Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“They couldn’t talk? What was it, throat cancer?”

“No, as I said before, these guys were poets, philosophers, men of letters. Remember?” I prodded. “It was just that they felt more comfortable, surer of themselves, when writing. They had time to reflect on what they wanted to say, to test their ideas. To compose.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard – writing to someone in the same room,” she said. “That sort of thing just gets in the way of real feelings. It’s a kind of mask to hide who you really are, and what you’re all about.”

That was her final judgment, and from Janet’s considered decisions there is no appeal, as I have learned to my sorrow. Still, I was almost in love, and at that precarious point one imagines it is important to be understood. So at our next planned meeting, two days later, I took along with me a passage I had copied from one of Gershenzon’s letters. It was to demonstrate to her the subtleties which are the province of the written word, and, more importantly, to signal her what was going on in my mind.

“You see, honey,” I said, trying to explain what Gershenzon meant to me, “he felt out of step with things going on around him. He might have said to old Ivanov: ‘Viacheslav, what’s the matter with me? I don’t feel I belong, I don’t feel right. Why is it I don’t think what other people think, or feel what other people say they feel?’ He could have put it that way. He could have, but he didn’t. What he did do was write:

This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.

Of course, when I looked up from the page, it was only to discover that Janet had gone to the bathroom to apply her contraceptive foam.

“I hear that you’re still refusing to see your wife,” says Dr. Herzl, introducing a new topic.

“That’s not entirely true. I said I wouldn’t see her alone. If she brings our daughter with her, well, that’s a different story.”

“Why won’t you speak with your wife alone?”

“I explained that in my second letter -”

“Why don’t you explain it to me now. Face to face, without the pretences of these letters.” There is a measure of asperity in the good doctor’s voice. From the very beginning I knew he didn’t like me. I do not have a confessional nature and he holds that against me.

I stare back stolidly.

“Is it because you’re ashamed? Is that why you won’t allow your wife to visit?”

“Yes.” There is little harm in agreeing with him. He has made up his mind on this point long ago.

“Ashamed of what? Your affair? Or what you did at the gallery?”

Why not? “Both,” I affirm, blithely shouldering a double load, the tawdry fardels of sexual guilt.

“Speaking of the gallery,” says Dr. Herzl, “your wife agrees with me. She believes that the depiction of the penis was what triggered the incident there.”

“She does, does she?”

“She thinks you felt it was undersized. She says you’re prone to read a disproportionate significance into that sort of thing.”

This is so like Miriam that I offer no complaint against this preposterous interpretation of my actions. I had my reasons.

Dr. Herzl clears his throat. “How am I to understand your silence?”

“The suggestion is too silly to grace with a comment.”

“How did you feel when you did it?”

“Cold.”

“I see,” says the doctor, letting his fingers wander through the paper on his desk. “Well, I believe we’ve made some progress. We’ve begun to talk to one another, at any rate. Now is as good a time to stop as any.” He closes my file. Perhaps the fact that it bulges with my correspondence reminds him. “You do see that writing letters is a way of avoiding the problem?” he asks hopefully.

“I want to see my daughter. You tell Miriam to bring Cynthia here.”

“I’m sorry,” says Dr. Herzl. “Mrs. Caragan says that would be impossible.”

In my room I lie down on my bed and speculate how Miriam is making out. I know she is not starving. I am on full salary while incapacitated. The teachers’ federation knows how to negotiate a collective agreement, and insanity is paid its rich deserts.

As far as the other things go – the neighbours’ whispers, the long, woeful faces of acquaintances – the proud prow of Miriam’s clipper can cleave those mundane waters. And her real friends, the ones that never liked me, will be intent on keeping her busy, or, as they would prefer, “involved.”

For a number of years I was “involved” too. Miriam demanded it. She was terribly concerned that we didn’t trade our ideals for a mortgage, that we didn’t become ordinary people. The flight from ordinariness kept me on a pretty strenuous schedule. I’d get home from the high school where I teach something called social studies just in time to grab a cheese sandwich and receive a briefing while the paint dried on my placard. Then we’d all load into a Volkswagen van owned by a troll with a social conscience, a short, hairy guy who made pieces of knotty-pine furniture capacious and sturdy enough to stand up to hard use by the giants I assumed were his clients, and drive off to let our opinions be known.

But about four years ago, when Miriam and I were fighting about Cynthia, and I was drinking even more than I was just before I got tossed in here, I gave up being involved and began my own journey; and there is no way that I’m going to give Miriam the chance to coax me back to Canada, now that I’m safely here, on the borders of Russia.

There’s an irony, too, in how my travels began. They commenced at one of Miriam’s protest rallies. About a dozen lonely souls were picketing a Liberal Fund-Raising Dinner – the reason why I now fail to recollect. It was the usual dispirited occasion. I was a little drunk and bored. The cars kept pulling up to the front of the hotel and discharging Liberals who slunk tight-lipped through our righteous gauntlet. One particularly incensed woman of our number kept demanding to know whether the Liberals were dining on macaroni and cheese that night. “Are you?” she shrilled in their faces. “Are you eating macaroni and cheese tonight?” The implication being that her own feisty spirit was sustained solely on that starchy, plebeian fuel.

It was all going more or less our way until a large, ruddy, drunk, middle-aged Liberal turned a passionate eye on our assembly. He was very angry. He seemed to have missed the point about macaroni and cheese. He thought we were objecting to our country! “Hey, you bastards!” he bellowed, while his wife tried to drag him into the lobby. “I love my country! I love Canada!” he yelled, actually striking his chest with his fist. “And if you don’t, why don’t you get out! Why don’t you go to Russia if you don’t like it here?”