John Goldbach - It Is an Honest Ghost

Duquet writes of being with Mohr a year earlier, on the landing stairs where his sailboat was docked, surrounded by cloud-capped hills, a fleur-de-lis painted on his sailboat’s bow, the loose white sail flapping in the wind as the men talked under a blue sky. Duquet writes that Mohr was excited about the construction of his new plant and at the time, by 1892, he knew he’d accomplished something great.

After Mohr’s death on December 15th, 1893, the whole Mohr family moved to New York — that is, where Levi was born and where much of the Blum family still lived — bringing Mohr’s body with them to receive proper Jewish funeral rites. The family didn’t want his grave to be in Quebec City, where they wouldn’t be able to visit. So Sigismund Mohr was buried in New York. In 1894, a little more than a decade after the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, Eugene Philip followed in his father’s footsteps and began a lifelong career running a telegraph-and-electricity company in Brooklyn.

While Mohr lay dying, Eugene Philip writes that he would recount to his father stories of the nights on Dufferin Terrace, when Mohr put on his electric-light exhibitions for the first time, drawing tens of thousands of townspeople. His father shallowly breathing, Eugene Philip reminded him of all the vapour illuminated and trapped in the light in the night air.

What you did was incredible, Papa , he said. To have suspended something as transitory as breath.

We stood at baggage claim at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport — that is, Boris, the Russian photographer; Tanya, his eight-year-old daughter; and me, the journalist — waiting for god knows how long by the carousel for my suitcase. Theirs appeared at the top of the carousel immediately, but my suitcase didn’t seem to have made it from Montreal to Amsterdam to Nairobi. Boris’s daughter, Tanya, was irritated that her father was making her wait for my luggage to arrive, even though she’d had hers for going on twenty minutes and her grandparents were waiting on the other side of the gate, eager to see their granddaughter, who they rarely got to see, as they lived in Nairobi and she in Montreal. I felt terrible.

‘Boris,’ I said, ‘seriously, go on without me. I’ll catch up.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time. I’m not leaving you.’

‘Dad,’ said Tanya, ‘let’s go let’s go let’s go!’

‘No, Tanya, we’ll only be a minute. Don’t be rude.’

‘I want to see Grandma and Papa.’

‘You have to wait. It won’t be long,’ he said.

But he was wrong. My suitcase didn’t appear for another fifteen minutes and by then we were all covered in sweat, our clothes soaked through, and weary from the flights, two eight-hour ordeals, with a seven-hour layover between the first and the second in the Amsterdam airport, where we rented a day-room for approximately five hours, so as to lie down for a bit and shower between flights.

My suitcase was broken when I pulled it off the carousel: it only had one wheel now and there was a large crack in the plastic panel that braced the bottom.

Boris said, ‘Don’t worry, man. We’ll get you a new suitcase while we’re here. They’re very inexpensive here. We’ll get a better suitcase.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said, and swallowed. Other than the fact that I couldn’t stop sweating, it felt like I’d left my corporeality somewhere in the sky between Amsterdam and Nairobi. Things seemed out of focus.

Tanya screamed, ‘ Babushka! Papa! ’ as her grandparents gathered her up in a hug, the babushka a stout but attractive Russian woman, with a large bosom that absorbed her grandchild, and the papa a tall man, a man of Maasai origins, from the Rift Valley, but he’d been living in Nairobi for fifty-five years, he told me on the car ride from the airport to his home, where he worked as an engineer, though he travelled for work a lot, and in fact he had to take the bus to Mombasa in the morning; he was working on a beachfront hotel development there.

‘How did you two meet?’ I asked them on the car ride, and Martin, the papa, told me that he met Galina, the babushka, in 1966, a couple of years after the independent Republic of Kenya was formed, while he was studying in Leningrad, in the former Soviet Union. Shortly after Kenyan independence, both the United States and the Soviet Union started offering many different types of scholarships in Kenya, Martin told me as he drove, Tanya and Galina and our luggage and me packed into the back of his Toyota hatchback, Boris seated beside his father-in-law, as Martin worked the gearshift from time to time, putting his whole tall body into it.

‘So I’d gotten a scholarship to study in Leningrad,’ continued Martin, ‘and that’s where I met Galina, at the Herzen University, where she was studying engineering, too.’

‘Oh wow,’ I said, turning to Galina, who I was pressed up against, who had Tanya on her lap, squeezing her granddaughter tightly, and Tanya glowed with happiness. ‘You’re an engineer, too.’

‘I was in the Soviet Union,’ Galina said. ‘But not here.’

‘She doesn’t work,’ said Martin.

‘I raised your children and now Sveta’s child, also.’

‘I need to make the money,’ he added. ‘To give to her.’

I looked out the windows, gathering impressions of the outskirts of Nairobi, but jetlagged impressions, somewhat surreal; the land and sky looked flattened and overexposed, like in an old colour photograph, as we drove from the airport to Martin and Galina’s house. I was booked at a hotel, the Heron Court Hotel, but everyone insisted that I come over for dinner first. Boris and Tanya were staying with Galina and Martin, though Boris and I were leaving for the coast later in the week. Tanya would stay on with her grandparents till we returned. In the meantime, I’d stay at the Heron Court Hotel.

When we arrived at Martin and Galina’s house, first Martin had to get out and remove a padlock from a gate, which swung open onto their small neighbourhood. He pulled the car past the gate and into their laneway and then got out and ran back to close and lock the gate. I got out and unpacked the luggage from the hatchback and proceeded to follow Galina, carrying the bags into her house in a few trips.

‘I need to lie down,’ said Boris. ‘I’m sure John does, too.’

‘I’m okay,’ I said, not wanting to impose, though I could hardly imagine staying awake.

Boris laughed. ‘Man, we’ve been travelling for two days basically. You’re tired. Lie down till supper.’

‘There’s a room upstairs,’ said Galina. ‘Alexi’s room. You can lie down there for now.’

‘Who’s Alexi?’ I asked, impulsively, immediately worrying that I’d asked something I shouldn’t have.

‘My grandson,’ said Galina. ‘Tanya’s cousin.’

‘He’s Svetlana’s son,’ said Boris. ‘Sveta’s my sister-in-law.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Sveta lives here now, too,’ said Galina. ‘She’s been having problems with her boyfriend. Tyson.’

‘Tyson’s all right,’ said Martin, waving off his wife’s worries. ‘Just a man.’

I didn’t say anything but Galina and I shared a look, a mother conveying her worry, me conveying my understanding that relationships are complicated and difficult and hopefully everything would be okay, or at least that’s what I was trying to convey with my bleary jetlagged expression.

I said, ‘Do you mind if I take a quick shower before I lie down?’

There was no way I could lie on a bed that wasn’t mine in the state I was in. The clothes I’d been travelling in were beyond ripe, having been sweated in for far too long, and I really wasn’t feeling well.