melt?” asks Madeleine.

“Can we talk about something nice, au nom du Seigneur?” says Mimi, coming to the end of her tether. “Think nice thoughts, Madeleine, think about what you’re going to wear the first day of your new school.”