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 “Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands.”
— Ryszard Kapuściński
9 Contributors
10 Letters
18 Sightings Generation www
20 Field Notes Guy Vanderhaeghe at cowboy camp in Saskatchewan,
biking through Xinjiang memories, uncovering Suriname’s hidden caves

fact
32 Extraction
All animals take from nature, the Canadian animal especially so
by Edward Burtynsky
36 Moneybags
The wealth divide is a canyon — will the rich cross it?
july/august 2007 by Bruce Livesey
volume 4 issue 6
44 3D Vision
Is Canada’s strategy in Afghanistan too complex to succeed?
by Taylor Owen and Patrick Travers
50 Charisma
Sex, play, and a fighting stance is what our leaders must provide
by Jeff Ryan

fiction
Beginning on 56 The Counterpart by Nadia Kalman
page 9: 64 Bob Dylan Goes Tubing by Marni Jackson
love songs, illustrated;
70 The Principles of Exile by Camilla Gibb
playlist by
Matthew McKinnon 77 Big Ticket a play by Jim Garrard

poetry
41 The Mall by Evelyn Lau
49 Big Paw by Priscila Uppal

arts & culture

82 Food Turkish cuisine as religious experience, by Marcello Di Cintio
88 Literature In Paris with Mavis Gallant, by Randy Boyagoda
96 Think Tank Brainteasers and crosswords, by Fraser Simpson and Craig Kasper
Cover:
Edward Burtynsky 98 Parallel Universe by Graham Roumieu

coat of arms: faile spot illustration: vänskap

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Nevin Halıcı is one of Turkey’s most respected food writers and a leading authority on the country’s national cuisine.
(See “Sufi Gourmet,” p. 82.) Detail from a photograph by Lana Šlezić

6
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Contributors
volume 4 issue 6
edward burtynsky (Cover and “Extrac-
tion,” p. 32) and his photographs of China’s
industrial revolution are the subject of the
film Manufactured Landscapes.
guy vanderhaeghe (“Cowboy Camp,”
p. 20) has twice won the Governor Gener-
al’s award for English language fiction. A
screen adaptation of The Englishman’s Boy
will air on cbc in the spring of 2008.
bruce livesey (“Moneybags,” p. 36) is an
investigative journalist and television pro-
ducer, formerly for cbc’s the fifth estate.
gabriel jones (“Moneybags”), a photog-
rapher, has exhibited in New York, Tou-
louse, Paris, Düsseldorf, London, and
Montreal.
evelyn lau (“The Mall,” p. 41) is the author
of Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, two short-
story collections, a book of essays, a novel,
and four volumes of poetry, most recently
2005’s Treble.
taylor owen (“3D Vision,” p. 44) is a Tru-
deau Scholar at the University of Oxford
and writes on security and foreign policy.
j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
nadia kalman (“The Counterpart,” p. 56)
was selected by Margaret Atwood as the
winner of last year’s Summer Literary Sem-
inars prize for fiction.
camilla gibb (“The Principles of Exile,”
p. 70) is the author of three novels, in-
cluding 2005’s award-winning Sweetness in
the Belly.
kate wilson (“The Principles of Exile”)
is a visual artist who has exhibited inter-
nationally. She is a member of Persona
Volare, an artist collective in Toronto.
jim garrard (“Big Ticket,” p. 77) is a play-
wright, the founder of Theatre Passe
Muraille in Toronto, and the former direc-
tor of the Toronto Arts Council.
lana šlezic (“Sufi Gourmet,” p. 82) is a
documentary photographer based in Istan-
bul. Forsaken, her book on Afghan women,
comes out this fall.
randy boyagoda (“In Paris with Mavis
Gallant, Writer,” p. 88) published his first
novel, Governor of the Northern Province,
in 2006.
9
 t h e wa l r u s

tend his analysis. Given the reliance

of our political system on what might
be called original theft, it is convenient
for not only police managers, bureau-
crats, and unions but also politicians
and captains of industry to ignore the
underlying causes of “one dead Indi-
an” and one defunct Tactical and Res-
cue Unit.
Willem de Lint
University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario

I applaud Stephen Williams for labour-

ing for police reform of some sort,
but I am unconvinced by the lessons
he draws from Constable Ron Heine-
mann’s humiliations. Williams posits
a gulf between the Ontario Provincial
Police management’s conceptions of
reputational risk and front-line officers’
conceptions of operational risk; in a
nutshell, the bigwigs are playing pol-
itics while little guys like Heinemann
are getting shot at. From this, Williams
concludes that the force needs more
“Lilac Wine” — Nina Simone (1966) and better management in the Harvard
style and that Standard Operating Pro-
cedures should not be second-guessed.
Letters These suggestions, typical of the case
for internal reform (and the “bad apple”
Tough Nut sible from such events, but politicians inquiries Williams derides), assume
Stephen Williams is to be commend- and judges would prefer that police that the police are generally well adapt-
ed for “Life on Nut Island” (May), in absorb the heat in their stead. At the ed to policing themselves and that the
particular for drawing attention to the same time, as those who framed our opp’s existing system of self-regulation
social costs of fateful police decisions system of liberal government (John is amenable to meaningful reform.
and practices and for raising the point Locke among them) knew, the execu- They further assume that rulebooks
that bad apples are dispatched more tive sometimes takes prerogative pow- are a relevant part of police operation-
expediently than rotten barrels. (Was er to act outside of the norms or rule al culture.
it not somewhat contradictory, though, of law, using police as the domestic In asking readers to choose between
to use knowledge generated by the Mol- instrument of that power. This pow- the priorities of tactically minded offi-
len Commission to support his case, er animates the occupational culture cers on the ground and those of strategy-
while objecting to the extraordinary of policing, stimulating the bureau- minded commanders off-site, Williams
expense of the Ipperwash Inquiry? ) cratic double-talk we hear from police is forcing the issue of police oversight
Policing is an extension of the exec- executives. into a binary. For him, tactics are rule
utive function of government and its As a consequence of the tension in- governed and good, strategy is arbitrary
capacity to act against individuals and herent in policing, both its occupation- and bad. However, one of the great tru-
groups for the common good. How- al culture and its leadership require a isms of policing is that there is a rule
ever, where interests are uncommon certain amount of justification. Enter for just about everything, and as Heine-
(outstanding native land claims, for in- well-paid lawyers, who defend beyond mann’s story and forty years of policing
stance), the police’s authority to act is the expected limits of the law the rights research indicate, there is a way around
ambiguous. Caledonia is the latest ex- of police organizations and individual every rule. This is as true for Incident
ample: in the absence of a political or police officers to persist in practices Commanders as it is for line officers. In
constitutional solution, police are the that are deemed necessary according to Williams’s own account, Standard Oper-
visible targets and will be criticized for the logic of liberal political philosophy ating Procedures broke down when
the action they take. but aberrant to common justice. Heinemann delivered a personal “fuck
Since Ipperwash and Oka, police I agree with Williams that there is you” to a suspect by way of a few pen
have attempted to retreat as far as pos- a systemic problem, but I would ex- strokes. A freak, bad apple moment?

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 t h e wa l r u s

One wonders . . . Life of Great American Cities? And why then, he underestimates them. For ex-
These problems will be solved not would Mazer skip over that compel- ample, while he credits Jacobs’s re-
by importing business management ling book to devote so much ink to de- shaping of Toronto’s politics with the
models or by giving more credence riding a minor work like The Question stunning electoral victory of David
and discretion to line officers, but of Separatism? Miller in 2003, he overlooks her im-
rather by investing toothless civilian These books share a core vision that pact on what were, at the time, equally
oversight bodies with more author- was central to Jacobs’s work and the surprising victories by David Crombie,
ity — the type of authority that can driving force behind her activism. She John Sewell, and Barbara Hall. He also
probe secret church-basement meet- knew from relentless observation that minimizes the significance of the ex-
ings where some cops collude to cover vibrant, dense networks produce more pressway victories in New York and
things up. good ideas than the brightest individ- Toronto, which were critical to the
Myles Leslie ual, that chaotic and engaged inter- success of those cities and inspired
Toronto, Ontario action evolves those ideas better than the revitalization of inner cities across
most costly think tanks, and that diver- North America.
Jacobs’s Ladder sity really is our strength. That’s why Finally, and inexplicably, Mazer
It feels almost churlish to critique Alex she favoured the creativity of commu- questions Jacobs’s visionary status
Mazer’s article on Jane Jacobs (“City nities over the dictates of demagogues. on the basis of her active role in every-
Limits,” May), in which he asks wheth- And that’s why she so forcefully argued, day affairs. This is historically wrong;
er it is time to rethink our view of her before it was popular to believe it, that Jacobs’s impact was almost always
as a visionary. His dismissal of the vi- cities had taken hold as the most im- through ideas and rarely through di-
sionary status of Toronto’s secular saint portant socio-political unit despite the rect mobilization. More importantly, it
is so gentle that he seems almost sorry dominance of the nation-state. Her is philosophically indefensible. What
to be asking the question. But ask it he subsequent work enriches that legacy are visionaries for if not to guide real
does, and his answer is baffling. with increasingly complex views of the action? It is an affirmation of Jacobs’s
How can anyone attempt to dismiss forces that condition the dynamic inter- visionary status that the foundation
Jacobs as a one-book-wonder and for- play of communities, ideas, and initia- that took up her legacy chose to call
get Cities and the Wealth of Nations, a tive and the impact of those forces, for itself Ideas That Matter. Would that
reinvention of economics almost as good or ill, on the world. more of our thinkers assumed their
revolutionary, persuasive, and appeal- Mazer concedes that Jacobs’s vision ideas should.
ing as her masterwork, The Death and produced great achievements, but even Sean Meagher
Toronto, Ontario

Alex Mazer asks, “does [Jane Jacobs’s]

vision still hold true for the world
today, or is her work the remnant of
the politics of an era — the 1960s and
1970s — whose relevance has passed?”
My answer is both yes and no. Yes, her
vision holds true today, and no, her rel-
evance hasn’t passed.
In the sixties and seventies, Toronto-
nians were inspired by charismatic na-
tional and local leaders — Jacobs among
them — who believed in sustainable
communities. This leadership, sup-
ported by strong environmental and
community-level policies, led us to in-
novation through broad, citizen-based
democracy. In the 1980s, governments
responded with policies that support-
ed a cleaner, greener, and more com-
munity-relevant way of life: greenbelt
and escarpment protection, waste mini-
mization, cleaner air through pollution
prevention, waterfront trails, and the
globally recognized concept of sustain-
able development.
“One Love” – Massive Attack (1991) But, with the early-nineties recession,

12 illustration: andreas samuelsson

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political momentum flagged, ideas fiz-
zled, and our innovative policy-makers
became voices in the wilderness, wait-
ing patiently for the next green wave.
We forgot (and now claim we didn’t
know) the costs of the consumer life-
style. Now, after fifteen years of inertia,
the threat of global warming has para-
chuted us once again into a “new” era
of consciousness.
Ontario’s new Places to Grow plan,
which recently won the American Plan-
ning Association’s coveted Daniel Burn-
ham Award, rests on the foundation of
Jacobs’s vision — vibrant, self-sustain-
ing communities connected by efficient
transportation corridors and surround-
ed by green. And many of the solutions
put forward by this May’s meeting of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
mate Change, a network of hundreds
of scientists and experts, can be found
in Jacobs’s 1961 book, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities. Hopefully,
one day soon, her vision of the future
will come to fruition.
Sally M. Leppard
Founder and ceo
Lura Consulting
Toronto, Ontario
“You Still Have Me” – André Ethier (2006)
t h e wa l r u s
Even if Alex Mazer can be forgiven for result was social cleansing.
one or two appalling assertions (most Mazer’s missed opportunity is even
notably, that Jacobs’s advocacy of lower- clearer in light of Michel Arseneault’s
level government was appropriate up Field Note about French architect Ro-
until the end of the Cold War, but that, land Castro ( “Suburban Renewal,”
post 9/11, it appears “naive and even ir- May). Among Castro’s considerations
responsible”), he has squandered the in rebuilding a notorious public hous-
opportunity to give a substantive cri- ing project in the Parisian suburbs are
tique of an icon who he quite rightly some of Jacobs’s most prominent “dos
complains seems immune. and don’ts” for urban renewal: yes to
The problem is that Mazer confines short block lengths and the preserva-
his criticisms to Jacobs’s four minor, tion of old buildings; no to mixed pri-
non-urban works, tacitly endorsing her mary use and buildings abutting the
most consequential ideas even as he sidewalk. Castro’s project is exactly
claims to be reappraising her. In fact, the kind of thing Jacobs’s ideas should
there are plenty of reasons for doubting be evaluated against. She originally
the accuracy of Jacobs’s beliefs about claimed her observations were only
urban decline and renewal, most fa- applicable to a small number of “great
mously outlined in The Death and American cities,” but they’ve been em-
Life of Great American Cities. For ex- ployed (without her protest) far more
ample, many argue that her prescrip- widely than that, and the results need
tions are in part responsible for the to be considered when assessing her
disappearance of affordable housing in legacy. A world, even a First World, of
Jacobs’s own Toronto neighbourhood Greenwich Villages is an impossibility,
and, more generally, the suburbaniza- and Jacobs’s vision can only really be
tion of poverty that Canadian cities appraised in the context of a world of
have witnessed in recent decades. A banlieues and tract suburbs.
generation of councillors and plan- Mazer calls Jacobs’s book The Ques-
ners deployed her ideas in the name of tion of Separatism “a rather unusual
neighbourhood preservation, and the product: a refutation of some of the
weaker arguments against secession.”
By this reckoning, Mazer’s essay is also
a rather unusual product — a timely cri-
tique of Jacobs, but one composed, un-
fortunately, of the weaker arguments.
David Wachsmuth
Toronto, Ontario
The Hole in the Doughnut
As an American reader of The Walrus,
I am struck by the extent to which your
contributors will evoke the United
States in efforts, it seems, to forge con-
cepts of Canadian national identity.
In the May issue, Deborah Kirsh-
ner (“A Pianist in Rwanda”) notes: “I
also couldn’t find a McDonald’s, which
is more significant than it sounds, be-
cause I discovered that the absence of
images from corporate America has
a dramatic affect on the psyche. . . . I
felt, for the first time in a long while,
a stretch along my own borders and
as uninvented as the landscape.” The
implication is, of course, that “images
from corporate America” exercise a
restrictive and unpleasant strangle-
hold in Canada, where Kirshner lives.
14 illustration: sam weber
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Yet the existence of a McDonald’s in
Toronto, for instance, is as emblem-
atic of Canadian corporatism as it is
of American corporatism; the same
can be said of the existence of a Tim
Hortons doughnut shop in a suburb
of Chicago.
The sentiment is echoed in a May
letter by John MacLachlan Gray (in re-
sponse to Charles Foran’s “An Amer-
ican Type of Sadness,” March): “The
fact is that in Canada, our discomfort
with consumerism and its cultural by-
products is accompanied by the know-
ledge that these demons are not of our
own creation or evocation — that they
grew out of a management vat in New
York and Los Angeles.” How consum-
ers, in this case Canadian, are not some- cians — that American comedians do lieve we need to work toward a more
what responsible for the “creation or
evocation” of their own consumerism
is beyond me, for consumer culture is
not created by producers alone, and
even if that were so, Canada produces
plenty to consume. The desire for cul-
tural independence from America is
understandable, but the influence of
American culture on Canada should
not be discussed in hegemonic terms,
however understated.
“Hello Love” – Hank Snow (1973)
t h e wa l r u s
So it is in Rebecca Addelman’s “The widespread among Americans, of Can-
Last Laugh” (May): “Canada is famous ada’s marginality.
for birthing satirists who have gone on Valentine A. Pakis
to take down the American establish- Minneapolis, Minnesota
ment. How did we get to the point of
needing Jon Stewart to make fun of our I Object!
politicians for us?” The underlying anx- Your coverage of International Con-
iety of this quotation is betrayed in the scientious Objectors Day in the May
hyperbole of its first sentence. Where Outlooks betrays a fundamental mis-
is Canada famous for birthing satirists? understanding of conscientious ob-
Can a satirist bring down an establish- jection. COs are not asking for their
ment? If so, can a satirist bring down an individual rights to “trump the collect-
establishment that is unaware of this ive resolution of state interests.” Rather,
satirist’s existence? The remark suggests they assert that the resolution cannot
further that the US is forcing its come- be accomplished by war.
dy into Canadian living rooms. Howev- COs neither deny the existence of
er, Canadians do not “need” American conflict nor wish to accept subjuga-
comedians to mock Canadian politi- tion as a result of inaction. They be-
so is beside the point. What they need, robust peace, which addresses the root
as the article points out, are fewer regu- of the conflict rather than tearing off
lations on public speech. limbs and branches.
Like Canadian culture, American In fact, COs are some of the most
culture is not monolithic, though your committed patriots; they believe that
writers are apt to fashion it as such, establishing more stable international
again, to give definition to their no- relationships will allow our countries
tions of Canadian identity. This pre- to develop more freely.
occupation detracts, however slightly, Scott Kroeker
from the intellectual quality of your Winnipeg, Manitoba
magazine and supports the stereotype,
Pick Your Poison
I have just taken the opportunity to
read John Lorinc’s very thoughtful
article, “Driven to Distraction” (April).
I would have read it sooner, but I’ve
been preoccupied reading a rather long
book, talking to my delightful sister
on the telephone, and visiting friends
across town. They make a mean pasta
and serve wine. We always have a few
hearty laughs and part in good humour.
But I digress. (Life is full of these kinds
of distractions, too.)
Technology has succeeded where
centuries of work have failed in keep-
ing us chained to the workplace 24/7,
365 days of the year. Mobile devices like
the BlackBerry are contributing to the
work pandemic that is running rampant
in our society. The false sense of urgen-
cy — and self-importance — conveyed
by these devices is driving us nuts. We
must keep them in their place.
One of Lorinc’s most important find-
ings is that we need “more time and
fewer distractions, even if that means
less information.” If there’s one thing
that’s overhyped in the Information
16 illustration: jillian tamaki
 R E S TA U R A N T
Name of Stor y

Age, it’s information. To everyone who’s

speeding headlong down the path to
information overload: if we put our

&
minds to it, we can choose our distrac-

B A K E R Y
tions! Turn off, tune out, drop out.
Alan Gummo
St. Catharines, Ontario

S E N S E S
Dead Cred
Joshua Knelman’s Field Note “Better

•
Red, Then Dead” (April) is wonderful-

P E N T H O U S E
ly evocative of Biblical times, flutter-
ing kaffiyehs, and the sunset days of
the British Empire in the Middle East.
Knelman also correctly sketches out
the ecological tragedy of the Dead Sea,

3 - S T O R E Y
dropping fast as a result of managed
overextraction of water for human con-
sumption, agriculture, and industrial

F T,
prowess. However, the proposed so-
lution — diverting water from the Red
Sea via a canal system — is more prob- S Q
4 , 0 0 0

lematic than he suggests. Penthouse living room

Far from there being consensus
on the Red/Dead project, regional en-
•
P O O L

vironmentalists, development special-

ists, and cooperation practitioners have
expressed concern about mixing differ-
L A P

ent sea waters, the ecological impact on

W I T H

protected areas in the Arava, and the

economic and political implications of
C E N T R E

constructing a “canal for peace.” Rather

than asking how to save the Dead Sea,
we might ask how we can meet human
needs while avoiding large-scale intru-
F I T N E S S

sion into the local ecology.

Eric Abitbol and Stuart Schoenfeld
Alternative Visions of Water
W O R L D - C L A S S

in the Middle East (avow)

York University
Toronto, Ontario
Hotel guestroom
Tusk, Tusk
Millions of mountain pine beetles ori-
ginating in the Nechako Valley region
soared 400 kilometres and infested for- Feel at home at the SoHo Metropolitan –
the ultra-luxur y hotel & residences that
ests east of the Rockies in BC and Alber-
have become Toronto's premier enclave.
ta in 2006, not 2002, as claimed in “Red
With standards that are the envy of other
Rush” (April). There was an airborne boutique and luxury hotels, your time away
outbreak in 2002, but it was smaller is time fabulously spent.
in scale. The Walrus regrets the error.

“The time has come,” The Walrus said,

“To talk of many things.” Write to us at 101–
19 Duncan Street, Toronto, ON, m5h
3h1, or letters@walrusmagazine.com.
Letters may be edited for length and clarity,
and may be published in any medium.
metropolitan.com/soho 1.866.764.6638

17
 Sightings

generation www
he new world order, as described in with room for coffee klatches if not agreements when elected officials have

T dispatches from the culture front, books. Higher up, there are the schools gone awol — are without historical con-
reveals itself as follows: so long as of journalism that concurrently teach sciousness or any appreciation that a
it is delivered in digestible chunks, is “the story chase” and public relations — powerful metaphor can go horribly awry.
salacious, gossipy, and supported by that is, teach truth and falsity all at Post-9/11, the Americans tried “Might is
illustrative pictures, Internet users gen- once — but never mind, the myth is Right” in Afghanistan. Mountains were
erally don’t care where content comes preserved that the writer’s craft can be beheaded, civilians and goats killed, a
from. On terra firma — say, at the mag- gleaned without excessive reading, trav- few nasty brutes wasted or sent off to
azine rack — editorial copy is said to be el, and downtime with Zarathustra. Guantánamo Bay, and the rest of the
“stuff ” around which advertisements are Vanity press is thriving, and self- bad guys and hearty Pashtuns returned
wrapped: often a sad but true summa- publishing via the Internet is thought to to their caves. It did not go well, but
tion. Elsewhere, paragraphs sequential- be more honest, more, well, immediate if at first you don’t succeed . . . And so
ly organized into narratives are viewed than anything subjected to an editor’s we have Canada’s myopic charge, our
as “running text.” At book signings, scalpel and the rigours of fact check- own might is right (lower case and
folks with large handfuls will likely sell ing. And in this gaseous explosion of without quotation marks, given our
the autographed products on eBay: a words and pictures, obfuscation flour- relative strength), while the Ameri-
“You’re the best, Don DeLillo” might ishes. “Citizen journalists,” pencilled cans chase hope over experience in
fetch $15 above retail, I’m told, “From in as a check and balance on propa- nearby Iraq.
Paris with love, Mavis Gallant” in the ganda if not purple prose, instead fol- Only a deserted public square could
neighbourhood of twenty bonus bucks, low the rushing current from one topic allow such inanities to persist. Only an
and “My treasure, Fyodor Dostoevsky,” to another. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper’s ahistorical braggart could fail to recog-
a king’s ransom — if packaged with “whole of government” (wog) settles nize that many Afghan and Iraqi in-
a tomb raider. over the commons — wog in this in- surgents are locally born and have in
That rappers ( “Two trailer park girls stance meaning, “Any minister who their bones distrust and hatred of for-
go round the outside . . .” ) and teenagers steps out of line will be kneecapped eign infidels, especially those pummel-
( “my bad” ) are the new grammarians by Brutus.” ling rockets into villages. Only those in
is widely known, if not appreciated. But Clogging other arteries is the celeb- the generals’ hip pockets fail to appre-
flying under the radar of those who rity confessional, and even in polite com- ciate that it is diplomacy that ultimate-
track society’s descent into mediocrity is pany one is now expected to speak about ly wins the peace. But distracted we are,
the Ontario high school diploma, which oneself. MySpace versus YouTube is the clicking away, surfing the World Wide
requires exactly one history course. In new battleground, and to be fair there Web for information, porn, the odd reci-
four truncated months — quick-and-dirty is much hilarity in both. But with just- pe, while history marches on, “Might
semestered schools winning out over in-time-delivery and what-have-you- is Right” winning the day, if not a sin-
the full-year programs — the tortured done-for-me-lately being sovereign, gle war. www, the new messiah, is just
teenagers receive a glimpse of the cour- everything is of the moment, and the as likely to produce a collective aneur-
eur de bois passing through native noise is deafening. God has been pro- ysm as it is the sharing of best prac-
woods and a few good men dead on nounced dead, and since He could be tices on open-source networks. And
foreign battlefields, maybe a mad dash a genuine nuisance, that is fair enough; in this unmediated era, when decent
through nafta, knock off five or eight but if history and reflection follow in manners, a touch of modesty, child-
videos, write a paper, sit the exam, and His wake, the cacophony will escalate hood, subject-verb agreement, and the
then “Free at last! Free at last! Thank and the trouble will destroy. slow search for truth are dying on the
God almighty, we are free at last!” — the It is apparent that Harper, defence vine, it is difficult to discern anything
quote not Canadian but at least on point. minister Gordon O’Connor, and bully- of substance inside the walls of self-
What used to be called “libraries” are boy Rick Hillier — the chief of the de- referential noise. ;
morphing into “information centres” fence staff, who signs international — Ken Alexander, Editor

18
 t h e wa l r u s
CANADA . CHINA . SURINAME
cowboy camp
Novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe saddles up
qu’appelle valley — In the summer
of 2006, a miniseries adaptation of my
novel The Englishman’s Boy went into
production in Saskatchewan. Since half
of the drama is set in the American
and Canadian West of 1873, it was de-
cided that a crash course in equitation
was necessary for the actors. When I
learned this “cowboy camp” was being
convened in the Qu’Appelle Valley,
north of Regina, wild horses couldn’t
have kept me away. For males of a cer-
tain age, who galloped their mothers’
brooms over backyard ranges in the fif-
ties, holstered cap guns flapping against
their thighs, the fantasy of playing cow-
boy is lethally attractive.
On the first morning of instruction,
I arrived wearing a pair of boots I had
bought in Dallas fifteen years before
and worn only once or twice since. My
middle-aged feet had spread like the
rest of me, forcing me to mince about
camp in a most unmanly fashion. The
wranglers in charge of teaching horse-
manship were former professional
rodeo riders and ranchers — laconic,
To hear Vanderhaeghe discuss the process of
reconceiving written fiction into screenplay, go
to walrusmagazine.com/more.
20
leathery types given to unfathomable
stares, most of which I felt were direct-
ed my way.
The first course was a safety primer,
covering topics such as how to approach
a horse from behind without getting
kicked into the bleachers, or what to
do if you find yourself on a careering
runaway. For instance, don’t scream.
It might further panic the horse. Next,
each actor was assigned a mount and
spent time currying and feeding it and
performing other ingratiating services
meant to encourage it to, if not like you,
tolerate you. I lingered hopefully on the
fringes like a kid awaiting the call to join
a pickup football game. Invitations were
not forthcoming.
By the time the actors were engaged
in learning the rudiments of steering,
stopping, and accelerating their new
four-legged friends, I was in a desper-
ate state of unrequited desire. Making
meek, supplicating motions, I approached
a wrangler who had just ridden up and
identified myself as the writer. Like Ri-
chard iii, I abjectly begged for a horse.
“Take mine,” he said and, dismount-
ing with catlike grace, left me to claw
myself aboard, joints grinding and creak-
ing. This was a mistake. Wranglers’ horses
are not like the ones assigned to actors.
They are provided with the most do-
cile horseflesh available, because inju-
ry to the talent would be a catastrophe.
But what happens to the writer is not a
cause for concern.
illustration: tamara shopsin
 t h e wa l r u s

Outlok for On the ensuing trail ride, the grin tasy was fulfilled. At age fifty-five, bet-
JULY/AUGUST soon melted off my face as I wrestled ter late than never, I had become a high
Illustrated by to restrain my high-spirited steed. If it plains drifter.
Tamara Shopsin
bolts, I reminded myself, resist the urge — Guy Vanderhaeghe
}
to shriek. Better to die in silence than
July 2–13 in disgrace.
Miss Galaxy In the next few days, I found my-
Pageant self aching in places I didn’t know I
Nuku’alofa, Tonga
owned and walking like an animated
wishbone. Meanwhile, the actors were “i am strong
soldiering on, growing ever stiffer, sorer,
and more chafed. They were also learning
in my basically”
that horses, like thespians, sometimes A bike ride through the Chinese psyche
exhibit quirks, foibles, and temperament.
One morning at breakfast, I asked one xinjiang autonomous region — My
In Tonga, two
of the actors, who sat morosely stirring daughter Noey and I were tired, hun-
genders just aren’t
enough. The third,
his fruit cocktail, what was the matter. gry, and lost, travelling with an inad-
known as fakaleiti He blurted out, “My horse hates me. He equate map and a “guide” who spoke
(“like a lady”), knows I’m from Toronto and I’m wear- no English, had never been in the area
consists of cross- ing pantyhose.” before, and was notably displeased with
dressing males It was a charged, confessional mo- our agenda. We were riding mountain
who, tradition has ment. Only later did I learn that all the bikes along a rutted dirt track that ram-
it, were raised as other actors had also donned panty- bled across the broad steppe in Xinjiang,
girls by families hose. The wranglers had given them a a region in northwest China formerly
lacking female “tip.” Hosiery minimized saddle friction, known as the East Turkestan Republic.
children to take preventing flesh from getting rubbed to Before that, it was traditionally the home
care of domestic hamburger. They had descended on a of Turkic herders and horse warriors
chores like weav-
womenswear store to get outfitted. who had been both enemies and allies
ing, cooking, and
Too soon, I had to leave, despairing of Genghis Khan.
cleaning. Part
at having notched only a single ride. We pedalled into a small valley with
gender-studies
conference, part When I returned weeks later, all the ac- worn pasture, too many sheep, and dun-
glamour gala, tors from Vancouver and Toronto had coloured yurts that matched the parched
the Miss Galaxy developed a blasé competence around hills. After coasting down, we met a Kaz-
Pageant showcases horses and were now being glamorous- akh woman who was carrying water in
the femininity and ly referred to as “the posse.” As a West- pails swinging from a stick that was bal-
liminality of this erner, I seethed at the unfairness of it anced across her shoulders. She shyly
well-established all. But one afternoon, when an actor but graciously invited us to dinner, in
element of Tongan was somehow occupied and his horse accordance with the Central Asian no-
society. Though needed to be ridden to a location, I was mad’s custom that anyone who has al-
metre-tall hats called upon. “Guy, take Michael’s horse. ready raised their yurt must offer shelter
provide a good
Go with the posse.” to weary travellers. The men returned
dose of camp, the
Michael happens to be considerably from their herds and we all sat cross-
competition is
shorter than me, but there was no time legged on colourful carpets to eat mutton
a high-minded
affair: contestants to adjust the stirrup lengths. Off I went, and noodles, cooked over a cow-dung
model elegant an overweight, superannuated jockey, fire on an open hearth.
evening gowns and knees hovering near my armpits. At The next morning, we rode across roll-
judges interview the top of a hill, I halted to take in the ing grassland, grazed to stubble, under
them earnestly to scene. By squinting my eyes, I was able a sky too broad to hold thoughts inside.
decide which one to banish the craft-services vehicle and By late afternoon, we pedalled past ir-
to crown . . . King? other cinematic impedimenta below. In rigated fields and then rolled into a
Princess? Queen? the valley, teepees glistened in glaring city with glistening modern buildings
On this Polynesian sunshine. Raked by a breeze, a grove of and wide avenues, where well-dressed
island, the distinc- poplars flashed silver. Insects hummed businesspeople hurried along spacious,
tions blur in the
in the heat. The posse filed down the curving sidewalks past tidy gardens of
smoky haze of
slope, costumed and armed. I drank white, red, and yellow flowers.
roasting pig.
it all in. By marrying movie illusion The following day, Noey and I found
with psychological delusion, my fan- a small college perched on a third floor

22
 Discover how many colours one
sea can hold

www.spain.info

OFICINA ESPAÑOLA DE TURISMO EN TORONTO • TOURIST OFFICE OF SPAIN • OFFICE DU TOURISME D'ESPAGNE
2 Bloor Street West, Suite 3402. TORONTO, Ontario, M4W 3E2
Tel.: 1- 416 - 961 31 31 Fax.: 1- 416 - 961 19 92 toronto@tourspain.toronto.on.ca www.tourspain.toronto.on.ca
 t h e wa l r u s

July 13–22 above a fashionable boutique. We locat- fidence in his demeanour that belied
The 38th ed an English teacher, a pretty young our concerns.
International woman dressed in tight jeans and high- He asked his mother for permission
Physics Olympiad
heeled sandals that revealed glittering to join us, and she angrily replied, “How
Isfahan, Iran
purple toenail polish. are you ever going to find a suitable
I knew that the People’s Liberation wife if you are out riding with these two
Army (pla) had wrested this land from Americans?”
the indigenous Kazakh and Uighur Ignoring her, Wuming Shi showed
people, just as they had conquered Tibet, up at our hotel the next morning on his
Denying the and that they had imported agriculture twenty-dollar Chinese bicycle, with cot-
Holocaust is so last and urbanization into a land traditional- ton bedding tied askew behind the back
year — this year,
ly inhabited by nomads. But we had been seat. On the long climb out of town, he
Iran has moved
travelling without language, so the tra- pedalled beside me as I struggled to catch
on to denying
string theory. High
gedy remained strangely sterile, as if hu- my breath. When we reached the sum-
school students mans weren’t involved. mit, I asked him how he could ride so
from across the After formalities, I asked, “What is the strongly, on a junker bike and with no
globe will travel relationship between the Han Chinese physical conditioning.
to Isfahan this and the Kazakh people here in north- Wuming Shi smiled. “I have suffered
July for a week- west Xinjiang?” more than you have. I am strong in my
long competition “Yes.” She smiled. basically.”
to identify the “Did you understand my question?” Ten days later, we were studying my
world’s nerdiest “Yes.” Another coquettish smile. map and Wuming Shi pointed his fin-
teenager. The I reworded my inquiry, using sim- ger at a region marked with the label,
contest has two ple syntax. “Many irrigation ditches.”
parts, one devoted
“Oh. We are all very happy.” “My father dug those ditches with a
to theoretical
We chatted congenially in this man- shovel.”
problems and
ner until Noey and I thanked the woman Then he began to cry. After a few mo-
a second to
experimental and retired to go shopping. When we ments he continued, “You are a writer.
questions, with stepped off the escalator in a large de- Sometimes you ask too many questions.
a day of rest partment store, two Filipino women ap- Remember, this is China. There are many
in between for proached and suggested mysteriously stories about the Han Chinese, the Kaz-
competitors to that we might want to talk with a local akhs, and the Uighurs. Some of these
hang out and resident — someone I will call Wuming stories may be true, while some may
talk about their Shi — who spoke excellent English. not. It is very hard to know. But I will
crushes with this As we sipped tea in a posh hotel, Wu- tell you the story of my father. I know
year’s guest of ming Shi explained that he couldn’t an- this is true.
honour, Stephen swer my questions in a public place, and “My father was born in 1930. When
Hawking. Last
invited us to his house. That evening, the Revolution started, he joined Chiang
year, sixteen-year-
we discussed Hemingway, the Bible, Kai-shek’s army, but his unit was defeat-
old Jonathan
and Joseph Conrad, but Wuming Shi ed by the Communists. They sent him
Pradana Mailoa
of Indonesia won deflected all inquiries about politics, so- to school and he joined the pla, who
the title of best cial interactions, or history. Three days fought against the independence move-
physics student later, defeated in our quest for informa- ment in East Turkestan. After the victory,
for correctly tion, Noey and I decided to continue the soldiers were ordered to colonize the
answering a ques- our bike ride across the steppe. conquered land, which later became the
tion about neutron- Wuming Shi asked if he could join region known as Xinjiang. There were
inferometers us. He was a retired bank clerk, fifty- no Chinese women, so the government
and the effect of four years old and frail looking, with dispatched agents to central China to
gravitational pull a thin face, chipped front teeth, large find wives for the soldier-settlers. The
on de Broglie eyeglasses, and a warm smile. He had Chinese built farms and cities, because
waves. At press
been married twice and had three chil- the Kazakh people were nomads.
time, no one from
dren, but had never camped out, been “My father dug irrigation trenches and
the United States
on a long-distance bike ride, or exer- raised fruit trees. He and my mother
had signed up.
cised in any meaningful way. Noey and were happy, and we always had enough
I were worried that he would become a to eat. But my father was of Yi national-
liability on the arduous ride ahead, but ity, not Han Chinese, so when the Cul-
there was a quiet peacefulness and con- tural Revolution commenced in 1966,

24
 What Books can’t tell you

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 t h e wa l r u s

August 9–10 neighbours accused my father of speak- shriek two-syllable greetings, and the
Fourth ing against the government.” electric hum of cicadas rises on the late-
International Wuming Shi continued quickly, in afternoon air along with the sour stink
Course on
cropped sentences, without description of wild boar. Soon the trail is blocked by
Improving the
Quality of Service or elaboration. a series of massive boulders. We have
in Security “Under torture, my father confessed arrived at the sanctuary of Werehpai.
Buenos Aires to crimes against the government. He Before taking us any further, our Trio
was imprisoned and held in chains. Then Indian guide recounts the story of how
he escaped and hid in a haystack. Still he found this place.
in chains, he returned home to see my “I was chasing a herd of boar when
mother. Just to look at her face. Of course, my hunting dog disappeared,” Kamania
he was captured, tortured, and impris- tells us in Sranan Tongo, Suriname’s
oned again. matter-of-fact lingua franca. “I looked
“My fellow Latin Wuming Shi sobbed uncontrollably. for him all day but couldn’t find him,
American rent-a- “My father was never a bad man. The so I returned to camp. My wife was very
cops: The people men who accused him just wanted to upset. Our dog is a good dog. I went to
fear for their make him look dirty so they would look sleep angry and very sad.”
homes and their clean.” That night, Kamania dreamt of a voice.
lives. In these He took a raggedy breath and con- The voice described a secret pathway
times of great tinued: “When my father was in prison, through the forest and told him to fol-
wealth for the we were always hungry, and in the win- low it. “You will not find your dog,” said
few and poverty ter, frost coated the inside of our house. the voice. “Instead, you will find pictures
for the many,
After the Cultural Revolution my father of your ancestors carved in stone.”
violent crime is
came home. But he was never the same “I woke before the sun and followed
ever rising. And
this is wonderful
man again.” the same route I’d learned in the dream,”
news for private Wuming Shi composed himself and Kamania continues. “I secretly expected
security firms! smiled. His face, which had been pale at to find my dog, but by noon I had found
Our industry is the beginning of the journey, was now nothing, so I sat down to eat my lunch.
growing by tanned, offset by a purple bruise above I was lost. I did not know where I was.
10 percent a year — his left eye, where he had crashed on Then, on the surface of a stone at my
so fast, in fact, that a rocky downhill. “I have never told feet, I saw a face staring up at me.”
our performance this to anyone before. I tell it to you be- Kamania looked up and realized he
has suffered and cause we are bicycling together. We are was sitting in front of a towering com-
we’re getting friends.” plex of granite boulders overgrown with
some tough press. Then he pointed his finger at me moss and vines. He had never seen this
Human rights
and admonished, “You have travelled place before. “The face told me to explore
groups and the
in China for a month and you have seen the stones,” he says.
UN are saying
we’re taking
some things. You have heard this story. Among the boulders, Kamania found
over from public Maybe you think that now you under- a labyrinth of seven interconnected caves.
police — in Chile, stand China. You will write that you The walls of each room were covered
we outnumber understand China. But you don’t know with rough petroglyphs, haunting imag-
them two to anything. You don’t understand any- es of faces and rainforest animals carved
one. They also thing about China.” into the rock. In one room he found an
say that we fuel — Jon Turk altar stone, its flat surface thick with the
the illegal arms bones of boar, armadillo, and monkey —
trade and engage once home to his ancestors, this room
in extrajudicial was now a jaguar’s lair. The sloped floors
killings. This is were carpeted with shards of pottery, and
precisely why
the sound of them splintering beneath
we must come to
together: to share
dreaming a new his feet frightened him.
best practices myth Kamania left quickly. He paddled
for these special downriver to Kwamalasamutu and alert-
A lost jungle cave reveals a secret
services, and ed the village chief to what he’d found.
to drink to our Soon, government officials and local
wisdom.” sipaliwini basin — We leave our boats archaeologists were informed, and the
on the river and trudge into the Surinam- site was declared a sanctuary. An archae-
ese jungle without speaking. Piha birds ologist from the Smithsonian came to

26
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 t h e wa l r u s
August 11 conduct a preliminary dig. Conservation
Dia da Pendura International, already active in the rain-
Brazil forests of Suriname, quickly began explor-
ing the ecotourism potential of the site.
Our expedition is part of that mission.
After uttering a short prayer, Kamania
leads us into the caves. The air becomes
dank and cold, almost subterranean. The
Law students floors are slippery with tropical lichens
throughout Brazil and dotted with ceramic fragments.
leave their res- We make our way into the first house
taurant cheques and begin to see the carvings: stick-figure
“hanging” (na bodies with oval heads, their mouths
pendura) every wide open in fear or anger; giant spi-
year on this, the ders and coiled serpents, threatening
date Portuguese to strike; hybrid beings, half man and
emperor Dom
half butterfly, loosing arrows from the
Pedro I founded
roof. And everywhere, images of men
the country’s law
with ornate headdresses, suggestive of
schools in 1827.
The custom began Amerindian royalty, and women in sim-
when eateries near ple pigtails.
the institutions The carvings come alive in the skit-
offered these tering light of our headlamps and cam-
important clients eras. In every room, I get the disturbing
a free meal in impression that a hundred eyes are fol-
honour of the lowing me as I move through the shad-
date. When the ows. No human has lived here for at
invitations least a millennium, but the caves still
started to peter feel eerily inhabited.
out, students
Carbon dating of charcoal remains
established a
has determined that Werehpai is at least
not-so-legal
5,000 years old, a prehistoric apartment
precedent:
lunch, pro bono. complex that once served as a tempor-
Offending scholars ary village site for nomadic hunters
gather at the and, later, small tribes of agricultural-
restaurant of ist Amerindians. Kamania’s discovery
their choice, eat is easily the most significant archeologic-
and drink their al find in Surinamese history, and the
fill, loudly and petroglyphs are one of the most remark-
tipsily thank their able deposits of Stone Age artwork in
hosts, then walk South America. But to date, fewer than
out solemnly a hundred modern people have set foot
without paying.
among the houses of Werehpai.
They do leave
The passageways between the rooms
the customary
are narrow and dark, and we often have
10 percent tip,
however — August
to crawl blindly on hands and knees.
11 is also Waiter’s But Kamania rushes us through the
Day. maze, clearly uncomfortable with our
popping flashes. He is very proud of
this place but intensely protective of it.
“Snel, snel,” he says, urging us to move
faster.
In an hour we emerge from the sev-
enth house. As our eyes adjust to the
muted light of the jungle, Kamania ex-
plains the sanctuary’s significance to
his people, and how it got its name.
28
Trio legend says that Werehpai was August 15
a young woman from the Akijo tribe, a 30th Anniversary of
group that lived for thousands of years the Wow! Signal
Sent from outer space
in the remote jungles of the Upper Ama-
to Delaware, Ohio
zon Basin. The Akijo were an advanced
people — they knew how to paint, to
draw, and to weave — but they were also
a warring one, renowned for their vio-
lence and cannibalism.
One day, Werehpai was given two
children, kidnapped from a neighbour-
ing tribe, to raise as her own. When they Dear Dr. Jerry
reached adolescence, the girl was re- Ehman of Earth,
moved from Werehpai’s care and sub-
jected to a horrific Akijo ritual: she was I left you a message
tattooed from head to toe and then kept thirty years ago
alive as her limbs and torso were shorn and still haven’t
apart and devoured by her tribespeople. heard back. Did
I say too much?
Terrified and heartbroken, Werehpai
Not enough? The
helped the girl’s brother, Aturai, escape
intensity variation
into the jungle. In time, Aturai returned I used — 6equj5 —
with an army of men, bent on revenge. did that click? I
A vicious battle ensued. The jungle spir- thought we had a
its, who could always be trusted to side connection. You
with the righteous, joined with Aturai. even doodled
When the jungles fell silent, he had pre- “Wow!” on
vailed — the Akijo had been destroyed. the computer
The Trio believe the petroglyphs at printout beside
Werehpai are their ancestors’ visual re- my message. At
cord of that battle — the graphic novel the Big Ear Radio
of a story that has been passed down Observatory. . . the
seti project . . .
orally for countless generations. Soon
remember, Jerry?
after the discovery of the caves became
Maybe I was too
public, the Trio held a feast to bless forward, what with
the sanctuary. They offered tributes to the strong narrow-
their forebears, the small tribes of Amer- band frequency.
indians whose prehistoric spirits still But it’s so hard to
haunt the caves. meet a nice earth-
But the feast also honoured Kamania ling. I know you
and the dream that led him to the caves. like to take things
His tale has quickly become legend here slow (and that’s cool
and now affords him a measure of sha- with me), but I’m
manic celebrity among his people. It confused. Is there
proves that even today, in parts of the someone else? A
quasar? Please call.
world where good storytelling is still
the most respected form of informa-
Still waiting,
tion technology, new myths are continu- Lonely Sentient
ally being lived, spoken, and dreamt. Space Being
We hike back to the Sipaliwini along
the tangled pathway of Kamania’s dream
route. As we climb into the boat, I ask
him if he ever found his dog. “No,” he
says with a smile. “The dog found me.”
A week after Kamania stumbled upon
Werehpai, his hunting dog reappeared
at his door.
— Andrew Westoll
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The amazement starts before you even step inside.

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 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7

Fact &
Fiction
fact

C a n a d a and the A g e o f E x t r a c t i o n
Rich vs. Poor: The Storm Awaits
T o u g h Ta l k on A f g h a n i s t a n
Political Charisma: Where Did It Go?
pp. 32~54

fiction

A Russian Nose Job

B o b D y l a n S p e n d s the S u m m e r
Can Exiles Ever Return?
A t the C a r P o u n d
pp. 56~81

illustrations: vänskap 31
 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
detail
E x t r ac t i o N
Canada started as a rough-and-tumble company, but
is the march of progress now killing the country?
essay and photography by Edward Burtynsky
Our greatest experiment — civilization itself — will succeed only
if it can live on nature’s terms, not man’s. To do this we must
adopt principles in which the short term is trumped by the
long; in which caution prevails over ingenuity; in which the ab-
surd myth of endless growth is replaced by respect for natural
limits; in which progress is steered by precautionary wisdom.
— Ronald Wright
ast year, I was in northern Portugal, near the Spanish
L border, photographing marble quarries. It’s a beauti-
ful part of the world — the Atlantic Ocean lapping
up on the shores, the Montes de León in the distance, the
people generous and curious. But the region is also pep-
pered with quarries, both large and small, and I was struck
by the amount of cut stone sitting idle, with no apparent
owner. I asked my guide, a quarryman in these parts for
twenty years, about the abandoned rock. He explained
that in the past, when extracting techniques were less re-
fined, practically all of the quarried rock found a market:
the fine grades were for flooring and sculpture; the lesser,
flawed stone, crushed into a near dust, for foot powders
and toothpaste. The backlog of unwanted stone is the re-
sult of choice, he said.
More efficient extraction techniques allowed for blocks
to be removed at a lower cost, and more elevated tastes
and specific consumer demands forced buyers to be more
selective when choosing stone for their respective mar-
kets. Blocks showing even minor flaws were passed over.
So, after many years of accumulating this secondary ma-
terial, the region’s natural beauty is marred by vast grave-
yards of rejected, unwanted stone. As markets change
their tastes, they also create a great deal of waste. I con-
soled my guide by saying that as the price of oil rises, the
cost of extracting, lifting, cutting, and transporting stone
would also rise. This would make all this secondary rock
left: iberia quarries #9, cochicho co., pardais, portugal, 2006 33
much more attractive. It was a guess.
In the 1970s, while working as an underground gold
miner near Red Lake in northern Ontario, I visited many
large, open-pit mines. The size of these holes was strik-
ing, and I began to think about how to express monumen-
tal scale in photographic terms. Canada itself, of course,
is monumental, a vast expanse of land and water with
few people, and I wondered about the relationship be-
tween scarred earth and human need. In many respects,
my work has from the beginning been a meditative lament
for the ongoing and dramatic loss of our natural environ-
ment and our flawed relationship with that world. Were
I born in a country less privileged with unspoiled wil-
derness — a country like Portugal, perhaps — I would no
doubt have a different view of nature. (Scarcity can frame
the mind in very distinct ways.) In that sense, my work,
all of it, is profoundly Canadian.
Throughout the developed world, practically every-
thing was long ago divided up — farms seeded, trees cut
down, forests replanted or not. Where civilization has
marched, few people know anything about original, pris-
tine settings. Canada is different, or at least potentially
so. We are blessed with an abundance of unadulterated
space, and I have always loved canoeing and hiking in our
remote regions. Experiencing raw spaces has given me a
reference point for understanding what I have come to
call a geological time consequence.
During the 1980s, I made numerous attempts to photo-
graph raw, unaffected natural spaces. But we all under-
stand wilderness images, and it seemed almost impossible
to keep my own from being drawn down by the gravita-
tional pull of clichés. In 1983, I set out in a Volvo station
wagon on a four-month exploration of the North Amer-
ican mined landscape. It was the beginning not of an en-
vironmental project, but rather of a visual update on the
 t h e wa l r u s
ages of humankind, from stone to bronze, iron, and on-
ward, a never-ending forward thrust. Rock and metals are
alive and well, I discovered — these ages existing on a scale
so immense that even 100 years ago it would have been
impossible to imagine their scope. Relatively inexpensive
energy — due, in large measure, to improved efficiencies
in the oil-and-gas sector — and the more than doubling
of the human population over the past sixty years, have
inexorably altered our present age. But though history
may get buried under the march of progress, if one looks
in the right places it is never extinguished. There are lo-
cations that put older ages in sharp relief, just beneath
the surface.
e have always taken from nature. This is normal, part
W of the human condition and, indeed, a fact of life
for all life forms. What is different today is the
speed and scale of human taking, and that the
earth has never experienced this kind of cumu-
lative impact. We don’t see it as extraordinary
because it evolved incrementally, but the result
is monumental. If my images appear surreal at
times, it must be remembered that they depict
our extractive world as it is. The trick — now, as on that
initial exploration — is to provide photographic images
that leave meaning open, an ambiguity necessary to gain
access to sites, engender discussion, and steer clear of po-
lemics and clichés.
Thirty years after chasing down my subject, I sense that
we are entering a new age. Never before has an entire gen-
eration been told in such convincing terms that the val-
ues and ambitions we assumed to be good and true, and
that we fought long and hard to establish, are, in fact, kill-
ing us. Few voices in government or business have accept-
able or timely solutions to reverse the deadly march of
progress. By slowing the machinery of industry, govern-
ments risk creating massive unemployment, we are told,
and I can accept this. But still, the evidence of human-
kind’s carbon footprint is growing daily. The biosphere
is at a breaking point, and it will lash back in ways more
deadly than the social and economic threats — crime and
revolution, an even larger divide between rich and poor,
etc. — that critics say will result from scaling back. We
are being tested.
Around the world, Canadians are regarded as nature-
loving people, but given our mad rush for oil in the West
(and East), the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, and the
collapse of our fisheries, it is an outdated, even curious
designation. Our boreal forests are as vital to ecological
diversity and carbon capture as the Amazon basin — two
great lungs, without which we would fry to a crisp — but
while much has been written and said about the Brazil-
ians hacking away at their precious resource, little is said,
or written, or even known about our own. With what is
going on in the forests of northern Alberta, we may be on
the cusp of destroying an irreplaceable contiguous ecosys-
tem. Tree planting is fine, but saplings take years to grow
into effective carbon sinks.
34
By virtue of this country’s seemingly limitless space,
and more particularly by virtue of our specific history,
Canadians have developed a fairly unique relationship to
the environment and to the geological time consequence.
For 200 years, much of Canada was actually a corpora-
tion, the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose chief purpose
was to extract. First came pelts, then trees, and then with
Confederation the railroad, our first great nation-build-
ing project, and the extraction of minerals on a signifi-
cant scale. We may think otherwise — especially in the
increasingly urban metropoles that are now redefining
the nation — but Canada’s natural resource wealth has
always been for sale, for the taking, and we have all bene-
fited enormously from this. It’s on us, as athletes say be-
fore a big game or after a big loss.
The current crisis crept up on us partly because govern-
ment structures — the ministries of the environ-
ment and natural resources, for instance — were
from the beginning subservient to the all-import-
ant role our governments and corporations
played in opening up the land and water to the
ages of extraction and progress. It turns out that
Canadians are thought of as nature-loving not
because of specific actions taken, but because we have
more wilderness than anyone else. The postcard images
are fabulous, but the question now is: “What will we do
with this natural bounty?”
I realize that in some respects my photographs are
shocking, that to some they represent answers rather than
questions. This is not my intention. I’m still in that old
Volvo, and my work is still an exploration. But the photo-
graphs are real, and it is worth asking, I believe, what we
should do with them.
Consider a different picture. Consider that the oil al-
ready extracted from the Alberta tar sands represents a
tiny percentage of the region’s estimated reserves; that
this area is already one of the largest surface-mining op-
erations in the world; that it includes one of the largest
toxic lakes ever created. Already the region looks like a
vast dystopia, out of sight for most of us — but for how
long can the secret hold? British Columbia novelist Wil-
liam Gibson has written: “It is becoming unprecedentedly
difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the
age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and
link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if
not sooner. This is something I would bring to the atten-
tion of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader:
the future, eventually, will find you out.” Picture the age
of evidence extraction.
Canadians have a choice: to elect leaders who have a
vision of how to make sustainable development real or
to carry on with our business and history as usual. What
we have going for us is general well-being, a decent heart,
and educated people sitting on a very large chest of gold.
If resources are what we have, and sustainable develop-
ment is what we want, then why not get on with a new age:
extracting what we need without destroying the places
we take it from.v
illustration: chris buchan
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• •
Today’s super-wealthy are as rich as Rockefeller,
but will they be as generous?
here are few things more boring
T than a class analysis, some say.
Karl Marx’s “fetishism of the com-
modity” or Adam Smith’s “invisible
hand” can kill a dinner party. But ce-
lebrity, especially celebrity attached to
wealth — real, gigantic wealth — is an-
other matter altogether. And so, while
Conrad Black’s trial in Chicago concen-
trated on the arcane legalities of non-
compete agreements and whether his
Lordship pocketed tens of millions of
dollars that didn’t belong to him, what
sparked a real frisson about this case
were the accounts of orgiastic spend-
ing Black and his vampish wife, Barb-
ara Amiel, indulged in at the pinnacle
of their power.
When is enough enough, people ask,
mad, envious, curious. Three opulent
mansions and a Park Avenue condo,
a private jet and Rolls-Royce Silver
Wraith, and Amiel’s “environmental
chamber” — her dozen crocodile-skin
Hermès Birkin handbags, the Renaud
t h e wa l r u s
so ciety
• • • • • •
by Bruce Livesey
photography by Gabriel Jones
Pellegrino evening bags (whose handles
are encased in jewels), the vast collec-
tion of Manolo Blahnik shoes — are
part of the answer. But there were also
the ludicrously expensive holidays in
Bora-Bora, the parties, and, of course,
the staff — the maids, chefs, chauffeurs,
footmen, housemen, guards, and sev-
enteen butlers, one of whom earned
$130,000 annually, plus board. (Good
help is hard to come by, apparently,
and once found must be compensat-
ed accordingly.) “Nobody has seven-
teen butlers,” snorts Peter C. Newman,
Black’s former confidant and biograph-
er (and Amiel’s former boss), who cov-
ered the tycoon’s trial. “Nobody had
seventeen butlers even during the
Gilded Age.”
Newman’s quip provides an inter-
esting historical comparison. As the
Blacks’ pharaonic appetite for luxury
illustrates, we are in the midst of a new
Gilded Age, a period where “extrava-
gance knows no bounds,” as Amiel her-
36
self put it. The world’s richest man, Bill
Gates, is worth $56 billion (US) and
lives in a 66,000-square-foot lakeside
compound near Seattle, valued at ap-
proximately $100 million. Paul Allen,
the co-founder of Microsoft, owns a 413-
foot yacht complete with a cinema, re-
cording studio, two helicopters, and a
ten-person submarine. To call it a boat
is absurd, says Shinan Govani, the Na-
tional Post’s gossip columnist, who at-
tended a party on Allen’s ship at the
Cannes film festival. “It’s a country un-
to itself.”
In a manner that has become famil-
iar, Ira Rennert became one of Amer-
ica’s highest paid executives in the 1990s
by accumulating nearly $500 million in
dividends and management fees from
his companies, mostly metals and steel
plants (one of which, AM General, builds
the gas-guzzling Hummer and Humvee).
His duplex apartment on Park Avenue
is replete with antiques and Impres-
sionist paintings. He owns a palatial
 t h e wa l r u s

spread in Israel, a Gulfstream V jet,
and, the pièce de résistance, a 100,000-
square-foot oceanfront mansion in the
Hamptons — a twenty-nine bedroom
mini-Versailles on sixty-four acres with
beach and garden pavilions, basket-
ball, squash, and tennis courts, and
a theatre.
Not to be outdone by US billion-
aires, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Alsaud
of Saudi Arabia, the world’s thirteenth
richest man, owns a 317-room, 400,000-
square-foot palace in Riyadh. Costing
$130 million to build, it has eight eleva-
tors and more than 500 television sets,
and the grounds, in this desert king-
dom, feature a soccer field.
Canada has twenty-three billion-
aires, with David Thomson, control-
ling $22 billion (US), leading the pack.
And many of our hyper-rich also enjoy
their toys. David Ho, the Vancouver-
based ceo of the now-defunct Harmony
Airways, reportedly owns a golf course,
a thirty-eight-foot Miami Vice-style ciga-
rette racing boat, a custom-made Ferrari
Testarossa, and a 13,000-square-foot
mansion. He also owns two homes
in Hawaii, one of which is valued at
over $20 million. Heather Reisman
and Gerald Schwartz of Indigo and
Onex fame, own homes in Nantucket
and Palm Beach, a yacht and a plane,
and live in a huge Toronto spread.
They safari with Hollywood royalty
like Michael Douglas and Catherine
Zeta-Jones.
show that wages for the working major- just over $500,000 ($1.5 million in to-
ity have either flattened out or declined day’s dollars). In 2005, the 100 high-
for more than two decades. est-paid Canadian ceos took home an
While most Canadians consider average annual salary of $9 million.
themselves part of a broad middle class, Whereas executive pay was once almost
that designation has shifted significant- entirely made up of salaries and bonus-
ly. In the post-World War II era and es, the use of stock options as induce-
through the 1970s, an ever-increasing ments took hold when corporations
number of Canadian families — sup- started wooing a small class of super-
ported largely by the salary of a single star ceos. As a result, in both Canada
wage-earner — improved their stan- and the US, executive compensation
dards of living and socked money away. has gone through the roof. Between
Today, incomes are growing much more 1998 and 2000, Michael Eisner, then at
slowly if at all, and Canadians are bor- the helm of Walt Disney, cashed in over
rowing more and more. As in the US, $680 million ( US) in stock options. Last
much of Canada’s “middle class” is ac- March, the co-ceos of Canada’s Power
tually two or three paycheques away Corp., André and Paul Desmarais Jr.,
from going broke, and many are wonder- earned a combined $35 million by exer-
ing what separates them from the priv- cising some of their stock options. Says
ileged few. David Green, a professor of economics
In the 1970s, American ceos made at the University of British Columbia,
roughly thirty times what average work- “The right wing managed to win the ar-
ers hauled in; today, they make 300 gument that what is good for the rich is
times the average wage. The chairman good for all of us.”
of Wal-Mart, America’s largest corpor- But is it? In North America, the wealth
ation, earns $23 million (US) annually; divide has become a canyon, and crit-
the company’s non-supervisory staff ics believe that the concentration of so
take home $18,000 (US). Thirty years much money pooled in the hands of
ago, Jack Armstrong of Imperial Oil a tiny elite is corrupting our institu-
was Canada’s highest-paid ceo. He made tions and dissipating economic vitality.

n 2003, according to Forbes maga-

I zine, there were 476 billionaires in
the world. Today, there are 946, with an
average net worth of $3.6 billion and a
combined wealth of $3.5 trillion. ( The
current US budget is $2.7 trillion.) Five
percent of Americans control just over
half of the country’s wealth, and collec-
tively the richest 300,000 Americans
earn almost as much income as the bot-
tom 150 million. A study co-authored
by McMaster University economics
professor Michael Veall and Emmanuel
Saez at UC Berkeley revealed that in
Canada, the wealth controlled by our
most affluent class has risen dramatic-
ally over the past thirty years. Today,
the top 1 percent account for 13.5 per-
cent of all income, as compared with 7.5
percent in the late 1970s; other studies “A Fool in Love” – Ike and Tina Turner and the Ikettes (1960)

38 illustration: matthew thurber


“By the time Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker were in power, they had an agenda. It was class
warfare from above, and people at the bottom didn’t know what hit them.”
Both national governments are becom-
ing less relevant in the face of emergent
plutocracies not necessarily loyal to
local economies — perhaps one reason
North America’s manufacturing base
is in such sad shape. Nor does either
national government seem interested
in solving the myriad economic, health,
environmental, educational, and so-
cial problems that cash-strapped local
governments cannot address. Prince-
ton economist and New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman has argued
that the growing gap between rich and
poor in countries like Canada and the
US has a haunting parallel with coun-
tries across Latin America, where for
decades dramatic wealth inequality so
fractured societies that revolution from
below was a constant threat. It still is.
“This, ultimately, is the most pressing
issue we face as a society today,” Krug-
man wrote.
he original Gilded Age extended from
T the end of the US Civil War to the
early years of the twentieth century,
an era when industrialization took root
and a small cabal took control of criti-
cal sectors of the economy. Given the
failure of the political classes to pre-
vent the war between the states and
the bankrupt economy that followed,
in some respects the emerging domi-
nance of private capital was a necessary
evil. While committed first and fore-
most to empire building, robber barons
such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew
Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan also invest-
ed massively in infrastructure, helping
to build the nation through roads and
railroads, universities, libraries, hospi-
tals, etc. Such men amassed vast for-
tunes, some of which they spent on
elegant manors and castles staffed with
armies of servants in New York City
and Newport, Rhode Island. Canada’s
own Gilded Age arrived later on, but
its legacy can still be seen in Mont-
real’s Golden Square Mile, a neighbour-
hood of giant and regal homes that hug
Mount Royal.
Extraordinary wealth in the US led
to political power and highly useful
illustration: mike constable
j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
state benefits for the rich like protect- Commerce, the memo claimed that big
ive tariffs, free land for railways, and business had “shown little stomach for
anti-strike measures. The codependent a hard-nosed contest with their critics”
relationship that developed between and that in terms of framing govern-
the state and the super-wealthy is per- ment policy, “the American business
haps best exemplified by the Panic of executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’ ”
1893, when a deep depression led to a With the US mired in Vietnam and
run on the gold supply. President Gro- anti-war demonstrations becoming
ver Cleveland asked financier J. P. Mor- more vociferous, Powell Jr. attacked
gan to create a syndicate to campus liberals, Ralph Na-
supply the US Treasury with der and his acolytes, and the
gold. Morgan did, and the na- press. While the stage was
tional bank was rescued from set for a firm business rebut-
insolvency. “That episode illus- tal, economic preoccupations
trated the bankers were more took a back seat to Watergate
powerful than the government,” and the US’s failure in Vietnam.
says Alan Lessoff, a professor Dispiriting years followed but,
of history at Illinois State University by the late 1970s, with Jimmy Carter
and an expert on the Gilded Age. in the White House and corporate
Special interests have always exer- profits declining, some precipitously,
cised undue influence on society, but the counter-revolution that Powell Jr.
after the shocks of two world wars and had attempted to spark gained renewed
the Depression, most North Ameri- vigour.
cans experienced an unparalleled rise Powell Jr.’s manifesto spelled out
in wages and living standards between an array of tactics that big business
the late 1940s and roughly 1980. By the could employ to challenge critics on
mid-1970s, one-quarter of the US work- campus, in the media and courts, and
force and over one-third of Canadian in the political arena. Most notable in
workers were unionized, and working this percolating ideological war was the
people were consistently winning sig- formative role of conservative think
nificant wage concessions. Fordism — tanks. The Heritage Foundation, fund-
the notion that increasing wage rates ed initially by Joseph Coors, beat the
for workers meant more consumers drum for economic deregulation, a
with more money to spend — prevailed theme also central to the American
in heavy industry. “It was an unpreced- Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute,
ented period in the history of capital- and the Hudson Institute, among others.
ism, where for a variety of reasons Such groups began producing reports —
working people were able to advance customarily distilled into press releases
their demands,” recalls Jim Stanford, and disseminated to major media out-
an economist with the Canadian Auto lets — as well as training young ideo-
Workers union. logues to staff key government and
But not all was quiet in corporate congressional posts. If the initial im-
America. In 1971, just prior to being petus was to promote Ronald Reagan’s
appointed by Richard Nixon to the US “trickle down” economic theories, “ex-
Supreme Court, Lewis F. Powell Jr. — a pert analysts” from conservative think
prominent corporate lawyer who sat tanks were soon dominating the televi-
on the boards of more than fifteen cor- sion talk show circuit, radio programs,
porations — wrote a memorandum and print journalism, and they were
claiming that “the American economic weighing in on practically every con-
system is under broad attack” and that ceivable subject.
businesspeople must “confront this This business counterattack was
problem as a primary responsibility highly organized, says Doug Henwood,
of corporate management.” Circulated publisher of the New York-based Left
to members of the US Chamber of Business Observer, which covers Wall
39

Give your daughter the
opportunity to try anything
in school and you give her the
power to do anything in life.
The Bishop Strachan School
www.bss.on.ca • (416) 483-4325
298 Lonsdale Road, Toronto
TORONTO FRENCH SCHOOL
Bilingual
Co-educational
International Baccalaureate
Campuses in Toronto
& Mississauga
www.tfs.ca
If education means
the world to you.
t h e wa l r u s
Street. “By the time Ronald Reagan and in large and visible wealth disparities.
[Federal Reserve chairman] Paul Vol- When everyone is poor they are all in
cker were in power, they had an agen- it together; when everyone is needy
da. It was class warfare from above, and save for a privileged few, the elites
people at the bottom didn’t know what become a target. Enlightened self-in-
hit them.” terest should drive those at the top to
Canada came a little later to this distribute wealth evenly and to “lift all
game, but ultimately the Fraser and boats,” but ceo compensation today
C. D. Howe institutes and the Canad- is not necessarily tied to shareholder
ian Council of Chief Executives came gains or profit growth (and in many
to play a similar role: all call for cap- quarters shareholders are indeed feel-
ital to be freed from constraints im- ing hosed down, to paraphrase Con-
posed by governments, all promote rad Black).
free trade, are generally critical of con- Between 1990 and 2001, as measured
sumer protection laws and the welfare by Standard & Poor’s 500 index, share
state, and make regular appearances in prices increased by an exceptional 300
the media. percent, corporate profit growth was a
In the early 1980s, Volcker drove solid 116 percent, and ceo pay skyrock-
up interest rates in order to offset in- eted by 535 percent. Suggesting that
flation, plunging the North American superb corporate stewardship is not
economy into its deepest recession always the principal reason for extra-
since the Great Depression. By the ordinary pay packages, last year for-
time the Reagan administration broke mer Loblaw president John Lederer
the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike by was paid $22 million as he was ushered
replacing unionized workers with scab out the door. This spring, the company
labour, Fordism had effectively been announced its first annual loss in nine-
defeated. Unions were on the defen- teen years.
sive and corporations were extracting And then there is the case of John
wage concessions. Roth, former ceo of Nortel Networks.
With increased globalization and When Roth took over in 1997, Nortel
freer trade, North American workers was already a high-tech powerhouse.
were soon forced to compete for jobs Roth then spent $32 billion on largely
with low-wage workers in the develop- useless Internet start-ups that generat-
ing world. The era of the closed union ed few sales. By the summer of 2000,
shop was over, and organized labour with the Internet bubble about to burst,
wilted as a force for equalization in the company’s stock peaked at $124.50.
North American society. Today, the Within weeks, Roth cashed in his stock
portion of the private sector workforce options, and by year’s end he had pock-
that is unionized is 7.4 percent in the eted $135 million.
US and 17 percent in Canada. Explains While Roth and PR flaks continued
the caw’s Stanford, “Working people to issue rosy projection statements, the
have lost power, not maintained their company was in fact hemorrhaging
share of the pie, and seen a decline in money. In 2001, as the crisis mounted,
their living standards.” Roth quit, retiring to his estate in Cal-
Exacerbating the wealth divide was edon, Ontario. Nortel spiralled into near-
the emergence of large institutional insolvency, its stock bottoming out at
shareholders, including mutual and 67 cents per share. More than 60,000 of
pension-plan funds, with get-rich-quick its 100,000 employees were given pink
mindsets. This pressured corporations slips, and shareholders’ retirement
to increase profit margins regardless of portfolios were wiped out. “It seems
the consequences. Across a number of inherently unfair when you see a guy
industries, the security of workers and like Roth living high off the hog and
the middle class began to slip. then the new version [of Nortel] trying
to get it together and coughing up all of
he reasons for the slippage are com- this money to settle lawsuits,” says Joel
T plex, but the result could be grow- Rochon, a Toronto lawyer whose firm
ing disorder. Social unrest tends to be launched one of the class-action share-
rooted less in general poverty than holder lawsuits against the company.
40
 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
f Roth’s big mistake was hubris, else-
I where local investment seems to be
drying up. By and large, the plutocrats
of the initial Gilded Age invested in
national projects. Business — in the
US, steel or insurance, say; in Canada,
timber or booze — came first, and be-
cause monopoly control was sought,
it was often ruthless. But as Rockefeller,
Carnegie, and others “developed a con-
science” (or were pressured into doing
so), spending spilled over into the arts,
education, health care, etc. Many of to-
day’s large corporations, however, are
transnational (and highly diversified)
and, as such, the necessity for home-
country investment with the requi-
site socio-cultural infrastructure is less
pronounced.
In 2006, non-financial Canadian
businesses accumulated about $40
billion in surplus cash. But these rec-
ord profits aren’t being pumped back
into the economy at a rate that will
maintain prosperity. “In the sixties and
seventies, [companies] would reinvest
over 100 percent of cash flow,” says
Stanford. “Now it is 70 to 80 percent
and the rest they let pile up.” According
to Stanford and others, North America’s
business community is showing little
interest in saving what’s left of the manu-
facturing base. Investments offshore,
where economies are developing at a
faster rate and the regulatory regimes
are more lax, are more attractive than at
home. In February, auto-industry ana-
lyst Ron Pinelli was quoted in the New
York Times, saying: “If Chrysler disap-
peared, would anyone’s life change,
except for the people that work for
the company? ”
In a globalized world, just as corpor-
ations chase cheap labour offshore,
local concerns must now fight for phil-
anthropy dollars with more visible
developing-world crises such as hiv/
aids, basic immunization shots, and so
forth. In an age of instant communica-
tion, Zambia can become more com-
pelling than the South Bronx, Watts,
or Jamestown.
he wealthy have always claimed
T that philanthropy is the great cor-
rective, helping to balance out inequit-
ies. “I don’t think you can find a better,
more efficient way to get millions of
The Mall
by Evelyn Lau
Today I choose it over the ocean.
Over the trees, their fall leaves
a flock of orange parrots perched on branches.
Over the chandelier of sunlight broken
on blue waves, over flowers
shaped like teacups or trumpets,
over the jade garden where once I dreamed
I wore a green velvet dress
clasped tight at the waist
like the grip of a man’s hand.
I walk towards it like a Zombie,
this strange planet suspended in time,
a space station in the rainforest
inhabited by teenage girls wearing glitter eyeshadow
and slippery lipgloss. I skate
along its arid walkways
as if on an invisible track, away
from my life. Here it could be day or night,
the walls stripped of clocks,
music moaning a mindless refrain,
not a window in sight.
The stores hold their mouths open
like seductresses, radiating heat and light
and a bright array of wares,
a sorbet rainbow of merchandise
delectable as pastilles.
Outside, the lives of grasses
and insects and breezes go on.
After a day at the mall,
stepping back into what’s left of the world,
the sunlight will sear your skin,
and the gallons of fresh air
will pour over you like pain.
41
 t h e wa l r u s
dollars put back into society than to
have the rich choose to do it,” says
high-society chronicler Rosemary Sex-
ton. Rockefeller and Carnegie gave
away hundreds of millions (billions
in today’s dollars) to build museums,
libraries, universities, and hospitals, or
to be disbursed by foundations. In 2004,
the last year for which there are com-
plete records in Canada, there were
2,400 active grant-making foundations
that donated more than $1.2 billion and
had over $14 billion in assets, combined.
Both numbers are consider-
ably higher today, and in re-
cent years Canadian business
leaders have given enormous
sums to the arts, higher edu-
cation, and health care. In the
US, there are currently more
than 70,000 foundations with
roughly $550 billion in assets. US foun-
dations donated over $40 billion in
2006. Most famously, Bill Gates and
his wife Melinda, co-founders of the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
have given nearly $30 billion (US) to re-
duce the spread of disease, poverty,
and premature death in the develop-
ing world, alongside anti-poverty initia-
tives in the US. Warren Buffett pledged
$31 billion to the Gates Foundation
as well.
Sounding a critical note in the New
York Times Magazine, bioethics profes-
sor Peter Singer, of the Center for Hu-
man Values at Princeton University,
wrote: “When wealthy people give
away money, we can always say that
41#692-3#"6 they are doing it to ease their con-
:!1,,;6+,"6<"&%#"/ sciences or generate favorable publi-
:2--#"6<,"=/1,* city.” Some have speculated that Bill
Gates, for one, is partly trying to up-
!"#$%&'%(%!"#$%)*+%)**,
grade his image after being pummelled
!"#$%&'(%)*& in antitrust suits brought against Micro-
,-.%"'&/0". D*:&B"2*+%$>$ soft a few years ago. Others, like the
12*3-&45&6-%#"'#57"% (*'"&E*##*
82$#5&9-.&!2*54:-' E*#0-24&F#2*:>52 Los Angeles Times, have pointed out
;%-<57&=$>>-' G7*A5&F5'*"2
?'425-&@5A. B-2%0-&F32.H$#0 that some of the Gates Foundation’s
?7*%+-*2&B-#@5"4 B*2*-:&I"5J%
9"0'&B5+#-7C K$.&6-'4520-5>05 investments run counter to its stated
>(!;2)&(.6!!"#$%&"'&("')!*#+*"'! mandate.
?&%16 !"#$%&"'(#)"* %#)*"+$,&(*- ./(0"&$1233(#
"! "!
To be sure, foundations are tax ha-
#$%&$&'!()*+),& 66@ABCBDECBBFF6#G%06H@@I vens that allow wealthy individuals to
$(%$($/0/&;#&=$J12-3#"0!$
shelter money and, if so desired, create
honourable family legacies. But gifts
are gifts, and given the growing import-
!"#$%&'#$()*#"+,"-&(.$"%/012-3#"0!$
ance of the philanthropic sector, the
4,",(%,567(%$"&,568$($)$66666666666666666666666 more important questions are: What
types of initiatives get support from
42
foundations? And what happens to basic
democratic institutions when a select
few exercise so much control? According
to Toronto socialite and fundraiser Cath-
erine Nugent, wealthy people “like to
see bricks and mortar to put their
names on, as opposed to research . . . re-
search is like fixing pipes under the
house, you can’t really see it.” Her
point is borne out by the Million Dol-
lar List, maintained by the Center
on Philanthropy at Indiana Univer-
sity. On the allocation of foundation
grants and gifts of more than
$1 million in the fourth quar-
ter of 2006, a scant 2 percent
went specifically to human
services.
While he is a staunch sup-
porter of philanthropy, Sing-
er expresses concern that “a
few wealthy individuals” can effect-
ively decide whether “billions go to
research vaccines or viruses that kill
millions in the developing world.” He
argues that it would be “better that a
democratic process determines where
the funds go.” But that “democratic
process” is called the tax regime, and
one sure reason for foundations is the
quid pro quo of control over where the
grants go in exchange for providing the
money in the first place.
t would be churlish to criticize ma-
I jor grants to the arts, for instance,
which are increasingly reliant on pri-
vate philanthropy. However, so are
many other sectors of the economy,
and affordable housing projects, for
one, are generally not the kind of
bricks-and-mortar projects that Nu-
gent describes as appealing to the foun-
dation sector. It might be fine for Ruth
Lilly, heir to the Lilly pharmaceutical
fortune, to give $200 million (US) to
Poetry magazine, but the homeless in
the Rust Belt might have liked to have
seen that lucre come their way. Ulti-
mately, there are genuine questions to
be asked about whether society as a
whole can afford to be subjected to the
whims of a tiny elite; about whether
foundation support for arts and cul-
ture, or for higher education, health
care, or for myriad other critical ar-
eas, takes the state off the hook; and
finally, about what happens to the los-
illustration: mike constable
 A BLACK SWAN is a highly improbable event with
ers in the granting sweepstakes. The
record of the first Gilded Age was de- three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable;
cidedly mixed. What of the second?
Krugman worries that the monu- it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we
mental upward shift of wealth is deny- concoct an explanation that makes it appear less
ing too many North Americans the
opportunities that they need, and that random, and more predictable, than it was. The
real cleavages are forming between the
few haves and the legions of have-nots. astonishing success of Google was a black swan;
“The statistical evidence shows, unequal
societies tend to be corrupt societies,”
so was 9/11.
he recently wrote. “When there are
huge disparities in wealth, the rich
have both the motive and the means
to corrupt the system on their behalf.”
Without significant changes, Krugman
envisions history repeating itself, not
necessarily with a new Gilded Age, but
in the form of Latin American dictator-
ships of the rich.
But what if the increasingly rich
donated significantly more than they
currently do? What if philanthropy
became a true third sector, as robust
and varied as the private and public
spheres? Again, the chief difficulties “A fascinating “A richly enjoyable
with vast wealth disparity occur when study of how we read with an
it becomes so visible that resentment is are regularly taken important message
inevitable. But what if the new pluto-
crats gave up their palaces and hog- for suckers by the .... Taleb is a world-
gish consumption and plowed their unexpected.” class raconteur.”
gains, whether legitimate or not, less —Guardian (UK) —BusinessWeek
into the playgrounds of the upwardly
mobile (the opera houses, museums,
and think tanks), and more into ur-
ban renewal, public education, and
the like? If Bill Gates has thrown down
the gauntlet and become more power-
ful, more generous, and more influ-
ential than many nation-states, what
if others followed in his large wake?
Many can afford to make a significant
dent to remedy the ravages of inequal-
ity, and if they did so, what could the
left say then?
It would be wrong, at this point, to
equate Bill Gates and Warren Buffett
with Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller. Gates and Buffett have dir-
ected most of their philanthropy at “Engaging.... In The Black Swan, Taleb proclaims that
the developing world; for Carnegie and the unexpected is the key to understanding not just
Rockefeller, the developing world was
at home. Today, the problems overseas
financial markets but history itself.... The Black Swan
are dire, of that there is no doubt, but has appealing cheek and admirable ambition, and
much of North America is also hurt- contains... wise observations.”
ing, and it is saying “charity begins at

—The New York Times
home.” How will our moneyed class-
es respond?

RANDOM HOUSE www.randomhouse.ca

 t h e wa l r u s

foreign affairs

3d
v i s i on
Can Canada reconcile its defence, diplomacy,
and development objectives in Afghanistan?

by Taylor Owen and Patrick Travers

photography by Martin Adler

A
hundred and twenty years before accidentally struck a house during a heaviest fighting is) in 2009, all national
Canada’s involvement in Afghan- firefight between nato troops and the parties save the New Democrats agree
istan, a British prime minister Taliban. President Hamid Karzai has that the humanitarian costs of with-
identified the issue at the heart of cur- summed up Afghanistan’s vulnerable drawing completely from the coun-
rent attempts to defeat the Taliban and position, stating, “We can’t prevent the try outweigh the many challenges of
reconstruct the country. In the midst of terrorists from coming from Pakistan, staying. Indeed, successive Canadian
the “Great Game” between the British and we can’t prevent the coalition from governments have ultimately justified
Empire and Tsarist Russia over influ- bombing the terrorists, and our child- the mission in similar terms. Unlike
ence in Central Asia, William Gladstone ren are dying because of this.” Gladstone, we are trying to help the Af-
urged his fellow citizens to “remember Karzai’s comment encapsulates the ghans build a viable and independent
that the sanctity of life in the hill vil- challenge Canada now faces in Afghan- state. With the official debate over Can-
lages of Afghanistan, among the winter istan. We must win local support for ada’s presence resolved for the time be-
snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Al- reconstruction efforts while also mak- ing, the question remains: how do we
mighty God, as can be your own.” ing war. These two tasks are not easily go about building peace while we’re
Preserving the sanctity of life, how- reconciled. As Afghan legislator Shu- still at war?
ever, is difficult when the enemy strikes kria Barakzai has warned, killing civil-
unexpectedly, blends into the local pop- ians will undermine nato’s mission in t the outset of our involvement in
ulace, and enjoys growing support. Last Afghanistan (to say nothing of harsh
October, for example, some twenty Af- treatment of detainees).
A Afghanistan, shortly after 9/11, a
senior official from a Canadian aid or-
ghan civilians were killed during two Although this poses a dilemma, it’s ganization had a call put out to the De-
separate nato attacks. First, a 2 a.m. no reason to leave — a point on which partment of National Defence to find
helicopter strike on Taliban fighters a near consensus has emerged. While out if we were at war. With strict rules
destroyed several huts in the village the Liberal Party supports moving for- about neutrality in place, his agency
of Ashogoh. The same day, a rocket ces out of Kandahar province (where the wanted to determine what its involve-

44 image provided by panos


According to the Senlis Council, the total defence expenditure for all parties has outpaced
development funding more than tenfold, and the ratio is similar for Canadian spending.
ment would be. An officer put the agen-
cy on hold, only to return and say that
he’d have to get back to them.
In part, this confusion reflects the
changing nature of international con-
flict. Canada’s long-held (and somewhat
mythical) view of peacekeeping does
not apply when the peace must be built
before it can be kept. The use of a neu-
tral blue helmet force to separate two
warring armies simply doesn’t work in
countries like Somalia, the Democrat-
ic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Si-
erra Leone, and Afghanistan, where
fighting over territory is often only
one part of a loosely defined and high-
ly complex struggle between organized
crime rings, warlords, and, increasing-
ly, insurgents. In such cases, poverty
and instability lead to a vicious cycle
of underdevelopment and violence.
It takes more than soldiers to address
the problem.
Recognizing this, Canada
has shifted to a robust form of
peace-building that brings de-
fence into closer contact with
diplomatic and development
activities. Paul Martin intro-
duced this approach first in
speeches, then in his 2005 internation-
al policy statement, under the name
“3D.” The Conservative government
has since replaced this with the term
“whole-of-government,” but the under-
lying philosophy remains the same. The
Department of National Defence (dnd),
Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Canada (dfait), and the Canadian Inter-
national Development Agency (cida)
must now work together to execute a
common strategy.
Reconciling military, diplomatic,
and humanitarian objectives may be a
more effective way of stabilizing failed
and fragile states, but it also creates in-
evitable trade-offs and requires a high
degree of collaboration. 3D is simply
easier on paper than it is in practice.
hen diplomat Glyn Berry, whose
W job was to facilitate relationships
between a wide range of Afghan groups,
was killed by a suicide bomber in Kan-
t h e wa l r u s
dahar on January 15, 2006, it was a strik- killed in a clearly marked truck; a Tal-
ing blow to Canada’s strategy in Afghan- iban spokesperson stated that aid or-
istan. In many ways, Berry personified ganizations thought to be working for
3D. Working alongside development American interests were legitimate tar-
specialists and protected by the mili- gets. On July 28, after twenty-four years
tary, he was part of the effort to rebuild of active involvement in Afghanistan,
the country. Since Berry’s death, non- msf announced that it would be pull-
military personnel have largely been ing out.
confined to secure bases in Kandahar. The issue of civilian protection is
His replacement, Gavin Buchan, would central to the 3D challenge. We may
like to “go out every day and talk to need to rethink a wide spectrum of
people on the street . . . but we’re not tactics, from how we treat detainees to
there yet and we’re not going to be the nature of our military engagement.
there in the foreseeable future.” If Bu- Air strikes, for example, can be an ef-
chan and other diplomats are unable fective means of fighting the Taliban in
to do their jobs, and if development hostile terrain with limited risk to our
workers are similarly constrained, how soldiers, but they also increase the like-
can Canada claim to be implement- lihood that innocent civilians will be
ing 3D? killed, turning local populations against
This question is behind much of the Canadian troops.
criticism of our mission in Afghani- The riots that have repeatedly bro-
stan. Analysts have noted that funding ken out across the country protesting
has been heavily weighted to- accidental deaths have borne this out.
ward the military, at both the As Brigadier Richard Nugee, the chief
national and international spokesperson for the UN-authorized,
levels. According to a 2006 re- nato-led International Security Assist-
port by the Senlis Council, the ance Force (isaf) has said, “The single
total defence expenditure for thing that we have done wrong and we
all parties in Afghanistan has are striving extremely hard to improve
outpaced development fund- on is killing innocent civilians.” Is this
ing more than tenfold, and the ratio a fair appraisal of the costs, though? Put
is similar for Canadian spending, al- another way: if we knew terrorists were
though exact figures are hard to come meeting at a home in Vancouver, Toron-
by. On these grounds, it is difficult to to, or Montreal, would we authorize air
dispute former foreign affairs minister strikes? Within a 3D approach, the cal-
Lloyd Axworthy’s claim that the mis- culus for acceptable human casualties
sion “has become one big ‘D.’ ” must be re-evaluated.
Non-governmental organizations John Watson, president of care Can-
have also been vocal in their disap- ada, a leading international relief and
proval of military encroachment into development organization, believes
the field of humanitarian assistance. For we’re not appropriately balancing mili-
example, plainclothed US special forces tary benefits against the wider costs. He
have been known to use the kind of places some of the blame on the mili-
white trucks that are ubiquitous in the tary itself, which, he argues, is slow-
development community. There was ly co-opting development assistance
also the US administration’s decision under the rubric of defence. He points
to drop food-ration packages roughly out that many of the concepts now
the same size and colour of unexplod- associated with 3D peace-building —
ed cluster bombs from military planes. such as civil-military cooperation, prov-
The confusion over the role of humani- incial reconstruction teams, and “three-
tarian workers that resulted from these block war” — originated in military
and similar incidents severely jeopard- discourse, prescribe a lead role for the
ized their security. On June 2, 2004, five military, and value development and
Médecins Sans Frontières workers were diplomacy only insofar as they are use-
46 illustration: balint zsako
 3 D Vi s i o n

ful for the advancement of military you can’t build schools in a war zone. The initial Canadian team in Kabul
objectives. It’s humanitarianism as a Others suggest that the suffering that was acclaimed for their collaborative
campaign for hearts and minds rather persists in the absence of humanitarian work. They benefited from their small
than as a moral responsibility. assistance is increasing support for the size and the presence of an active am-
It will not always be possible to simul-
Taliban, making the military fight more bassador; personal connections and
taneously achieve all our goals, and some difficult. dnd, in conjunction with the joint experience in the field allowed
Prime Minister’s Office, has taken the them to overcome bureaucratic cultures.
policies will inevitably contradict others.
Indeed, Canadian involvement in Af- lead on strategic decision-making in But with increased deployment to Kan-
ghanistan has been many things to many conflicts, which makes sense if secur- dahar, the advantage of scale was lost.
people. What began as an exercise in ity is viewed as a prerequisite for hu- As the Taliban grew in strength, new
national security and a response to manitarian action. security restrictions emerged, and the
global terrorism has gradually shifted But the reality is that the three Ds military took the lead.
toward humanitarian assistance and are fundamentally interconnected, and In Ottawa, the level of coordination
reconstruction. From a broader diplo- the only way this tenuous balance can between cida, dnd, and dfait has seen
matic perspective, it has also served to be managed is through collaboration — some improvement. While the Prime
fulfill our commitment to nato and the cornerstone of 3D peace building. Minister’s Office and dnd continue to
provide an opportunity to repair rela- If a particular military strategy has drive much of our Afghanistan policy,
tions with the United States, strained humanitarian implications, all rele- the three Ds are more sensitive to each
by our refusals to commit troops to the vant stakeholders need to be aware other’s actions than ever before. How-
Iraq war and participate in ballistic mis-of them from the outset. This requires ever, more integration is necessary. Ste-
sile defence. Serving multiple interests a level of public communication that phen Harper recently appointed an
is justifiable, even desirable. The real doesn’t currently exist. dnd, cida, and associate deputy minister within dfait
problem is that while 3D calls for the dfait have different mandates, operat- to facilitate coordination, but it remains
integration of defence, diplomacy, and ing procedures, and cultures, as well as to be seen if the position, which lacks the
development, it does not lay out how different perspectives on Canada’s in- authority exercised by the Prime Min-
they should be integrated. ternational policy and their respective ister’s Office or the Privy Council Of-
roles. As an old adage about the UN fice, will have any real influence over the
he relationship between war and de- reminds us, everybody is in favour powerfully independent and resource-
T velopment in Afghanistan is some- of coordination, but no one likes to rich cida and dnd.
thing of a Catch-22. Many argue that be coordinated. The United Kingdom, an early adopt-
er of 3D, has gone a step further by tying
funding to collaboration. Instead of ask-
ing their development, defence, and
diplomatic ministries to work together,
Britain has made funding conditional on
it through a joint-funding model called
“conflict prevention pools.” Staffed by
officials from across the bureaucracy,
the pools bid alongside parent depart-
ments for resources. This brings pol-
icy analysts together permanently and
establishes incentives for truly collab-
orative decision making. This may not
be the right solution for Canada, but
something similar may prove necessary
if the departments continue to compete
for influence and retain vestiges of their
traditional roles.
Of course, if 3D rests on the assump-
tion that only a comprehensive approach
to the problems plaguing Afghanistan
will be successful, then our partners
must also coordinate. But we are oper-
ating as part of a thirty-seven-member
coalition, isaf, in which national con-
tingents often have different mandates,
priorities, and tactics. In September
“You Belong to Me” – Jo Stafford (1952) 2006, for example, the UK negotiat-

illustration: marco cibola 47

 t h e wa l r u s

ed a deal in the Musa Qala district funding for military-led development

of Helmand province whereby tribal
CBC LITERARY AWARDS leaders would take control of the area
if both Taliban and British forces with-
drew. The United States viewed the
compromise as a surrender, and when
the Taliban overran Musa Qala in Feb-
ruary 2007, isaf, under US leadership,
Wild authorized air strikes rather than re-
negotiating the deal.
projects, and the establishment of a
corruption reduction strategy, simply
do not match the scale of the problems
they are meant to address.
If we are serious about staying, we
need widespread public engagement.
Behind facile debates about supporting
the troops lie crucial questions. How
exactly do we define success? What are

about words? Debates over relative contributions

Send us your unpublished poetry,
short stories or creative nonfiction.
and rules of engagement have also been
fierce. The US, having initially secured
the country with Operation Enduring
Freedom, refocused most of its resour-
ces and troops to Iraq before it could
contribute to the rebuilding process.
Had the US stayed, Afghanistan would
likely be more stable, and non-military
personnel like Gavin Buchan would be
in a better position to do their jobs.
e have a long way to go in Afghan-
W istan. A recent Canadian Senate
report pointed out that medieval societ-
ies change slowly, corruption is endem-
ic, and the Taliban has the home-court
advantage. Unfortunately, the Senate’s
recommendations, which included ad-
ditional military training, direct cida
our ultimate goals and objectives? What
is our strategy for achieving them?
Finding answers has been difficult part-
ly because information has been so
hard to come by. All public communi-
cation from the departments operating
in Afghanistan (even from senior civil
servants) must now be cleared by the
Prime Minister’s Office.
In November 2006, the Conservative
government spent a reported $76,000
on focus groups to evaluate its com-
munications strategy on Afghanistan.
The results suggested that justifying the
mission as a response to terrorism and
through appeals to freedom invoked,
unfavourably, President Bush’s stance
on the war in Iraq and that the preferred
language would emphasize progress,
development, and our commitment to

WIN
$6,000 first prize
$4,000 second prize
courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts.
CBC will offer visibility to the winners and their
winning works, which will also be published
in Air Canada’s enRoute magazine.

Contest deadline:
November 1st, 2007
For contest details, go to
www.cbc.ca/literaryawards
or call 1-877-888-6788

“No One’s Gonna Love You”

– Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators (2005)

48 illustration: balint zsako

 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7

reconstruction. This raises perhaps the

most important question about Can-
adian involvement in Afghanistan: how
do we explain our inability to live up to
the political rhetoric surrounding 3D
peace-building?
It may be that 3D is not what it seems,
that the mission we’re being sold ob-
scures less palatable objectives. The
incentive to dress hard military object- Big Paw
ives in soft humanitarian clothing has by Priscila Uppal
been present from the start, regardless
of the party in charge. Protecting the
country from future terrorist attacks is The cat’s paw keeps getting bigger.
certainly as important as projecting hu- Soon we will have to give it a name.
manitarian values, but there is no hon-
our or integrity in mistaking one for At the vet, the young receptionists all laugh.
the other. Tell us it’s perfectly natural
It’s also possible that the strategy it- though they haven’t seen
self is flawed. Perhaps the civil service a single case like it.
and isaf are currently incapable of the
type of collaboration 3D requires. And We purchase pills, wrestle vitamins,
even if the political will is there, the re- work cream after cream
sources may be lacking. Peace-building into red skin.
experiences in Africa and the Balkans
suggest that the overall international The paw gets
contribution to Afghanistan remains bigger.
substantially below the levels of mili-
tary and economic support usually ne- Our house gets smaller.
cessary to rebuild a state. Our talk of 3D Tiny as a toothpick
peace-building may ultimately be too in a club sandwich.
ambitious for the circumstances. How-
ever, this conclusion suggests an un- We can’t keep anything
comfortable set of alternatives: either safe. Last night, the paw swiped
we aren’t truly committed to Afghani- our memories clean.
stan, or such nation-building projects are
beyond our capacity. Tomorrow, it threatens
But if the principles of 3D are sound, to x-ray the sky.
and the challenges are part and parcel
of implementing a new approach, then
actually putting the strategy into action
should make a marked difference. In
this case, 3D offers Canada a unique
opportunity to once again demonstrate
international leadership on issues of
peace and security.
One conclusion is absolutely clear:
lives, resources, and opportunities are
at stake, and only after we have defined
exactly what we intend to accomplish
in Afghanistan will we be able to assess
the prospects for success and justify
the necessary sacrifices. W
—
To listen to a podcast on Canadian foreign
policy by Jennifer Welsh, professor of inter-
national affairs at the University of Oxford,
please visit walrusmagazine.com/more.

49

charisma
Do we want our political leaders to be sexy and playful,
or are we content with being bored?
t’s a rally-the-troops gathering at the
I Franco-Manitoban Cultural Centre
in the Saint Boniface district of Win-
nipeg, and the January 2006 election is
forty-eight hours away. Stephen Harp-
er, a policy wonk with an angry, vitu-
perative side, is surging in the polls and
appearing, incredibly, to be a populist
alternative. The lights dim, the canned
music softens and then bleeds out. Lib-
eral faithful are desperate for their man,
their leader, to hit the button. The lights
dim further, and the blood rises. All start
to chant in unison: “Paul. Paul. Paul.”
The shaggy silhouettes of the local
high school band, Rock Toxique, emerge
on stage. Guitars are plugged in. Thud.
Thud. Everyone knows the sound. The
drummer bangs out a few notes, and
the crowd — 500 or more — inches for-
ward, necks craning. Canned music is
t h e wa l r u s
politics
by Jeff Ryan
photography by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
one thing, but live rock ’n’ roll reaches
into the soul. The big man’s arrival is
imminent. Slowly the lights rise, and
there he is: from the bottom up, fresh-
ly polished loafers, pressed pants, but-
ton-down shirt, hair the same as it ever
was. Ladies and gentlemen, your sexa-
genarian rock star, Paul Martin. The
crowd, myopic as any group in such cir-
cumstances must be, roars. Martin, smil-
ing like no rocker ever smiles, strums his
guitar. Can it be? Yes, it can. He is play-
ing air guitar, looking for all the world
like a cross between a former finance
minister, a wax figure from Madame
Tussauds, and a dad laying it on thick
for his son’s girlfriend. The band ham-
mers out “Takin’ Care of Business.”
Thud. Everyone knows that sound too,
but no one admits it.
Consent, dissent, shopping for things
50
no one needs — a certain style of shoe,
a certain dress, perfume, musk — all of
this can be created out of thin air. Char-
isma is another matter. It can come in
many forms, but you’ve either got it or
you don’t. On this night any thought
that charisma cannot be manufactured
was jettisoned for a higher emotion-
al purpose, but long afterwards one
could still hear the faint echoes of that
last thud. A campaign rally, a potential
watershed moment, registered to all but
the true believers more as “we’re up
shit creek.” Martin as finance minister
had gravitas: by balancing the nation’s
books, he did indeed “take care of busi-
ness,” and he gained some mystique for
doing so. But it could not, and did not,
translate onto the bigger stage.
Stéphane Dion is facing a similar di-
lemma, and right now if Liberal insiders

knew more about the science of charis-
ma — okay, the social science of charis-
ma — it wouldn’t be Michael Ignatieff or
Frank McKenna or even Bob Rae they’d
be pining for. It would be Bill Clinton. If
Avuncular Bill were leader of the Liberal
Party of Canada, on campaign stops he’d
be blowing hot jazz out of a cool saxo-
phone, and Stephen Harper, Jack Lay-
ton, Gilles Duceppe, and Elizabeth May
would be quaking in their slickless boots.
It wouldn’t matter much what Clinton
said — he is a master at saying every-
thing and nothing — women would still
want to sleep with him and men would
“feel his pain.”
rvine Schiffer, author of the under-
I appreciated 1973 book Charisma: A
Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society, iden-
tified eight charismatic attributes, a
combination of which successful lead-
ers possess, or come close to possessing.
They are: sexual mystique, playfulness
(or hoax), a call from above, a fighting
stance, a desirable social station, an in-
novative lifestyle, a touch of foreignness,
and, unpredictably, a clear deficiency,
often a physical imperfection.
Like most lists, it is as interesting
“Romantic Rights” – Death From Above 1979 (2004)
t h e wa l r u s
for what it excludes. Intellectual pro-
bity is absent, as is a linebacker’s build
or an Alexander Haig “I’m in control
here” disposition. Instead, charisma
comes from within, an intuitive, spon-
taneous projection that connects with
regular men and women. Events like
Martin’s “concert” or Stockwell Day ar-
riving on a Jet Ski wearing a wetsuit to
speak with reporters, were orchestrat-
ed playfulness, goofy failures in stage
management. They were also desper-
ate, the opposite of playful. And, as
Pierre Trudeau, the charismatic gold
standard in Canadian politics, said:
never trust anyone who wants to lead
too desperately. Trudeau might have
loved being the top gun, but he hid
it masterfully.
While most consider sex and poli-
tics to be like oil and water, they are ac-
tually more like chocolate cake and ice
cream — made for each other. Wheth-
er Clinton’s “sins” in the Oval Office or
Trudeau marrying outside his station
(and age bracket) or his private pecca-
dilloes, a leader that displays a certain
sexual adventurism and recklessness
goes a long way toward registering char-
ismatically. Sex is a two-way street (or, if
52
you are lucky, a multi-lane highway),
and there are few needs more profound
than the need to be desired. Clinton’s
amateurish flings might not match up
with Barbra Streisand’s public display
of affection for Trudeau, but both men
exuded sexual mojo, and Canadian
women murmured “Lucky Margaret”
as the prime ministerial couple were
popping out young ones and “Lucky
others” after they split up. Merging sex-
ual mystique and playfulness, when a
reporter asked Trudeau if he was going
to give up his Mercedes, the prime min-
ister replied, “Do you mean the girl or
the car?” “The car,” the reporter said.
To which Trudeau quipped, “I won’t
give up either.”
Stephen Harper reading bedtime
stories to comedian Rick Mercer was a
clever political stroke. The moment de-
picted a leader who could be a prank-
ster comfortable in his own skin. But
neither Harper nor Dion would ever al-
lude to any form of sexual indiscretion.
Physically, they carry themselves as the
Queen and Prince Philip of sexual pol-
itics, and emotionally they project an
image of well-adjusted maturity, too
adroit to engage in sexual frivolity that
would endanger the ship of state. These
are stolid, solid men but, one suspects,
not much fun in the sack.
Jack Layton, who is known to wear
leather on occasion, has a bit of the
menace about him, but one senses that
the national arena has made him less
playful, less adventuresome. With a
party platform that is essentially one-
note, Gilles Duceppe has the greatest
opportunity for exhibiting a little sex-
ual recklessness, but, like Harper, his
hair is always perfectly coiffed. Greens
might have more fun, but Elizabeth
May doesn’t really register on the sex
meter. If not sex, then what of play
or hoax?
Trudeau, again, set the bar high with
stunts such as his famous pirouette, his
slide down the banister at the Château
Laurier, or his backflips into swimming
pools. He could pull off gratuitous play
with insouciant arrogance, and he did it
on his own terms, spontaneously, but
with, no doubt, studied panache (an
exception to many rules, he was). But
under “the charisma of hoax,” Schiffer
writes, “Every great politician is to some
illustration: karin von ompteda

When Mulroney appeared too cocksure in Gucci loafers and began to strut, he forgot that
people appreciate humility, not vanity. Canadians skewered him.
degree an actor . . . our political figures
on the national and global stages are
thespians of the first order.” Or at least
they should be. Unlike Trudeau, today’s
leaders stand outside of hoax or gleeful
mucking about. They prefer the safer
practice of play by association, of sur-
rounding themselves with people or
things that exude a desirable image:
Harper with Mercer or in the Toronto
Maple Leafs’ locker room; Martin with
U2’s Bono, again and again; Layton car-
rying the Barenaked Ladies’ bags. Ours
might be a cautious age, but what a
bore! What risk aversion. No hoax, no
glory. With prepared spontaneity, the
payback is minimal.
And so, there you have it: federal
politics as a sexless, less-than-playful
spectator sport. Is it any wonder that
the commons are tuning out? The
search for charisma must troll in dif-
ferent fields.
A fighting stance, Schiffer’s big num-
ber four. That has to be it; there is,
after all, a lot of shouting going on. But
what are our leaders fighting for? The
territory of Quebec may not be a na-
tion, but the people are. When the reso-
lution was being debated, no one stood
up in Parliament, looked Gilles Du-
ceppe in the eye, and said, “You sir,
are a separatist. I don’t know how you
got here, but this House is in charge
of the nation as a whole. So get outta
town!”
Indeed, a fighting stance in Canadian
politics is increasingly defined negatively.
By trashing the Liberals on the “sponsor-
ship scandal,” Harper rode the Trojan
Horse of accountability into elected of-
fice. His campaign slogan, “Stand Up
For Canada,” usually means (in the
context of Canadian history) a battle
royale against the provinces, a fight to
put them in their place and to reassert
Ottawa’s leadership role. The Liberals
had diminished the state, we were led
to believe, and it was time to set things
right. Instead, time has shown that Har-
per is an accommodationist, “restoring
the fiscal balance” through transfers to
the provinces. The spring budget — in
illustration: ben weeks
j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
essence Martin’s asymmetric federal- bined with environmental taxes (as dis-
ism on steroids — says, “I am not scary, incentives for carrying on with business
not a libertarian, not in favour of a flat as usual), would represent a Great Society
tax, not a social conservative, not even program. This is Dion’s call from above,
a fiscal conservative.” Defined nega- and he cannot be shy about it. He must
tively and designed to assuage, it is not say: “I don’t care if I get arrested for
a fighting stance at all. chaining myself to a tree or for creating
For his part, Dion appears to be for a roadblock at the gateway to Alberta’s
everything. He went along with the tar sands. I don’t care what you think,
soothing balm of the Quebecois as a there is a clear and present danger and
nation, and then, begging at the high I’m going to save the environment from
altar of environmentalism, eschewed the bad guys.”
partisan politics and embraced the Harper’s fighting stance is offshore —
Green Party, cooking up a deal not to against the Chinese (sort of ) and against
run a Liberal candidate against Elizabeth the Taliban in Afghanistan. But if more
May in Nova Scotia. Well, a fighting body bags come home from that tor-
stance means fighting, even rid battlefield, expect Defence
when the field is crowded. More- Minister Gordon O’Connor to
over, the narcissism of minor be sacrificed (see former Envi-
difference usually means hat- ronment Minister Rona Am-
ing most profoundly he or she brose), and for there to be a
who is closest to you. For many, sudden change of heart and dir-
the Dion-May pact — she won’t ection. For the time being, Harp-
field a Green candidate against er will “support our troops,” but
Dion in Montreal — is political games- if he has a call from above it is nowhere
manship. And the sound and fury of in evidence. Vis-à-vis Afghanistan, Dion
charisma can only emerge when polar- needs a pre-emptive strike, and it could
ities are sought, accepted, and a fire come with the clear statement: “Actu-
is lit. ally, fighting terrorism in Kandahar
Jack Layton took the high road and and Helmand provinces is not in our
expressed disappointment at the Liberal- national interest, a diplomatic offen-
Green arrangement not to duke it out sive is.”
in the party leaders’ playgrounds, but Fighting stance and call from above?
one sensed in his protest simple exas- We shall see.
peration at being left out in the cold.
Meanwhile, Duceppe appears denuded,
stripped of any genuine federal foil and L essening the chance that either will
emerge is the fact that our political
forced to accept Quebec’s sovereignty- leaders come neither from humble be-
association by increment, for which he ginnings nor high social station. They
will get little or no credit. are middle class, profoundly so, and
middle-of-the-road sensibilities tend
A nd the commons, the public square? to stay rooted there. Rags to riches stor-
There, the citizens are backing away, ies resonate, and Bill Clinton, Jean
tired of faux battles. The people are Chrétien, and Brian Mulroney used
not interested in a horse race any more their working-class narratives to build
than they are attracted to horse trad- dreams in the body politic. Just as over-
ing; they are interested in a genuine coming obstacles can make leaders
fighting stance. On two fronts — the en- populist, so can descending from high
vironment and Afghanistan, at home station into the muck of public ser-
and far away — Dion has a chance to vice. Giving up lofty cocktail parties
carve out some territory of his own. A for the grind of stump speeches on
green agenda rooted in using the lever- the Prairies, the tedium of constitu-
aging power of the federal surplus to ency barbecues, the rank odour of
support a post-fossil fuel economy, com- bingo halls, is a sacrifice — the soul of
53
 t h e wa l r u s
public service. When Mulroney ap-
peared too cocksure in Gucci loafers
and began to strut, he forgot that people
appreciate humility, not vanity. Can-
adians skewered him (Kim Campbell
bearing the brunt of it). A strutter leaves
us with nothing to do but watch and
become annoyed.
Related to rising above lowly status
or descending from high privilege are
traits suggestive of an innovative life-
style, something different from the pro-
saic toil of shuttling the little ones to
hockey, lacrosse, or ballet. Harper shak-
ing hands with his son was a public rela-
tions nightmare, but he’s a quick study
and today he can be as friendly with his
direct issue as he is with Rick Mercer.
Dion’s dog Kyoto is cute; now the Lib-
eral leader needs a televised recording
of himself accepting policy advice from
the old mutt. ( The image of the relation-
ship between Mackenzie King and his
dog Pat was an endearing and enduring
one.) One can imagine Elizabeth May
promoting the composting toilet, and
that’s fine, but in downtown Vancouver
and Halifax people might also like to see
her enjoying a fine bottle of claret. Lay-
ton’s got good, solid, athletic legs, and
bicycle trips allow him to show them
off much better than attempts to repli-
cate iconic canoeing pictures. Duceppe
is Duceppe, plus ça change.
A touch of foreignness is thought to
be a boon, but given the furor over Dion
holding onto his French citizenship —
so much for globalization and multi-
culturalism — one cannot be sure. Col-
lectively, our leaders seem, well, less
than foreign, unless you count Duceppe,
which would be giving in to his separa-
tist cant.
ne thing is certain: a clear deficien-
O cy, even a physical imperfection,
is of paramount importance for char-
ismatic leaders, as it is for celebrities.
The problem with David Beckham is
that he’s a perfect specimen, skilled and
beautiful. On the charisma radar, he
registers zero, great to look at but vapid.
The former pope had charisma, and be-
came more endearing, if odder, with
age. The Queen (or at least Helen Mir-
ren) has it in her way, and Chrétien had
it without question.
In the political arena, it is not just
54
that people want to be led. They crave
a role, a way in, and an imperfection
allows them to complete their polit-
ical representatives. Everyone rallied
around the hurt Chrétien when the
Conser vative Party released ads dur-
ing the 1993 election campaign that at-
tempted to caricature him by poking
fun at his facial paralysis. ( That little
support fell to Dion after the Conser-
vatives’ “This is unfair” attack ad aired
this past winter is due to the clever strat-
egy of using Michael Ignatieff as the an-
tagonist.) Lucien Bouchard garnered
enormous sympathy when his leg was
amputated. Trudeau’s marital difficul-
ties reached into homes across the na-
tion. And Clinton’s clumsy adulterous
liaisons made him profoundly human,
lost and in need of help.
One of the great difficulties with our
current crop of leaders is that they do
not appear deficient in any particular
way. They are not battle-scarred heroes
rising above a certain disadvantage or
beating a stigma to the ground. Dion
struggles with English, but there is no
one with Churchill’s lisp or Moshe Day-
an’s eye patch — clear markers of disad-
vantage. Our leaders strike us as healthy,
well-adjusted, and of average height, safe,
and strangely immunized to the hor-
rors and accidents that afflict the rest
of us. They appear, in short, profession-
al (and without particular flaw) in an
arena that ought not be governed by
professionals.
The big question for Canadians is,
do we want charismatic leaders? Maybe
we don’t. Maybe we think that char-
isma, like intellectualism, is suspicious.
Maybe we want our political represent-
atives to be predictable — good stew-
ards of the economy and not much else.
Maybe the Ralph Klein/Pierre Trudeau/
Sir John A. Macdonald model is just
too wacky. But if it’s stewardship over
leadership that is desired, how are Can-
adians going to solve the riddles of
planetary heat and aboriginal exclu-
sion, our northern vision gap, staying
mum about American exceptionalism?
These are not normal times, the chal-
lenges are exceptional, and solutions
must come with a punch, must elevate
the masses, must shake us from the tor-

por of average life. Come on brothers
and sisters. Bring it on!
 t h e wa l r u s

A
leksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin — the former Gorky
fiction Professor of Arts and Letters at Leningrad State, the
father of a twelve-year-old daughter in ribbons and
brown uniform in Moscow, the destroyer of a beautiful old

The grand piano, the owner of a first edition of Pushkin’s The

Stone Guest, the renter of a garage apartment in the Mas-
sachusetts house of Todd Elkin, the recipient of a Writer’s
Counterpart Union silver medal, the beneficiary of hickeys the purplish-
chestnut colour of Tatiana Elkin’s hair, and the reluctant
overseer of a bulbous nose whose presence had made him
‡ first the laughingstock of his old petty-noble family and later
the butt of anti-Semitic remarks to which it had been useless
by Nadia Kalman to protest his Christianity. That nose! One winter morning
illustration by Petra Mrzyk & Jean-François Moriceau in 1991 Aleksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin woke to discover
that this last and least valuable of all his possessions, like so
many of the others, was gone.

56
 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7
He needed no mirror, no hand feeling the flatness, the
simian holes through which he now breathed, for confirma-
tion. He knew in the way he’d known his wife would leave
him for the idiot Cossack Malkov, with his yearly trips to
Lenin’s tomb “to feel the history in my gizzard,” before his
wife had even met that blathering Slavophile. He knew in
the way he’d known he wouldn’t get tenure at Thomas Paine
University, though he hadn’t guessed at the reason — accord-
ing to the dean, his criticisms of students’ work was hurting
their self-esteem. He knew but he didn’t want to know, so he
looked for a mirror, prepared to shake off this strange idea
as he had shaken off so many others.
Petra Mzyrk, a German-born artist, and Jean-François Moriceau, of France,
have shown their collaborative work, much of it based on James Bond themes,
around the world. Illustration provided by Air de Paris, Paris
57
No force had been involved in the taking of his nose. The
flesh where it had been was childishly smooth, small-pored,
and pale. He stroked it with a hairy finger and found it no
more or less sensitive than the skin on his cheek. His brain,
that tired telephone operator, had unplugged from emotion
and intellect both, willing only to connect him to his sen-
ses. As when he made love (in English), or occupied him-
self with sex (in Russian), he breathed heavily through his
great stomach.
Abruptly, he hit the mirror with the flat of his hand and
the telephone operator came to life. What had he done last
night? What had they — he and Tatiana — done? Standing
in his loose briefs, scratching at the hair around his belly-
button, Aleksey could remember no injury, no pain, and of
course it would not have healed so quickly. Two empty bot-
tles of Polish vodka stood on a wobbly pile of dishes and
 t h e wa l r u s

paper towels, idiot twin brothers, still around the morning had been first his American colleague and counterpart, then
after, panting to tell stories about how much he’d had. Chekh- his sponsor at Paine, and was now simply his landlord, was
ov and all those country doctors had used vodka to dull the pulling out of the driveway in his vintage Corvette.
pain of operations. Todd was a man not easily satisfied. It wasn’t enough for
There was a method by which he could discover what him to be a professor of nineteenth-century American liter-
happened. A list must be written, or perhaps a chart on ature. Todd was also a painter! A skier! A sailor! The lover of
his computer. Best not to get over-ambitious; best to open an athletic little lady from the registrar’s office!
one of the fourteen legal pads with which he’d absconded And six years ago, Todd had been the only member of that
from Paine. American delegatory cabal who had done more than stare,
1. Translations. Before Tatiana came over, Aleksey had as if through a glass, brightly, at the sorry smoking Russians
been doing another translation for the Russian publishing from Leningrad State University. This was the man who, in a
house Uyutniy Dom, or Cozy House, not that either he or moment when the escorts weren’t watching, had pulled out a
Tatiana had any qualms about interrupting his work. Here dictionary and fiercely pointed to the words, ya pomogu tebe,
in the United States, Aleksey himself was translating Gone I’ll help you. Todd had gotten him out, had rented him the
with the Tesseract, which featured the adventures of a time- garage, had gotten him his first, and Aleksey was beginning
travelling Southern heroine with “a husband in one century to fear his last, professorial job in the US.
and a lover in another,” a convenient arrangement. The hus- Soon, too soon, after their customary fifteen minutes,
band was a civil-rights lawyer; the lover, a Con- Tatiana would come a-knocking on his door and
federate soldier; Aleksey, the unfortunate conduit he would have to say, “Who’s there? ” but know-
through which “Oh, my sweet baby” became, in its ing all the time that here she was, the woman who
nearest Russian approximation, “My darling crumb expected a real man, a full man, hairy and beard-
(moya dorogaya kroshka).” ed and bellied, and who would find instead a noz-
2. Tatiana — over — 8 prompto. Todd Elkin had entity, a nostrato.
an evening seminar: Edgar Allan Poe and the Ab- What to do? He rushed on wobbly legs around
surdity of Fear. Tatiana came to his room wearing the apartment, furiously straightening it up, sweep-
a red skirt and wooden beaded necklace that left ing vodka and glasses and shirt into his kitchen cab-
bruises on his chest when they embraced. She had inets. When had his nose gone? When? When?
brought over some new drawings she’d done of herself nude, A knock on the door. “It’s not a good time . . .”
slightly shapelier than she was in actual life, her legs splayed “Guess who!”
hither and thither. “I’m very sick, I might infect you . . .”
“This is the last time you’ll have to do this,” Tatiana had “What? ” She opened the door and came in. Aleksey spun
said, throwing the pages of Gone with the Tesseract on the around so that his back was facing her. “What’s the matter
floor. “After tomorrow, you’ll be a powerful biznessman.” with you? ” she said. He grabbed a page from his desk and
By this, she meant he’d be a real estate agent like herself. That covered his face in it.
way, they could see each other during the day, with less of “I don’t know, maybe you do,” he said. It was the page, he
the sneaky-sneaky. And they’d have money, and would go to couldn’t help noticing, on which the Confederate soldier ex-
conferences together, and swim naked in the hotel pools. Sex plains his reasons for going into battle. “I like to keep what’s
in the water, Tatiana had said, was like sex on cocaine. Alek- mine,” the soldier says. Aleksey said, “Did you perhaps take
sey had never tried either one — what a linty, boiled-chicken something from the apartment? ”
life he’d had until now, never even invited to a single one of “Take something? Are you drunk? ”
the famous geology department orgies back in Leningrad! “Part of my face. I’m just asking, did you perhaps cut off
3. Tatiana = barber. In preparation for his real estate inter- part of my face and take it with you? Perhaps by accident? ”
view, Tatiana had shaved Aleksey’s beard and cut some of Aleksey turned slowly around, the page still over the bot-
the shagginess out of his head, leaving a bowl-like arrange- tom half of his face.
ment of waves that reminded him of a children’s puppet, “What’s happened to you? Are you playing bandit now? ”
meant to represent Anna Karenina’s husband, that he’d Tatiana was impatient. She’d been quick to immigrate from
watched with his daughter and wife in Leningrad. Byelorussia, quick to change from engineer to real estate
4. Salad and napoleon; vodka commences. Tatiana was try- agent, quick to marry Professor Todd, and would be quick
ing to lose weight. to drop the noseless mutant he’d become.
5. Making love. Satisfactory for Tatiana; less so for Aleksey, “Just a little accident, baby,” he said in Russian. “Noth-
who was worried about his interview. ing terrible.”
6. Sleep. “Show me!” She pulled the paper out of his hands and
Had Tatiana cut off his nose? threw it on the floor. She stared at his face and crossed her-
But to what end? To what end? self — nipple, nipple, belly button. She hadn’t taken it, he
knew that instantly. How could he have been so crazy as to
e pulled back the window curtain, almost expecting the suspect her?
H sky to be red, the street to be dust — a nuclear holocaust
took his nose! But everything was as usual. Todd Elkin, who
“See, but it’s fine, I’m not bleeding . . .”
“But how did it happen? ”

58 illustration: william davison

 The Counterpart
“Well,” Aleksey said, nodding, “something will resolve
itself.”
“But the interview!”
Aleksey was finding some bravery, bravery he’d last had
in St. Petersburg when, drunk, he’d challenged his wife’s
Slavophile to a duel, “if you like the old ways so much!” Now,
he said, “It’ll be fine, I’m not interviewing for the job of a
fashion model,” and pranced for a few steps.
“Now you’re a homosexual, too, as well as a Gogol char-
acter? ”
“No.” He sighed.
“If only we’d thought to let you keep that moustache,” she
said darkly. “It could have hidden everything. All right, let’s
just think about this together for a minute.”
“But that’s not even what’s important!” he cried, trying
for some romantic-lead insouciance. “I mean, do you still
love me, for example? ”
She put a hand on his cheek. “Of course it doesn’t matter
to me. What we have is deeper than that, isn’t it? It’s spiritual,
isn’t it? Even though you don’t believe in God, it still is.” She
sighed and sat abruptly on a kitchen stool, propping her head
in her hands with their hot-pink nails. “All right. Well.”
“Yes? ” he said.
“First of all, your interview isn’t until five. That gives us a
lot of time, doesn’t it? And also —”
“Also? ”
“Also, maybe — maybe your nose is there, but it just got
crushed,” she said. “You do like to sleep on your stomach,
you know it’s very unhealthy, I keep telling you, and still
you flop down onto it like a walrus. Maybe if we just — ” She
reached up and tried to take hold of the flat skin in the cen-
tre of his face.
“Oy,” he said, trying to twist away.
“That’s good, create some pressure for it. Now — we’ll just
hold it for a minute — okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
She released him. “Yes, it does look better.” She took a com-
pact from her bag and held the mirror up to him. In the mir-
ror, he saw his face, the red imprints of Tatiana’s nails making
a circle like a bull’s eye in the middle.
“I don’t see a change,” he said, turning away. “But maybe,
Tatianachka, you’re right, I shouldn’t go to the interview? ”
“No, you can’t let something like this keep you from a
meeting with your future. Don’t be such a fatalist.”
She began speaking in English, something she always did
when it was time to be business-like. “I must meet a client in
North Hills. So you go, pick up resumé — and call me.”
“Okay, that is cheering. I now have wonderful privilege to
walk outside, alone, and have the little children crying and
the big children throwing the rocks at me,” he said.
“I’ll drive you there. You only have to walk back, okay, my
big theatre queen? ”
t was early winter and there were many possibilities —
I opportunities! — for concealment. They tried an old ski
mask of Todd’s, a handkerchief, a tissue, a bandage, a scarf,
a jumbo Band-Aid, and, last but not least, embarrassingly,
contouring makeup.
“Listen,” Tatiana said at the end, “there probably will not
illustration: maxwell loren holyoke - hirsch 59
be anyone there anyway.”
When she dropped him off at the copy shop, he tried to
kiss her, and she tried to kiss him, but somehow it didn’t
work out. He ended up licking her chin, then, giving a brave
smile, got out of the car and walked rapidly, head down,
into the store.
As if to taunt him, the clerk had a huge Stalinist mous-
tache of sufficient length to hide anything that might need
hiding. His large, bald head moved in rhythm to a song about
people who liked to rock all night. “I’m picking up, please,
under Smoletkin? ” Aleksey said. The clerk gave him his
copies, told him the price, and took his money, all without
ceasing the motion of his neck or looking at Aleksey. Back
in St. Petersburg, the same kind of young man would have
yelled out in surprise, apologized, told him about his friend
who lost a leg in a construction accident, pulled a bottle from
under the counter, and a flotilla of interesting questions and
confessions would have wafted in on the waves of vodka.
Eventually Aleksey would know about the clerk’s sinus prob-
lems — his slobbering slut of an ex-wife, and his desire to
someday become a medical type of person or otherwise
help those in Aleksey’s situation, perhaps by taking them to
houses of prostitution. The thought of this entire wretched
scene made Aleksey ask himself, did his nostalgia now ex-
tend to nosy drunks? Nostalgia, that sodden field — had he
fallen that far?
He walked home, noting the cleanliness of the sidewalk
and the disrepair of his shoes. People seemed to be giving
him a wide berth, he gathered, based on the glimpses he
caught of their feet. Aleksey had an excellent sense of direc-
tion, but eventually he had to raise his eyes to make sure he
was going the right way. And it was then, as he confirmed
that Whiting Lane was exactly where he’d expected it to be,
that he collided with a man in a dark coat and yarmulke, with
Aleksey’s very nose right in the centre of his surprised face.
“Sweet Jane” – The Velvet Underground (1970)
 t h e wa l r u s
“Please forgive me,” Aleksey said, transfixed.
“Excuse me,” the man said, and walked off in the direction
of the park. Aleksey pivoted like a music-box doll and fol-
lowed the man, ever ready to conceal himself behind a tele-
phone pole or a parked car, but in fact the man never turned
around. He strode through the park and to — why hadn’t
Aleksey guessed it? — the town synagogue. Had his nose now
found its rightful home on a rabbi? Aleksey stood on a pile
of snow in the empty park square, watching the black coat
mount the steps, open the door, and disappear into the warm
yellow light of the synagogue’s interior.
Aleksey stood there, his feet burning with cold in the dirty
snow, watching his own breath dissipate, trying not to re-
member that it was coming from two holes the size of pen-
cil erasers embedded in his face.
ack at the Elkin house, Tatiana met him at the door with
B a look of cracked merriment on her face. “Todd’s here
for lunch,” she sang out, “guess what he has? ” She dragged
him into the kitchen, where Todd sat smiling up from a ham-
and-cheese sandwich.
“Hey, buddy,” Todd said. “Sorry about your accident.”
“But show him,” Tatiana said, still tugging on Aleksey’s
arm.
Todd took out what looked like a collection of tissues.
“The strangest thing,” he said, “I found it on top of my com-
puter, right next to my trekking compass.” Here,
he began to lift something pink out of the tis-
sues. Like Venus rising from foam, Aleksey’s nose
emerged, naked and proud, profuse and purple-
veined. “Maybe it’s a prosthetic or something?
Anyway, when Tatiana told me about you, I said,
‘You never know. I’ve always been a very lucky
guy.’ Maybe this is just the thing to help you.”
“Thank you,” Aleksey said, reaching for it and cradling it
in the palm of his hand. It was cold and when he stroked it
with one finger, felt waxier than he’d remembered.
“And then I said,” Tatiana put in, “ ‘Remember that plas-
tic surgeon who did — do — my eyes in one hour only and
I look so different and good when she is finished? ’ ”
“So we called and made an appointment. You and Tatiana
are off to see her right now. Don’t even take your coat off.”
“Come, come,” Tatiana said, pulling Aleksey out the back
door while blowing Todd a kiss.
A capricious yet oddly self-righteous driver at the best of
times, Tatiana now steered the car with an Ophelia-like rap-
ture, careening down streets and speeding through red lights,
saying, “Isn’t it wonderful how we can get things back? ”
So, Aleksey thought, she has been lying to me about lov-
ing me the same whether I had a nose or not. Obviously, this
woman is as shallow as I thought she was when we first met.
But this thought did not make him feel any less unhappy, be-
cause he read in the blurred building awnings, and heard in
the horns and shouts aimed at their car, the clear message
that his nose was dead and so was Tatiana’s love for him.
Tatiana bumped into a parking spot and they took the
elevator upstairs to the plastic surgeon’s office. The plas-
tic surgeon, a dark, tiny young woman, her face shining
60
smoothly like a boxing glove, touched his face with white-
nailed fingers.
“I’ve seen better,” she said in her rough voice. “Then
again, I’ve seen worse. Much worse, let me tell you.” She and
Tatiana shared a conspiratorial smile. “Let me take a look at
the nose again.” Holding the dead creature to Aleksey’s face,
she said, “It’s proportional to his head, I’ll give you that.”
“So when will be the operation? ” Tatiana asked.
“Here’s the thing: no qualified plastic surgeon would be will-
ing to do an operation like this. Right now, everything is func-
tional and you can breathe normally. If I try to mess around
with that nose, we don’t really know what could happen.”
“But, we must try,” Tatiana said.
“No, no. ‘First, do no harm.’ Surgery might rupture his
paranasal sinuses, not to mention his tear ducts, his naso-
pharynx. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you?
I can’t do it, and any other surgeon would tell you the same
thing.” She was using the nose to gesture as she made her
point; then, finished, she handed it to Tatiana, who dropped
it into her purse without any attempt to wrap it.
riving home, Tatiana was silent. She turned the radio
D to a dance station that played a song about two hearts.
There was a word between “two” and “hearts” that Aleksey
could not make out. To take his mind off his nose, bump-
ing against keys and jagged coins in Tatiana’s purse, Aleksey
tried to sing along: “Two, uh, hearts, two hearts
that beat as one . . .” Tatiana gave him a look and he
stopped. He remembered singing his daughter to
sleep in Leningrad. His deep bass was not ideally
suited to lullabies, but Natalia loved hearing him,
especially when he sang a song he’d learned from
a movie about a mixed-race baby, who miracu-
lously escaped from lynch-happy America and
was brought to the ussr to be raised by a circus:
“The bears and elephants are sleeping,
The men and women are sleeping,
At night, everyone should sleep,
But not if they are at work!”
His wife would come in while he was singing and ca-
ress the five hairs on Natalia’s head (she’d heard that scalp
massages make babies’ hair grow in faster). Aleksey’s voice
would swell, filling both rooms up to the chandeliers, be-
cause look at what he had! A wife, a child, a piano, two rooms,
and that was just the start. Soon there’d be more children,
more rooms, a piano in each room! A piano in the commu-
nal bathroom for the neighbours to share!
Back at the house, Tatiana pulled herself together a bit to
help Aleksey with the suit she’d bought him. “It’s a suit like
Richard Gere was wearing in Pretty Woman. You even look
like him a little bit.”
“Oh, really? ” he said, making a foolhardy attempt to flirt
as he put on the pinstriped jacket.
“His face is also a little bit flat, but who notices that? ”
“Are you my pretty woman? ” Aleksey touched her breast
with a sleeve-covered hand.
“Sure, okay.” She turned away and went to Todd’s clos-
et for a tie.
illustration: william davison
 The Counterpart

“O kay,” Tatiana said, pulling up to the Century First of- to face with the shiny bump on its end, from which several
fice. “Neither one of us expected it to be this hard. hairs were growing. At least, he thought, the nose would not
But” — brightening — “maybe this is a handicapped disabil- notice his deformity, for it — he? — did not seem to have any
ity situation, and they have to hire you because you are de- eyes. “So,” Aleksey said, “we know each other, perhaps? ”
formed? What do you think? Maybe I should bring it up, “I don’t think so,” the nose said. “Were you at Who’s Who
even, to Mr. Gess? ” LM: Aruba? ”
“Tatianachka, if you love me even a bit, you will not do “No, but I have once travelled to Cuba,” Aleksey said.
that,” Aleksey said. The whole drive over, he’d been looking “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Hardly any of the new guys go,
at himself in the passenger-side mirror, trying to find some can’t afford it, most of the time. You know what LM stands
angle of his head to lessen the effect of that which was gone. for? ”
Now, he swatted the mirror away and scratched his right leg Large Medals? Large Metals? Forget the large — that’s
in its unfamiliar navy-and-pink pinstripe. Sovetskiy thinking. Here they know there’s more to life than
They walked in together. Mr. Gess was waiting for them large. Likes Meetings? Meeting people is important in this
behind the glass door, half hidden by some advertisements field. “No, I am not familiar.”
for condominiums, wearing a pin-striped suit much like “Luxury Markets. The only kind I sell to.”
Aleksey’s. The similarity did not end there. Mr. Gess was, in “Yes, very good,” Aleksey said, trying to sound like he
fact, Aleksey’s very own nose, writ very large. Aleksey stead- wore silk underwear and took saunas at his dacha.
ied himself against the door frame as Tatiana sauntered in “Some great scuba diving there. You scuba dive? ”
and kissed the nose, just to the left of a slight discoloration “No, unfortunately.” In his nervousness, Aleksey was for-
from an old sunburn on its bridge. getting the noseness of the nose. In its fine suit — of a better
“And this is my famous friend Aleksey, very good with fabric than his own, and with a more delicate pinstripe, and
the conversation, especially with people from the univer- beautiful shoes, now crossed at an angle from his desk, the
sity,” she said. “He will be big asset.” Aleksey turned to her, nose looked like a better kind of human being, a human be-
horrified by her normalcy, but she was already going, jaunt- ing with fewer distracting features, a human being more solid
ily waving at the two of them. and more ready to fight, no soft spots on him. There is no
“So,” his nose said, “Let’s go to my office and we’ll see Achilles heel on a nose, Aleksey thought dizzily.
what we can do.” “Yeah, I was wondering,” the nose said. “I noticed, in your
“I have myself some ideas. For what we can do,” Alek- resumé, you don’t have any hobbies. Where’s your hobbies
sey said with morose significance, then instantly regretted section? ”
it. Already he was making a bad impression! He promised “My what? ”
himself to smile every time he said anything — besides eradi- “See here . . .” The nose pushed a paper at him, “On this re-
cating the bad impression, it would give his voice extra rich- sumé, the hobbies are golf and, and — what’s the rest? ”
ness, according to Tatiana. Aleksey read, “body building, and of course Monopoly.”
The nose sat behind a desk and gestured Aleksey into a “You see how adding a section like that, something a little
slightly lower chair than its own, so that Aleksey was face fun, you can show the world you’re not just a professor from
a very messed up place — you know, I read the news. You put
in a hobbies section, I say, ‘Hey, this guy isn’t so boring, I can
work with this guy, maybe teach him some street smarts.”
Here the nose made some karate chopping movements with
the attenuated, doll-like arms that protruded from either side
of its bridge. It must, Aleksey realized, have gotten its suit
specially tailored. “So hit me with some hobbies.”
“I like reading and also I like many winter sports, for exam-
ple, skiing and also I like the Monopoly . . . ” At least, he had
seen a Monopoly game in Tatiana and Todd’s garage.
“Look, Al, I’ll give you the real deal here. Half of all agents
are gone in two years. Why? ”
“Why? ”
“ ’Cause they don’t know thing one about commitment.
This business owns you for the first two years. Owns. You.
And if you can’t handle that, if you want to be all” — here the
nose affected a high, sexually indeterminate voice — “ ‘Oh,
what about my books’ or ‘What about my family?,’ well then,
Al, you might as well just walk out that door.”
“All right,” Aleksey said. “I understand.”
The nose leaned back in its chair. “You got any questions
“I’ll Be There For You/You’re All I Need to Get By” for me? ”
– Method Man and Mary J. Blige (1995) Aleksey, of course, did have questions: how much money

illustration: chris lee 61

 t h e wa l r u s
could he expect to make? How many hours would he have
to work? Would the nose ever come back and sit on his
face, or was it finding the real estate business too lucrative?
But Tatiana had told him not to ask the first two questions —
they made it sound like he cared too much about those
things, whereas you were supposed to care about this real
estate agency because it was the best. Pay and hours be
damned — you’d work there for free, gladly! That was how
you got a job in America. As for the last question, well, you
didn’t need a Tatiana yelling at you to know it was wrong.
It implied that he thought he was in charge of the nose and
reflected badly on his ability to respect his superiors. Sub-
servience, subservience, subservience — that lesson Alek-
sey had learned for himself in Russia.
He took his leave of the nose. But not without peeking
back through the window at its tottering, almost hen-like
progress between the empty desks.
azed, Aleksey wandered back in the direction of the
D house, no longer caring whether anyone saw him. And
in fact, it seemed that people did not see anything amiss.
In Leningrad, not even one second would have elapsed be-
fore some babushka demanded to know what had happened
to his face — was it hooligans? — and suggested a cucumber
poultice. But here, people expected to see a nose on every
face and that was what they saw.
But this thought, though probably true, didn’t really make
its way through the pillow that seemed to be lining Alek-
sey’s mind. It was a goose-down pillow, the same one he’d
had from birth to emigration, with a few feather stems pok-
ing through the thin cloth. He was sitting on a suitcase, wait-
ing for them to call his train.
He was watching his daughter read a gigantic book, only
her legs visible, until she peeked around the side of the cover
and said, “How do you do? ” in a voice she considered at once
extremely grown-up and hilarious.
He was in the corridor waiting to take his last Moscow
State entrance exam, an interview, sweating even down to
his ankles, horrified upon realizing he’d forgotten all but
one of the lines in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, the one
about walking hand in hand into the grave.
What kind of place was this, really? You woke up one
morning, just like any other day, except “yo” — as they said
here — an essential organ was missing, and that very after-
noon, that very organ was interviewing you for a job.
He was unable to think more on this and went to bed as
soon as he got to the Elkins’.
In the middle of the night, he awoke from a dream in
which his nose had formed a motorcycle gang and was chas-
ing him down the highway. Wiping sweat from his forehead,
Aleksey stood up, let the sheet fall from him, and shivered.
He went to the window. The street lights made the snow blue,
and it reminded him of snow in Leningrad, in the almost un-
inhabitable winters, when residents asked each other just
how crazy Peter the Great had been, “to even have had the
thought of building here!”
The front door light came on and Todd stepped outside,
carrying a duffle bag that was larger than he was. Tatiana’s
62
voice came from inside the house, “He is nothing, Toddzik!
If you’d just come home more often . . .”
Todd slammed his trunk closed. Aleksey realized that he
wasn’t dressed, just wearing a ski jacket over some plaid pa-
jamas and sneakers. “Remember, I didn’t have to tell you,”
Tatiana called out.
“Get inside,” Todd said, in a voice Aleksey had never heard
him use before but had heard in some films he’d seen short-
ly after immigrating — the voice of Chuck Norris, enraged to
have found himself tiny, betrayed, and pajama-clad on this
freezing night.
The door slammed.
Todd looked up at the second floor, and, seeing Aleksey
there, shouted, “Fucker! Loser! Jerkwad!” He paused briefly
to gather some snow into snowballs, and then began throw-
ing them at Aleksey’s window. With each toss, he called
him by a different name. “Broomhead! Fuckwit! Deserter!
Greenhorn!” After a few minutes, he began pausing to sim-
ply glare. Aleksey thought perhaps he was running out of
names, but then another barrage came: “Carpetbagger!
Homo! Pissant! Letch!” At “Letch,” a snowball broke through
the glass and Aleksey jumped back, snow scattering every-
where. Encouraged, Todd and the names and the snowballs
went on and on; it was as if Todd was marshalling all the
memories of his American life — of playgrounds, of sports
fields, of bars, of, indeed, his academic specialty, nineteenth-
century American literature. He threw the snowballs with
a good strong pitcher’s arm. “Whelp! Squatter! Square!
Retard!” Finally, he got in his car, accidentally turning on
the interior light as well as the headlights, opened his win-
dow, shouted, “Chump!” and rolled away, silhouetted by
the glow.
Aleksey stumbled back a few more paces, breathing hard,
and flipped the light switch. His reflection in what remained
of the window looked surprisingly normal — if only everyone
else could see that reflection instead of his real self ! After
a few seconds, hope formed, and to extinguish it, Aleksey
walked to the bathroom and stared hard into the mirror.
And saw his prodigal nose, right where it was supposed to
be, just as if nothing had happened. His vein was there, his
hairs were there, and when it had all come back, he did not
know. He did not know, nor did he want to know. He wanted
to sit on his floor. He wanted to have a drink and think about
the future that he suddenly saw before him, just past the tip
of his newly restored nose.
Tatiana would come up the stairs. He would sell houses
and — why not? — make a million dollars. He and Tatiana
would marry. They would have a baby, and the baby would
know neither Barkov nor babka, would wonder neither
What Must Be Done? (Chto Delat? ) nor Whose Fault? (Kto
Vinovat? ). More power to the baby! All power to the baby!
He heard Tatiana’s shoes on the stairs and their clip-clop
sound told him that he would forget that the past day had
ever happened. Aren’t immigrants like horses? Don’t we
need our blinders to move? What’s a professorship, what’s
a piano, what’s a daughter, compared to our desire to just get
out? In fact, let’s not discuss these barely remembered losses
any more. It doesn’t do any of us good. V
 TORONTO PRIDE WEEK | JUNE 15-24, 2007

DYKE MARCH - June 23

PRIDE PARADE - June 24
STREET FESTIVAL - June 22-24
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 t h e wa l r u s
fiction
Bob D ylan
G oes Tubing
by Marni Jackson
illustration by Thomas Libetti
O
ne morning we came back from town to find a strange
car parked under the white pines beside our cottage.
An old Citroën, the kind where the chassis goes up
and down hydraulically. Yellow. Nobody we knew drove
a Citroën. Our son Ryan ran down the long switchback of
wooden steps that lead to the lake.
“There’s somebody out on the lake,” he yelled, “on the
air mattress.”
Paul shaded his eyes. A pale, small, but visibly adult fig-
ure, with a Tilley hat tied under his chin was paddling to-
ward our dock.
“I need the binocs,” Paul said, and went and retrieved
them from the cottage. He studied the figure for a long mo-
ment.
“This is really weird,” he said, “but whoever that is looks
exactly like Bob Dylan.” He passed the binoculars to me.
And it did look like him — a little guy with a pencil mous-
tache, wearing Ryan’s flippers, on our air mattress.
“See? Only older.”
“Well, he is older.”
The figure paddled closer. Paul waved and called out.
“Hi. We’re back from town.”
I waved too. It could, remotely, be some friend of a friend,
dropping by on his way up to another cottage. Our place had
no phone, no email, and cell connection was dodgy because
of the granite cliffs. Sometimes people we scarcely knew just
turned up. “Yeah, I’m back too,” the Dylan-person called.
Then he started singing in a slightly hokey, Nashville Skyline
voice, “Back here on Kashagawigamog.”
That is, in fact, the name of a lake in North Ontario, but
not ours. Ours is Sturgeon Lake.
“What do we do now?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know. Offer him a drink?”
He cupped his hands. “Come on up and join us, if you’re
heading in.”
64
“Sure thing,” the floater said. I got a towel from the pump
shed and went down to the dock. Bob Dylan — no question
now, it was him — rolled off the mattress, careful to keep the
brim of his hat dry. He slung the mattress up on the diving
raft and did a credible breaststroke to the end of the dock,
where he held on to the edge with thin white fingers.
“No ladder?” He asked.
The nails on the baby finger on each hand were extra long,
and filed square.
“Let me give you a hand.”
I leaned over, careful to keep my scoop-neck shirt from
gaping, and Dylan grabbed hold of me like a big ropey eight-
year-old. He was pale as a grub, with a dot of chin hair and
that riverboat-gambler moustache he started wearing around
Love and Theft. But his blue eyes were still strong and clear,
and met mine. He whisked the water off his arms with
his hands.
“Water’s real nice, once you get in.”
Dylan was wearing a pair of old-fashioned wool swim-
ming trunks with a narrow white belt. Wet, they revealed a
springy crescent of cock underneath. His skin was so white
it looked translucent, but he had good biceps — from play-
ing guitar, probably. His forearms had energy, and drew
your eye.
He wrapped himself in my blue towel.
“Want to see the boathouse?” asked Ryan. He led Dylan
inside where he showed him our old green waterlogged
Chestnut canoe slung up in the rafters and the aluminum
boat we used for fishing. Ryan was nine and didn’t care or
know who this skinny visitor was.
“The canoe leaks,” Ryan said, “but we can go tubing. My
friend Trevor has a Chris-Craft with a Merc 120.”
“Sounds good,” Dylan said, using his hand to close one
nostril as he blew out the other one to clear his sinuses. Then
we all climbed the eighty-seven wooden trestle-ties up to the
j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7

65
 t h e wa l r u s

cottage, where Paul was waiting for us with the map spread lake were coming by to go tubing soon, and did Bob want to
out on the kitchen table. go? We explained tubing to Dylan — being dragged around
“Okay, now, Bob, you’re here,” Paul said, pointing to Stur- the lake behind a power boat, while clinging to a large in-
geon Lake, a liver-shaped body of water northeast of Hunts- flated rubber donut with handles. Like tobogganing fast,
ville, “and Kashagawigamog is quite a ways over there.” Kash over water.
was closer to Bancroft. “Guess I kinda overshot it,” Dylan “Sure, I’ll give it a shot,” Dylan said. They headed down
mumbled. “Nice ride up, though.” to the water, where Ryan got him a life preserver. Dylan
I was staring into the fridge without being able to see any- tried to light a cigarette, hunching over his lighter, but it
thing. “Can I offer you something, Bob? Orange juice? A nice was too breezy. The big Chris-Craft chugged up to the dock.
Stoli with some lemonade? We have cold beer, of course. We watched the two of them climb in and roar off, as Dylan’s
Canadian beer.” hat flipped straight up in the wind. He looked happy.
“Sure, that all sounds good. ‘Give it to me in a cup,’ he “What do we do when he gets tired of tubing?” Paul said.
sang, ‘and let the queen dance with the jack.’ ” He was study- “Let’s worry about that later.” I hung the towels out on the
ing the map, circling some of the names that tickled him. line, lay down on our bed, and fell asleep. I wasn’t used to
“Arnprior,” he murmured with a faint lift of the moustache. drinking before lunch.
“Madoc. Irondale.”
After some dithering, I mixed him a Red Needle — tequila, usk was coming on. We had cocktails and listened to
slice of lemon, and cranberry juice with lots of ice — and D Lucinda Williams singing “Six Blocks Away.” I twirled
opened a couple of Coronas for us. Dylan downed his drink the ice in my empty glass. Dylan stood at the big front win-
and fingered peanuts from a dish. “Madawaska,” he said, dow scowling at the horizon, which was bloody. His mood
then underlined the name with a felt pen. Meanwhile Paul had changed.
was standing in front of our CD collection, sweating over “Look at the sun,” he snarled, “goin’ down over the sea.”
what to play for Bob Dylan. He spider-walked one hand down the windowpane.
“Sally, where’s that klezmer collection . . .” “The sky is erupting now / and I must take my leave.” He
“No,” I cried, leaping over to the CD player. “Play . . . play went into the guest bedroom. We heard him rummaging
the remastered Etta James. Or that Robert Johnson one, did around in the dresser drawer and then he emerged, wear-
we bring that?” ing a pair of Ryan’s flannel pajamas with a horse-and-buggy
Dylan looked up from the map. “Got any old Valdy?” motif. He had a harmonica in one hand and a toothbrush in
“Valdy.” Paul swivelled on his heels to me with panic- the other. It looked like mine.
stricken eyes. “Now let me have a look.” “Okay if I drink the water?”
Valdy is a West Coast Canadian folksinger who had enjoyed “Go ahead, we just had it tested.”
a little plateau of fame in the 1970s. While Paul inverted his At the kitchen sink he put his harmonica in a glass of wat-
head to read the labels on the lowest shelf of CDs, Dylan er to soak, like a pair of dentures. For several minutes he
wandered into the kitchen, looked in the fridge, and turned scoured his teeth over the kitchen sink, brushing and spit-
on the radio. The cbc news was just wrapping up. ting methodically. Then he flossed, making the floss pock in
“Good old Jim Curran,” said Dylan, putting chunks of
brie on a row of Ritz crackers. “Talkin’ traffic.” He turned
the volume up.
“Really?” Paul said. “You listen to cbc?”
“Oh yeah. The boys on the bus listen to npr and cbc all
the time. It’s good for moving through the land.” Dylan took
his plate of crackers over to the couch and sat down.
“I wrote a pretty good song about Gzowski a few years
back.”
“You’re kidding,” Paul said.
“About this guy in a little green studio, smokin’ and talkin’
to people all over the country until one day the government
burns down the radio station with him in it. Yeah, the band
all likes the cbc. We get sick of watchin’ TV on the bus.”
“Huh,” Paul said. He was staring at Glenn Gould, Goldberg
Variations. Too manic for this time of day.
“I was gonna record it, but the record people said this guy
was too obscure. Hurricane Carter, people have heard of,
they said, but they don’t know Peter Gzowski.”
“Well, they would if you sang about it,” I pointed out.
What about Hattie Carroll and William Zanzinger?
“Old Petey boy,” Dylan mused, “in that little green room.” “Prisoner of Love (Slip Away riddim)”
Ryan came in and said that Trevor and Angus down the – Dave Barker and the Upsetters (1969)

66 illustration: radek drutis

 Bob Dylan Goes Tubing

“Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,” Dylan sang, zipping his candlestick around the board, an unlit
cigarette hanging off his lip. We let him smoke inside, but he didn’t push it.

a rhythm. Then he rinsed. between the three bedrooms that didn’t go all the way up.
“Think I’ll sleep down by the water tonight,” he said, be- With Dylan next door, Paul and I had to make love like hos-
fore he grabbed his pack of American Spirits and banged out tages, scarcely moving. I developed a taste for it that way. One
the screen door, with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket slung night, not long after his arrival, we had flipped our covers
over one shoulder. He headed down the path, toes gripping down to get at each other more quietly when we heard Dylan
his flip-flops. on the other side of the wall, talking in his sleep.
I stood at the window. Wrapped in the blanket, Dylan “Someone’s got it in for me,” he said, clearly and loudly.
settled on our yellow plastic chaise at the end of “They’re planting stories in the press.”
the dock. I could see him through the birches, in “Just let me check on him,” I whispered to Paul.
the early lavender darkness. He took out a ciga- I slipped into his room and there he was, an aging
rette, lit it, broke up several more and threw the poet in horse-and-buggy pajamas, his white feet
crumbs of tobacco to the minnows that dimpled uncovered. Now he was mumbling. I put my hand
the surface of the water. Further out on the lake, on his brow and he settled down. I tucked him in.
a pair of loons, long, black and plump, left a pla- He looked so young asleep.
cid W behind them. This was the time of evening The next morning he emerged with a rumpled
when the fish fed, and unseen bugs made circles on the wat- face, unsmiling. I microwaved his oatmeal.
er that looked as if a light rain was falling. “Bad night?”
Then it was finally dark. I left the window and Paul lit a “Bad dreams. Joanie dreams. She won’t let go.” He spread
fire in the woodstove. In his room, Ryan had fallen asleep a good half-inch of cold butter on his bun. I was buying two
over a Spider-Man comic book. I turned off his light. a day at this point.
A little later, I went down to give Dylan a flashlight and “Did you hear the loons?”
some bug repellent. He was fooling around with the har- “Yeah. Same first notes as “Wichita Lineman.”
monica. It was cloudy out, and the lake looked too rough for tubing.
“If you hear rustling in the woods, it’s just raccoons. But Paul was playing Monopoly with Ryan, and crowing about
they won’t bother you on the dock.” having eight hotels. Dylan sat down beside them.
“Frogs are jumpin’, toads are croakin’ / seems like every- “Want to play?” Ryan asked Dylan, giving him a silver
thing is broken,” he half sang in his cigarette-frayed voice. candlestick from the Clue game as his marker. Dylan sat at
“Goodnight, Bob. Sleep tight.” the board, eating his oatmeal and shaking the dice. I heard
“Hey Sal, you too.” him thump his marker smartly as he moved around the board.
We watched the moonless night sky for a moment. The I decided it was a good day to make a lamb stew that could
stars were all out, coming at us in smithereens. Coldness slow cook in the oven. In no time, Dylan had snagged three
radiated off of the lake. A shooting star fell down through railroads, as well as Park Place and Pennsylvania Avenue.
the blackness, like a magnet slipping. “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle,” Dylan sang, zipping his candle-
stick around the board, an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip.
nd so, without a word of explanation, Bob Dylan became We let him smoke inside, but he didn’t push it.
A a guest at our cottage. A week passed, then another. “Hurry up and roll,” Ryan said morosely. Paul gazed out
Every morning he got up first — we would hear him plunge the window at the choppy grey lake. He disliked board games.
off the dock, thrash out to the raft, and then swim back again. He was looking a little fed up. Sooner or later, I realized, we
He got into the local Chelsea buns. “Like the hotel?” he asked were going to have to do something about Bob Dylan.
when I gave him his first one. Most afternoons he went tub- “I think we should put the chairs in the boathouse,” I said,
ing with Ryan and the boys. looking pointedly at Paul. “The wind’s coming up.”
“It’s not too different from being on the road with the “I’m sure he’ll leave soon,” I told him when we were down
band, just more fun,” he explained. by the lake, out of earshot. “He just needs to rest.”
Sometimes Paul and I would stand on the dock with the “But what if he doesn’t? What if he ends up living with us,
binoculars, and watch him bump over the waves behind or coming back down to the city with us?”
Trevor’s boat, thinking “Bob Dylan is tubing on our lake.” “Sooner or later somebody’s going to come looking for
It was pretty unreal. But Canadian summers are so short that him. He’s world-famous, for God’s sake. He’s supposed to
everything about them feels a bit like a dream. You expect to be on tour.”
wake up any minute. Our friends would always swear up and “Plus,” Paul said, “the guy eats like a horse, in case you
down they’d visit, but they never made it. I understood; the haven’t noticed. When you factor in gas for the outboard,
city is jealous and won’t let people go. We were only renting and all those cartons of American Spirit I bring back from
the cabin, and we didn’t socialize too much. So it was just the town, it starts to add up.”
four of us that August — me, Ryan, Paul, and Dylan. “He’s rich. Money probably never crosses his mind.”
The cottage was small and old-fashioned, with partitions “Well, it should. It crosses mine.”

illustration: michelangelo iaffaldano 67

 t h e wa l r u s

His beard didn’t scratch too much when we kissed. I froze, listening for Paul’s near-snore.
“You are a jewel,” Dylan breathed into my ear. “A precious shining jewel.”

“Give him a bit more time, honey. It’s good for Ryan, he’s I was settled with a duvet on the sofa bed one night, as a
teaching him chords on the guitar. We could have nipped it cool current of air from the lake flowed stealthily over me.
in the bud on the first day, but at this point it’d be rude to I could feel the presence of the lake, like a sleeping dog. The
kick him out.” call of the loons was preternaturally clear and loud, notes
“And I don’t appreciate the way he goes around making fun breathed into a bamboo instrument. Sometimes the laugh-
of Dwight Yoakam when he can see he’s in our CD wallet.” ter of a party would carry over from the other side of the
“That’s just him.” lake, but that night it was perfectly quiet. I listened to the
“Why are you defending him? You let him get away with sounds of breathing — Paul, even and deep. Ryan, turn-
murder playing Scrabble — you didn’t even challenge zydeko. ing often and rustling his plastic. Nothing from Dylan’s
Zydeko? You wouldn’t take that shit from me.” room. Then I heard someone get up and use the bathroom.
“I’m not defending him, I just think he likes it here. It’s “Ryan?” “No.” “Oh, Bob, sorry.” Dylan, wrapped in the blan-
good for him. And I like it when he sings for us.” ket, came into the porch. His feet were long and
“Right. When he can remember the words.” narrow and white. I could smell tobacco and the
If you asked Bob directly, he wouldn’t sing. strange lanolin cream he used on his hands and
But if you set up a good situation, he would sidle nails. Bag balm, he called it, something farmers
over to Ryan’s cheap acoustic guitar and ease into used on cracked cow udders.
a song. One chilly night — August was almost “Quarter moon, Sal,” he whispered. Through
over — we made a bonfire outside. Dylan wrapped the trees, I could see the bone-coloured crescent.
himself in the Bay blanket and sang “Farewell, An- I thumped the edge of the sofa. “Sit here.”
gelina,” followed by “Tangled Up in Blue.” He played with Shivering, Dylan tried to keep his blanket from slipping
his head bowed, picking with one hand propped up on his off while he lit a cigarette.
right baby finger. His voice was hard-edged and lovely, like “Mind?”
an old sharpened knife. He made up a song for Ryan, called “Be my guest.”
“The Man in the Loon.” It was about a boy who fell into the He sat down on the sofa.
lake and was raised by a pair of loons, so he grew up think- “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
ing he was a bird. “It’s cooler on the porch.”
“Slept in a rowboat / swam through the reeds,” he sang, “Yeah, the air is sweet.”
“livin’ in the river / where the crawfish feeds.” The smell of his cigarette was rough and pleasant — some-
After that he did that Beach Boys song, “In My Room,” times tobacco smelled so good. I brought my knees up, un-
changing the chorus to “In My Loon.” Ryan played along covering my feet. He took them in his cool hands and
on his little synthesizer keyboard. “Play ‘Surfer Girl’ now,” absentmindedly stroked them, as if they were a cat that
I pleaded. But Dylan put the guitar aside, threw his cigarette had found its way onto his lap.
into the woods, and went off to bed like a tiny king, his quilt “I can only really sleep on the bus,” he said. “It never feels
sweeping up the pine needles behind him. right if I’m not moving.”
That night in bed, Paul turned to me. His hands felt so alive on my skin. A kind of swarming in-
“Were there any messages when you went to town? telligence came off them. He put out his cigarette in a saucer
Doesn’t he have a manager or something?” on the windowsill. A loon breathed its shaky note. Dylan’s
A mosquito hovered. I let it land on my arm, waited, then hands stroked further up my leg, like a masseur, following
smacked it. “Nope. We’re it, I guess.” the line of the calf muscle.
“Anyone else would at least buy the odd bottle of wine,” “Swimmer’s legs,” he said.
Paul said, rolling away. “Talk about out of touch.” “Not any more.”
“The man is lost,” I said, “that’s all.” “I like to watch you move around this place.”
He shivered.
or some reason, Ryan got the best bed in the cottage. It “Here,” I said, lifting up the duvet. “Get warm.” He slipped
F was a new firm mattress, wrapped in a zippered plastic like quicksilver out of his blanket and under mine. He was
bag that rustled noisily whenever he flipped about in his smooth as the handle of a knife, slim as a boy, cool as china.
sleep. Our bed was bigger, but old and it sagged. Since Paul His beard didn’t scratch too much when we kissed. I froze,
was six foot two, his weight in the middle left me feeling as if listening for Paul’s near-snore, which rasped on, and Ryan’s
I was clinging to the crest of the mattress all night long. The rustling plastic. “You are a jewel,” Dylan breathed into my
room had just enough space for the bed and a dresser with ear. “A precious shining jewel.”
one stuck drawer. On hot nights, I would often move to the
screened-in porch to sleep on the sofa bed. I liked feeling the he skies were turning a harder, more brilliant blue, and
cushions up against my back, and my feet solid against the
tufted upholstered arms.
T the lake water now appeared more solid and navy blue.
The water was almost too cold for swimming. The mist that

68 illustration: michelangelo iaffaldano

 Bob Dylan Goes Tubing

rose from the surface of the lake each morning took longer few days later, when we were packing up the cottage,
each day to lift. The top leaves of a few maples were red. A we took the boat over to Arnie’s marina to go into stor-
Our porch encounter was never repeated, nor mentioned. age. Arnie winched the boat up the rails and out of the
Paul suspected nothing, and he even began to warm to Dylan water.
when the two of them started playing his old vinyl Johnny “Before I forget, there’s a letter here for you,” he said as
Cash albums. Paul found a Valdy record, Smorgas Bard, at a we were paying up in his office full of life jackets and fish-
garage sale in town and gave it to Dylan. So they made their ing nets. He handed us an enveloped addressed to Ryan, care
connection. As for me, on the rainy afternoons when Ryan of Warners’ Marina, Sturgeon Lake. He finally got that right.
lay on the couch reading old National Geographics with his It was written on motel stationery from a Best Western in
headphones on, and the two men were listening to Johnny Boise, Idaho.
Cash sing “Girl from the North Country,” I couldn’t have Ryan, Didn’t want to wake you up, but thanks for all the rides,
been happier. All my men at peace, under one roof. man — and the chorus is just the same, A, D, E, only barre chords
Then one Sunday morning, early, I heard the Citroën sound better. Tube on, Bobby
turn over, stealthily, and catch. I heard the car revving in re- The owners of our cottage, Sheila and Tony, lived in a big-
verse, as it slowly backed down our gravel road, swishing ger place on the next lake over. When we got back from the
past the tall poplars. marina, they were waiting for us, sitting round the seldom-
“He’s gone,” I whispered to Paul. used picnic table over the septic tank, where the grass was
“Probably just went to town for smokes.” long and green.
“It’s Sunday. Nothing’s open this early.” “Tim’s firm has transferred him to Toronto,” Tony began,
We got up, expecting a note, or possibly a cheque, but “which we’re happy about, of course.”
there was no sign of anything. I went into his room; the bed Tim was their married son and it turned out that his fam-
was neatly made. Ryan’s sock monkey with the Xs for eyes ily wanted to take over the cottage next summer. They felt
leaned against the pillow. In the kitchen I noticed that the badly, but they really had no choice.
latest box from the bakery was gone. “I can still go to camp, though?” Ryan asked.
“He fucking took my bun,” said Paul. He went to check I felt I ought to tell them something about our guest, but I
the row of albums, “and Smorgas Bard too.” didn’t know what to say. Watch out for Bob Dylan?
When Ryan woke up, we told him Bob had to leave
early, to catch a plane, to go back on tour. He was disap- o that’s what happens when you rent. You have to be
pointed because they were right in the middle of learning
“You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry.
Sprepared to move on. But we would find a new lake; the
north was littered with lakes. Or try Quebec, where prices
“He’s on the road most of the year,” I reminded him. “Next were lower.
time he comes through town, I’m sure he’ll look us up.” One thing bothered me when we got back to the city,
“A hundred bucks we never hear from him again,” said though. Somehow, in all the packing and unpacking, I had
Paul. lost Dylan’s note to Ryan. Our time with him had become
But I am a romantic. I didn’t need to see him again. a family secret — something that might or might not have
taken place. Like the dream of summer when you try to think
of it in winter. The tube was stowed in the garage, and the
gyres of autumn began to turn and mesh.
In January, Dylan’s new album, Madawaska, came out.
When I heard the title, my heart raced. Paul downloaded it as
soon as it showed up online, and the two of us sat at the com-
puter, scanning the song titles. None rang a bell. Maybe I was
afraid of, or hoping for, something called “Precious Jewel,”
or “Swimmer’s Legs.” The music was traditional bluegrass,
with fiddles, and Emmylou Harris singing ethereal harmony
with Dylan on the title tune: “And all along the Madawaska /
I’ve been thinking of the night / When the moon rose up
in splendour / And your step was young and light.” A plain
song, like “Red River Valley.” Paul played it twice, and nei-
ther of us spoke. Maybe that was it, my sign. Another song,
fast and driving, was an incredible story about a stable full
of famous race horses that burns to the ground.
Later, in the middle of the night, I got up and played
“Madawaska” again, with the headphones on. There was
another line in it, about night air cool as water. My guess
would be that it was Sturgeon Lake air. I went ahead with
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” that in my mind. Everyone craves evidence, after all, evi-
– Frank Sinatra (1956) dence that a time was real, even for five minutes. O

illustration: paul kim 69

 t h e wa l r u s

y mother has sent me out to Saint-Denis by Métro,

fiction
M because Alsan, the cleaner at her office, has told
her that the best halloumi is to be found floating in a

The bucket at the back of a Lebanese bakery in the market on Rue

de la République. My mother would make the cheese her-
self if she could, just as she is making baklava from whisper-
Pr inciples thin sheets of phyllo and honey produced by bees raised in
fields of lavender.

of Exile For Monsieur Sarkis, a man whose picture sits framed

on top of the piano as if he is a relative, nothing but the best
will do.
† My father tells her she needn’t bother — we’ll cater, we’ll
order, we’ll dine at Le Paradis — but my mother is insistent:
by Camilla Gibb we will entertain at home and she will cook, for this is a
illustration by Kate Wilson man who for so long did not have the safety and comfort of
a home, living in hiding, under threat of a fatwa calling for

70
 jjuly/august
uly /au g u s t 2007
his assassination for the better part of a decade.
The fatwa was finally lifted last year and Sarkis’s new book
is about to be launched in Paris. My father, his French pub-
lisher, has been talking of little else for months, even losing
interest in the Swiss copy editor with the shiny black bob
and pert breasts.
Ours is a small publishing house established by my grand-
father from money inherited from his father, an engineer
who built railway lines in Africa. My father, attempting to
shake off the colonial residue when he took over as publisher
in 1969, dropped the word “Dark” and relaunched the house
as simply Continent Editions. He did not make any signifi-
cant money, and did not expect to when he signed on a rela-
tively unknown Lebanese-American author named David
Sarkis who had penned a startling novella about a Muslim
cleric’s sexual awakening.
71
2007
The British edition was published first. We could never
have anticipated the reaction. Radical Muslim clerics im-
mediately denounced the book as a defamation of Islam,
and others raised enough money to offer a million-dollar re-
ward for Sarkis’s head. Our edition quickly followed, as did
deals for publication in twenty-seven other countries. Sud-
denly, and unexpectedly, Continent Editions had a bestseller,
and David Sarkis was a star.
My father thrived on this recognition, a reward that
seemed worth the threat of the black Mercedes with tinted
windows that started following him home from work, worth
the inconvenience of having to change his route every day,
worth the expense of hiring a driver, worth the seriousness of
the bodyguard the government assigned to protect us, worth
the threat to himself, to my mother, and to me. Until he re-
ceived the letter threatening to kidnap me, at which point my
 t h e wa l r u s

mother, for all she shared in the excitement, for all it seemed and rocks and sky and the occasional three-legged dog out
to have reinvigorated their marriage, said: enough. there. There was nowhere for me to run except back to Trudy’s
My father’s solution was to stop the driver outside a travel house, where I slept in a shared room wallpapered with palm
agency after picking me up from school the following day, trees on white sandy beaches.
and ask the agent to book me a ticket to the furthest place Trudy was the sister of someone who worked in publish-
possible. At fourteen, I was sent off to Australia — and not ing in Sydney and she was a nurse, although there was no
to Sydney or Melbourne, but to the remote and desolate hospital in the town. Her husband, Mathias, was only home
interior — without a return date. on weekends because he spent the week prospecting for oil
in the desert. I was never sure whether either of them actual-
he squat, veiled woman behind the counter has her eye on ly knew why I was there, but I was quite sure that even if I’d
T me as I scan the shelves, as if I’m about to make off with had the language to explain it, they would not have been par-
something. I’m taking it all in: the sweaty smell of cumin, the ticularly interested.
sizzle of frying falafel patties, the sour smell of vinegar eman- Mathias would sit across from me at the linoleum table in
ating from the vats of Greek olives. A boy who must be her the kitchen drinking beer on Friday nights and talk to Trudy’s
son — taller than her and pockmarked by acne — asks me if back while she stood at the counter chopping carrots. I could
he can help me find something, while she slips behind a cur- tell he was talking about me long before I spoke English.
tain. I tell him I have come for cheese. He says they have no “You should ask for more money, Trude,” he would say. “You
cheese and I ask him: “Not even halloumi?” see how much he eats?”
“Halloumi, we have,” he says. One of my first thoughts in English was a resolution to
“And isn’t halloumi cheese?” eat less.
“Yes,” he says. “How much do you want?”
The boy’s mother reemerges, realizing that I am harm- y mother has always thought Sarkis very handsome.
less, just a man who doesn’t know exactly what he wants. M Perhaps a wanted man is always handsome. He is rather
She says something to her son in Arabic and he translates: portly and olive-skinned, with a thick black moustache and
“What are you using it for?” beard, and eyebrows that nearly meet in the mid-
“I don’t know exactly,” I admit. “My mother, dle. His beard allegedly conceals a scar on his chin,
she’s making Lebanese food,” adding, “for a Leba- the legacy of his having been knifed by a Mossad
nese man.” agent after seducing the man’s daughter — a story
The squat woman winks at me, evidently under- that is legendary and, most likely, apocryphal, but
standing. She pulls a plastic bag off a roll and now immortalized as the plot of his new novel.
plunges her hand into a white, plastic bucket be- I only came to read his work years later. It was
hind her. She captures a big piece of halloumi his short stories that moved me, particularly the
floating in the water and deftly inverts the bag. one about a man in prison who helps a despon-
“He’s just a friend of the family,” I explain, “not a friend dent spider mend its broken web by offering the spider his
exactly, a writer, a famous writer, we published his book, per- eyelashes one by one. That story was an enormous comfort
haps you know him? David Sarkis?” to me. I was that web — that thin, near-transparent, hidden
The squat woman squints, opens the plastic bag, spits thing, torn in a corner. I was that spider, trapped in a prison
onto the halloumi, twists and ties the neck of the bag, and without walls or cellmates.
thrusts it into my hand. Trudy and Mathias had a daughter named Tammy, about
I am left standing there holding this clear plastic bag at my age, as well as a son, Tommy, who was still wearing dia-
arm’s length as if it contains a dead goldfish. I hand over all pers even though he was nearly eight. Tommy stayed at the
the money in my pocket to the boy. Perhaps he shares the house of the lady next door while Tammy and I were at
same view of Sarkis as his mother; he makes no effort to school and Trudy was at work.
hand me any change. And I make no effort to ask for it. Tammy found the fact that I didn’t speak English inordin-
ately funny and took to calling me Frog Legs, a nickname she
was not happy about being forced to leave Paris, particu- soon shared with the entire grade. By the time I was stam-
I larly when I had just been introduced to the world under- mering just enough English to survive, I had suffered the
neath Isabel’s school uniform. I understood the principle be- humiliation of being made to crouch and croak and eat flies
hind having to leave, though I had trouble comprehending by older children in the schoolyard. They would stand in a
how it was that a fourteen-year-old boy from Paris should be circle, a circle of identical faces, lightly bronzed and wild-
sent away because of the publication of a book he had never eyed and framed with blond hair, shouting orders, kicking
read by a Lebanese-American man he had never met. It made up the dirt.
me feel the world was very small and perhaps it is for just As much as I longed to be able to explain my presence to
that reason that my parents had to send me away. them, the English I was acquiring was not so much for conver-
And big it became: endless. The dusty town in the mid- sation as self-defence. I quietly stocked my arsenal and waited
dle of a continent on the other side of the world gave way for the inevitable. I had fast become attuned to the cues, the
to dusty desert on all sides. The schoolyard had no fences — subtle shifts in classroom weather, the tension rising like a ci-
what would have been the point? There was nothing but sand cada’s crescendo in the heat. The day that a group of students

72 illustration: stephen appleby - barr

 The Principles of Exile
For the first time, I felt as if there was someone other than Sarkis, author of a short story about
a spider, who understood me. I would marry Marta if she weren’t a lesbian.
standing in a bristling cluster during lunch break ignored
me when I tripped over my shoelace, I knew my time was
up. The cabbage I’d eaten started to pickle in my stomach.
“Hey, wait up,” Tammy yelled, as I pushed my way down
the hallway and out through the swinging door. I turned
around and saw her smirking through the glass, while be-
hind me a group of boys assembled.
I stood in the middle of their shrinking circle, my knees
about to buckle. And then I timidly raised my gun.
Something dribbled rather than shot out of my mouth.
“What’d you say?” shouted one of the more thick-necked
of the bunch.
“Can’t hear you mate,” another said, pushing me up
against the school’s grey wall.
My chest inflated with the stink of his armpits and the
desert dust and I bellowed, “Fuck you, you shitty buggers!”
The bully backed up and I wiped my mouth of the spit
caused by all those hard consonants. Then the wall of boys
crumbled. In strode Mr. Henry, the grade eight math teacher.
He grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed. “Profanity,
my little Frenchman, might be the way you communicate au
Paris, but here it is completely unacceptable.”
I ended up on a bench outside the principal’s office. There
was one other boy there — the only aboriginal boy in the
school.
I tried to make conversation. “Have you ever been on a
school trip?” I asked.
The boy looked at me with raised eyebrows and said
nothing.
“Last year my class took a trip to the Dordogne. To see the
cave paintings,” I said, thinking he might know something
about cave paintings.
The boy turned his full attention back to the scab on
his knee.
“Hey,” I said then, lowering my voice, “tell me, what’s go-
ing to happen?”
“Whippin’,” he said, popping the scab, by then wedged
under his fingernail, into his mouth.
y mother is making fish, a whole white fish from her fa-
M vourite fishmonger. She’s patting its silver back dry with
a paper towel while she peruses a slim, photocopied booklet
called “Cooking with the First Lady of Egypt.” There is a very
badly reproduced photograph of President Gamal Abdel
Nasser standing fuzzy and askew on the cover, followed by
an introduction written in broken English about socialist
revolution, collective harvesting, and traditional cuisine.
I am chopping onions and garlic while my mother stands
beside me, sprinkling earthy green olive oil onto the fish. She
is humming “Les enfants qui s’aiment.” She massages the oil
into the skin and sprinkles it with cumin and salt and pep-
per. She lines the cavity with slices of lemon and threads of
saffron. The fish looks proud in its dressing and my mother
T boys, but men. Perhaps they were as old as twenty. One
looks even more proud in her apron.
73
I cannot remember the last time she was in the kitchen,
with the exception of the one time Marta came to visit. My
mother was convinced Marta was my girlfriend, my first
since Isabel, and so, despite my repeated protestations, she
baked a cake in honour of her arrival.
Marta praised its delicacy, its subtle anise flavour.
“I’ll give you the recipe,” my mother said. “It’s Emmanuel’s
favourite.”
Marta kicked me under the table.
Later, undressing in my room, Marta commented on the
transparency of my poor mother’s attempts to engage her.
The guest room was conveniently unavailable, my mother
claimed, due to mould growing under the wallpaper because
of the heavy spring rains. It was embarrassing enough that I
still lived with my parents, but now Marta could see the pa-
thetic evidence of the only victories in my life — chess tro-
phies and assorted certificates of merit for things like poetry
recitation — that covered my boy-bedroom wall.
I resisted the urge to look while she undressed, but I could
smell the lavender talc of her skin when she removed her
blouse and pulled her nightdress over her head.
My mother strains the soaking lentils over the sink. I sauté
the onions and garlic and a small green chilli in a pot, and
when they begin to brown, I tip in the soft lentils and stir.
“Marta wishes she could be here,” I say as casually as
possible.
My mother stops humming.
“She just couldn’t believe Sarkis was coming.”
My mother sniffs her hands and grimaces.
I met Marta by chance a few years ago. She was accom-
panying her father, Sarkis’s German publisher, to the Frank-
furt Book Fair, and when we were introduced, I was struck
by her peculiar-sounding French. While I had been in Aus-
tralia, Marta had been in a small town in Canada, though I
did not know that at the time, did not know there were chil-
dren of Sarkis’s publishers scattered about the world, living
in its most remote and lonely places. Over a drink, Marta
told me about her two years of exile in a small fishing vil-
lage in New Brunswick.
The connection between us was immediate. For the first
time, I felt as if there was someone other than Sarkis, author
of a short story about a spider, who understood me. I would
marry Marta if she weren’t a lesbian.
My mother no longer approves of Marta and would not
have invited her to join us for dinner. It is not that Marta is a
lesbian; it is that she has asked me if I will be a sperm donor,
or rather, it is that I am considering it. My mother should
be happy — this way I might actually stand a chance of be-
ing a father.
here were two boys at our school who really were not
had failed repeatedly because his brain had been damaged
from sniffing glue, and the other, so they said, had missed
 t h e wa l r u s

two years of school while in juvie. When the aboriginal boy and he had come to stay over the Christmas holidays.
left, they turned their full attention to Frog Legs. I had a sudden flashback to my Christmas in the outback.
The one who had been in prison whacked me in the back Mathias had grilled sausages on the barbie, fatty squat things
of the knees with a stick. Once I was down, the one who slathered in tomato sauce that he poked aggressively with a
sniffed glue shoved my face into the dirt and dragged my fork until they looked as if they had been shot twenty times
cheek over a rock. with an air rifle. There were a lot of people getting loud on a
Trudy applied antiseptic to my face that night and told me lot of beer and Tammy mimicking fellatio at me with a sweat-
she didn’t need any more problems. Mathias smirked, then ing sausage behind her father’s back. I’d hated myself for get-
offered to teach me how to use my fists, which I declined. ting hard and going to relieve myself in the toilet.
“Pussy,” I heard him say. “It was partly that I felt sorry for him,” Marta said. “That
I wasn’t even sure how to reach my parents then. The gov- is, until he was lying on top of me.”
ernment had them in protection, moving them from flat to He came into her room, which was just a converted closet,
flat. So I sat on my bed and scratched at the ringed bark of drunk on homemade booze. He crawled into her bed, lifted
the palm trees on the wall and decided that I would eat even her nightgown, and without a word, pushed himself into her.
less in the hope of becoming invisible. When she cried out, he cupped his palm over her mouth, and
When I returned home after eighteen months, my mother quickly finished. He left her as silently as he’d come into her
said I looked very handsome — I’d lost all my baby fat. She room but the next day, over breakfast, he looked at her with
couldn’t see what else I’d lost. Perhaps I would have told her something like love in his eyes and she excused herself to go
if I’d had the words. Strangely, the words only seemed to and vomit up her oatmeal. She chewed parsley every mor-
come with Marta, beginning that very first night in Frank- ning for the next month. The woman she lived with kept a
furt when she spoke her funny French to me. bag full of it in the freezer.
The dispatcher comes back on the line. “He dropped him

A t half past seven the table is set. My mother fills a large off at his hotel, sir,” he says. “At about eight o’clock.”
jug with water and ice and adds a slice of lemon. She “But he was due here then,” I stammer. “Was the driver
toasts Lebanese flatbread. She changes her skirt twice; her not instructed to bring him here?”
blouse twice. She dusts her eyelids with blue powder. She “Apparently he said he was rather tired.”
sits down with my father in the library, then immediately I thank him, and put the phone down gently.
stands up again. She paces around the apartment. She heats “So?” my mother asks, suddenly standing in the doorway
the oven, stirs the lentils, and turns down the heat. with her hands on her hips.
At nine o’clock she finally speaks. “René? Where on earth “Well, it seems there was some emergency and he had to
do you think he is?” return to New York.” I shake my head and shrug. “The driv-
My father puts down his newspaper and peers over his er took him to the airport.”
glasses. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon.” “My god,” is all she says, expressionless. Then: “René?
“But really, René, he’s already over an hour late.” René?” and the clack of her heels against the parquet down
“What’s one more hour when we’ve been waiting ten the hall to the library.
years?”
“It’s a burnt dinner, that’s what it is.”
“I told you we should have had it catered.”
“That’s not the point,” she says, pushing a stray hair out
of her eyes.
“Emmanuel?” she says, turning to me. “Ring the car ser-
vice will you? Find out where he is.”
I return to the kitchen, turn off the oven, and call the
dispatcher. He puts me on hold while he radios the driver.
Madonna sings “Like a Virgin” in my ear and I smell the skin
of the fish turning black.
Marta kissed me once. It was a couple of years ago. She
was quite drunk when she suddenly tipped her barstool for-
ward and leaned into my mouth, saying she just wanted to
know what it felt like.
So what did it feel like, I wanted to know.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Confirmation.”
I must have looked hurt. “Oh, Manny,” she said, stroking
my cheek. “It’s me, not you.”
As if to reassure me, she told me the story of losing her vir-
ginity. The man was a widower, though he wasn’t that old: his
wife had died of botulism from a crab cake the year before. He
was a cousin of the woman Marta lived with in New Brunswick “Dance Me to the End of Love” – Leonard Cohen (1984)

74 illustration: shawn kuruneru

 The Principles of Exile
We spend every evening twisting on the same stools in the same bar, inventing the rest of
our lives. She knows the Australian desert chapter so well it is as if it happened to her.
erhaps the world is at its most awful when you are four-
P teen years old and effectively orphaned, sacrificed for the
sake of some higher principle that you have trouble enough
understanding even when it doesn’t translate into having
your face mashed into the dirt by five bullies high on glue.
I remember two of them standing on my shoulders while
Tammy tugged down my trousers and laughed at the sight of
me. “Look at his sagging grundies! He’s got no bum!
Oh my god, he’s got no bum!” she kept shrieking.
“What about a clacker?” one of them said.
“Yeah, see if you can find his clacker, Tammy.
Give it a burl. Or maybe he shits out his mouth.”
Two of them wrenched my legs apart and pinned
them down. They took turns jabbing at me with a
stick. I was already thousands of miles away from home; the
only place left was beyond Earth, freed from gravity.
It was Tammy who went deep.
It was Trudy who saw the blood on the sheets the follow-
ing morning and said: “I told you I don’t want any trouble.
I have enough problems as it is.”
It was Tommy who cried.
It was Mathias who said: “I don’t think he can stay here
anymore.”
It was my mother who commented that I looked good, I’d
lost weight, become a man.
She had me sit for a photograph shortly after arriving
home. And my mother chooses to display this photo above
all others on the piano next to Sarkis — me looking like some
thin, undomesticated shaft of wheat; Sarkis looking like a
shining, plump stuffed olive.
arta and I make a ritual out of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
M We spend every evening twisting on the same stools in
the same bar, inventing the rest of our lives. She knows the
Australian desert chapter so well it is as if it happened to her
in New Brunswick. She knows everything I know about the
two women I have craved in adulthood, including the sad
fact that I have never found the courage to do anything more
than pay for their coffee. She knows me so well she will never
approach me unexpectedly from behind, never touch my
back, or make reference to my appearance.
It was only last year that I told her about Isabel. When I re-
turned from Australia, Isabel, unexpectedly, had been there;
she said she had been waiting all year. And this should have
meant something — I had never been terribly popular and
here was one of the prettiest girls in the entire school reserv-
ing herself for me. It should have meant even more than that:
someone had missed me, felt my absence, kept a place. But
I just couldn’t respond. I didn’t feel anything. Isabel started
weeping and I sat there stunned, in the wake of her naked
declaration, unable to reach out or say anything.
Isabel refused to speak to me for the rest of the year.
Finally, desperately, at the beginning of the summer holi-
days, I found myself at the door to her flat. When she opened
illustration: stephen appleby - barr
the door, I reached out and fumbled with the front of her
blouse — I grabbed her breast, in lieu of speaking.
“What is wrong with you? ” she screamed. “Get your
hands off me!”
And I remember thinking: but I thought this was what
you wanted.
“You poor, poor darling,” Marta had said, her knees knock-
ing against mine. She reached out and touched my
cheek, then leaned in and kissed me again, lemon-
flavoured, on the mouth. She took my hand and
raised it to her breast.
“Marta, don’t,” I said, grabbing her forearms and
pushing her back. “It doesn’t work that way.”
She bit her lip as she smiled and said: “Well, ac-
tually, Manny? I have an ulterior motive.”
I have always assumed it was just that Sarkis didn’t know
about the legions of children who were torn up by the roots
and forced to live out a year, if not an eternity, in unearthed
desperation. I have always assumed that until tonight. But
now the lentils are burnt. As is the fish. And my mother is
in a collapse of tears.
“How could he not call us?” she says, flipping the lid of
the garbage can. “How could someone not call us? I cooked
all this food.”
The fish slides off the plate. She tips over the pot of len-
tils. My mother’s mascara travels the rivulets of her face.
She says she’s going to bed.
My father has fallen asleep in his chair in the library.
In the silence of the kitchen I pour myself a brandy, lean back
against the kitchen counter, and pick up the phone.
Marta does not bother with hello. “So? Is he still there?”
“He didn’t show up, Marta.”
“What?” I can hear her whole body subsiding, can picture
the dramatic slump of her shoulders.
“I know. Apparently he decided he was tired and went
back to his hotel.”
“I cannot believe it,” she says.
“He didn’t even call.”
“How difficult is it to call? How hard is it to say thank you?
Or sorry, for that matter.”
I am silent. I never expected thank you. Or sorry. If I ex-
pected anything, I suppose it was more like an eyelash, a
tiny renewable piece of self, given freely to another; a simple
gesture that can facilitate the fragile restoration of a web.
“At a minimum,” says Marta, emphasizing each syllable.
Or the critical piece that allows for the creation of an entire-
ly new web, one in which the donor is inextricably a part.
“I thought I might come for a visit,” I say.
“Really? Wonderful.”
—
“A serious visit. Perhaps for a month.”
Kiss me again, Marta, I will say to her. Kiss me again. 
To listen to a podcast featuring Camilla Gibb at the 2007 Congress
of the Humanities and Social Sciences, visit walrusmagazine.com.
75
Away from cities and crowds and machines,
On a sea of tranquility, closer than you ever imagined,
For a list of outfitters offering
You come to understand exactly why, wildlife encounters in Nunavut go
People come to, and fall in love with, Nunavut. to www.NunavutTourism.com.
and order your free Nunavut
Enjoy! Travel Planner!
 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7

drama

big
t i c k e t
by Jim Garrard

the characters

Dave ................................................. Tow truck operator

Annie ............................................................... Realtor
Billy .................................................................... Biker
For a complete list of characters and the full text of Big Ticket,
visit walrusmagazine.com/bigticket.

77
 t h e wa l r u s

Early evening. A grimy auto-pound office — in a trailer. dave: Is that an invitation?

Ambient light through barred windows. Traffic noise
from expressway overhead. City sounds, not very
far off.
dave, a big roughneck tow truck operator in biker
gear, in his early thirties, is negotiating with annie,
stylishly dressed, about the same age. They appear to
be strangers.
Annie claims she wants to pay Dave to abduct and
terrify her husband. Dave proposes to bring the
husband to the auto pound and lock him up in a
chain-link cage used for safe storage.
annie: Depends on how I’m feeling.
dave: How are you feeling?
annie: I’m feeling like I’m here with an outlaw, Dave,
a real tough customer. He’s got me at his mercy. He
could do anything to me.
dave: I’m probably not as tough as I look.
annie: I bet. C’mon in, why don’t you?
He hesitates.

Annie explores the interior of the cage. Dave watches. annie (as if to a dog): C’mon. C’mon. Be a good boy.
She’s trying to be seductive. He unlocks the gate and goes in. It’s awkward for him.
annie: So what’s all this going to cost me? There’s not much room inside.

dave: If I don’t have to break nothin’, five hundred bucks. annie: Let me help you out of those dirty, dirty clothes.

annie: That’s pretty reasonable. dave: You don’t waste any time, do you?

dave: This kind of thing’s just a sideline for me. Helps She removes his leather jacket, unbuttons his shirt,
me relax. Besides, a pretty woman like you shouldn’t pulls off his boots, takes off his pants. This takes
have to put up with assholes. a while.

annie: That’s very sweet of you to say, Dave. Lock the She steps outside the cage and piles his clothing on a
door. chair. She pushes the door of the cage shut and locks it,
removes Dave’s keys, leaving him locked inside in his
dave: What for? underwear. She opens a plastic bottle of water.
annie: Lock me in. Just for a minute. I want to know annie: How you feeling now? Kinda creepy don’t you
what it feels like to be incarcerated. think?
dave: You’re the customer. dave: I don’t really go for this kind of shit.
He locks her inside. annie: How you feeling though? Kinda sexy?
annie: Hmmn. This is pretty exciting. dave: I’ll feel a whole lot sexier when you unlock that
door and get your pretty little ass back in here.
dave: How so?
annie: You’re so pathetic.
annie: It’s scary really. You hear the lock click and you
feel so helpless. You ever bring women here? dave: I’m what?
dave: I brought you, didn’t I?
annie: I mean for pleasure. You ever lock any women
up in here?
dave: We had a woman one time left her kid in her
car at rush hour in a tow-away zone with the engine
running. Cops took the kid. We took the car. She came
down here and bit my dispatcher on the elbow. We
locked her up pretty good.
annie: You ever bring any women in here, after hours?
Women that don’t really want to be here? You know,
like with you and the cops? After hours? Any cozy
stuff like that?
dave: You ask a lot of questions. What are you—a
detective?
Annie laughs. So does Dave.
annie: Although there’s not a lot of room in here. For
stuff.
The atmosphere thickens a little.
annie: Of course, it doesn’t have to take a lot of room. “Peach Trees” – Rufus Wainwright (2004)

78 illustration: ryan waller

 B i g Ti c k e t
annie: Pathetic. Look at you. Big tough guy in his
underwear. I wonder what your cop buddies are going
to think about that.
dave: Okay, so I’m pathetic. I’m at your mercy. I get it.
Now let me out of here.
annie: That’ll be the frosty Friday.
dave: Look. This isn’t all that funny.
annie: Get used to it. You’re gonna be in there for
quite a long time.
dave: Don’t be stupid. What about your husband?
annie: I don’t have a husband.
dave: Then what’s this all about? What did I do?
annie: You towed my fucking car away, Dave. That’s
the problem.
She throws the rest of her water in his face. Dave is
shocked into silence. It takes him a moment to respond.
dave: You . . . lying . . . little . . . pig.
Like a gorilla, he shakes the cage violently. He gives up
and presses his face hard against the fencing.
dave (roaring): You do all this because you think I
towed your fucking car away?
annie: I know you did. I know it was you. I saw you. It
wasn’t the first time.
dave: If you value your life — at all — you better let me
out of this cage right now.
annie: I’ve had about a thousand parking tickets, Dave.
Almost none of them made any sense to me. Five times
I had my car towed away. Three of those times this
disgusting place is where I had to come to get it back.
dave: Look. This is sick. Give me my clothes back and
let me out of this fucking cage.
annie: Last time I was towed it was you. I was parked
outside a hospital — getting a biopsy for Christ’s sake!
I was five minutes late getting back and you had me
hooked up already. You and your wormy little prick
partner parking cop were standing there waiting for
the meter to expire. I begged you, I begged you both,
to please let me have my car back. No, you said; it was
too late.
dave: Unlock the door, bitch, or die.
annie: You’re a vampire. You, the cops, the parking
cops, the politicians — all the people in this
racket — you’re all vampires.
Dave shakes the fence violently. Annie holds back
a sob.
annie: My little boy’s birthday cake was in that car! I
missed his party! My little boy had his birthday party
with no cake. Do you know what that means? Weren’t
you ever a little boy? What in hell happened to you?
dave: This is forcible confinement, lady. It’s the same
as kidnapping. You’ll go to jail.
79
annie: You were both so rude. You laughed and drove
away and left me standing on the sidewalk.
dave: You’ll go to jail!
annie: I don’t care.
dave: I will kill you. I’m not kidding.
annie: So you keep saying, Dave, but I . . . don’t . . .
care. The only thing I do care about is making you
suffer. Not just for me, but for all the other thousands
of people you leech off. I’m going to make you an
example. So all the other bottom-feeders in your
business get to see what happens when good people
get pushed too far.
dave: Look. Annie. You’re upset. I can see that. Maybe
I made a mistake. But I do think you’re overreacting
a bit. I was just doing my job. It’s against the law
to park in prohibited areas. You’re not being
reasonable.
She comes closer.
annie: How about I park something in one of your
prohibited areas?
dave: What makes you so sure you’ve got the right guy?
annie: I saw you with my own eyes. Plus. . .
She yanks a notebook from her purse.
annie (reading): “David Mason Markus.” Is that not
you? “Proprietor, Dave’s Towing and Auto Pound.”
Is that not you? “acsm 833.” Is that not the licence
number on your truck? “Cindy.” Is that not the
name you’ve got painted right underneath your hood
ornament? “Moose.” Is that not what your friends and
former fellow inmates call you? “Six feet, two inches.
Two hundred and ten pounds, brown hair, brown eyes.
Birthmark, left elbow. Fire-breathing dragon tattoo,
right bicep.” Is that not you? “Three months less a day
in the Brampton Correctional Facility for assaulting
your high school teacher.” Do you not recognize that
person . . . Moose?
He slumps down, head in hands.
dave: Okay, it was me. I apologize. Now why don’t you
just forget about all that shit and get back in here so I
can take you some places you’ve never been before.
annie: What kind of places? What do you mean by
that? What kind of places have I never been before?
dave: I think you know.
annie: No, I don’t know. What kind of places would
you take me to where I’ve never been before — exactly?
Are we talking tongue here?
dave: I’m thinking about forgetting about all this
bullshit and you and me just get it on. You’ll like it.
It’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what this is really
all about?
annie: I honestly can’t believe what kind of pathetic
weasel you are.
dave: You’re getting off on this.
 t h e wa l r u s
annie: In what way are you defective? How is it that
you can’t even begin to understand the nature of the
evil you inflict on the world? You’re an ape. You’re
less than an ape. I don’t want to live in a world with
people like you in it.
dave: Okay, okay, I get it. You’re not that kind of chick.
annie: None of us is that kind of chick, Dave.
dave: You think I’m a bad person.
annie: Of course I do! You descend on people at
random. Like Robin Hood in reverse. You take from
the innocent and give to the government. Do you have
any idea how much harm the government can do with
that much money?
Pause.
dave: You’re not being very fair. You don’t know me.
I breathe. I eat. I sleep. Just like you. I have a kid. I
have a dog. I like to watch TV. I go for walks in the
woods. Where in fuck do you get off calling me stupid,
criticizing my life? You don’t even know who I am.
annie: Do all your trucks have names?
dave: Most of them.
annie: Who’s Cindy? Anybody?
dave: I knew her in high school.
annie: Was she your first?
dave: I never got into her pants, if that’s what you
mean. She was kind of like a Salvation Army chick —
hot, like, but not hot for me. I liked her but I don’t
think she really knew that. I was pretty shy back then.
annie: Do you think about her?
dave: I do sometimes.
annie: And you named a truck after her?
dave: Yeah.
annie: Do you have any idea how idiotic that seems
to me?
She goes out. Dogs bark. Truck door slams shut.
She returns, lugging a can of gas.
annie: This is gasoline. Right? She holds up a lighter.
This is a lighter. Right? Lights it. You’re locked up. You
can’t get out. And you deserve to die. Right?
dave: Look, Annie, I don’t deserve to die. There are all
kinds of people worse than me out there.
annie: Hah!
dave: Really. Really, I don’t. I don’t go looking for
trouble. I’ve got troubles of my own. You ask me to do
a job for you; I agree to help you out. And this is how
you thank me. But that’s okay. Probably we’re never
going to see eye-to-eye on this, Annie. I mean maybe
in your case we made a mistake. Christ, nobody’s
perfect. Why don’t we just agree to disagree? Why
don’t I just write you a nice little cheque to cover your
expenses and we’ll let it go at that, no hard feelings.
80
annie: It took me two hours the first time to track
down my car. Apparently it’s nobody’s job to tell
people where their cars have gone. Then I had to
make my way down to this wasteland, where there
aren’t even any sidewalks, let alone any public
transportation. I mean, what kind of sadistic bastard
makes these arrangements? Pay you. Pay the cops.
Get leered at by louts. Get grunted at by some greasy,
fat, unpleasant excuse for a woman you pay to
stand behind that counter and treat people like shit.
That’s your real business, isn’t it Dave? You get rich
humiliating people at their own expense. Well, we’ll
just see about that.
She splashes a little gasoline on the floor around the
cage. Dave is agitated.
dave: Now look, let’s not get too carried away here.
You’re putting our lives at risk here. You don’t really
want to do that.
annie: Oh, but I do.
Pause. Annie fiddles with the office phone, switching
on the speaker phone. Brief, loud dial tone. She
activates the yard intercom. Her voice booms
outside in the yard.
annie: Moooooooooooose! Mooooose Markus is an
asshole. Moose Markus is a total asshole. (She laughs
and switches off the intercom.) This is fun. You want to
call somebody? On the phone?
dave: Like who?
annie: Anybody you want. Maybe get a buddy to come
down and help you out. Call the police if you feel like it.
dave: You serious?
annie: Sure I am.
dave: I can’t reach the phone.
Annie activates the speaker phone again. Loud dial tone.
annie: Gimme a number. I’ll dial it for you.
dave: 972-9476?
She dials. Several rings. Voice of Billy over the speaker
phone.
billy: Hello.
dave (shouting across the room): Billy, it’s Dave. I’m in
a bit of a jam, down at the yard. I was wondering if you
could come down and help me straighten things out.
billy: What kind of a jam?
dave: It’s kind of hard to explain. There’s a woman
here. She’s not too happy. She’s talking about torching
the place.
billy: Give her a good smack in the head.
Annie fiddles with the surveillance monitor. Turns it on.
dave: It’s not that simple, Billy. She’s kinda got the
jump on me.
Gate and yard outside appear on monitor.
 B i g Ti c k e t
Annie switches to the inside camera. She looks at
herself and Dave on the monitor. Waves her arms to
check that she’s seeing herself live.
billy: You sound like you’re down a well.
dave: I’m in the cooler, Billy. She’s got me locked in
the cooler. She’s got a can of gasoline.
annie: He’s not kidding, Billy. Come on down and
have a look for yourself. Maybe bring a little barbecue
sauce.
dave: She’s nuts, Billy.
billy: Has she got a gun?
dave: I don’t think so. Just a goddamn can of gas.
She’s a psycho.
billy: How’d she get you into the cooler?
dave: Billy, for fuck’s sake! It’s a long story. Just come
on down here with a couple of the guys and talk some
sense into this woman. Before it’s too late.
billy: I don’t know, man, we got the game on.
annie: He’s pissing his pants, Billy. You better get
down here. Bring a couple of the guys. And a camera.
billy: Hey, lady, be cool okay? Okay, we’ll be there in
about fifteen minutes. Get this all sorted out.
Dial tone. Annie disconnects. Pause.
annie: You called me a psycho.
dave: You don’t want to be here when Billy gets here.
You think I’m a rough customer. Wait ’til you meet
Billy.
annie: What’s Billy gonna do? If he’s anything like
you he’s probably a pussy too.
dave: He’s a killer.
“Because the Night” – Patti Smith (1978)
illustration: e. f. richardson
annie: You think he might kill me.
dave: Maybe worse.
annie: How’s he gonna get in?
dave: Sledgehammer would be my guess. You better
fuck off out of here before he arrives.
annie: How’s he going to get past the cops?
dave: What cops?
annie: If you weren’t so stupid you could have got
yourself out of this with just a spanking . . . . Excuse
me just a moment. Psycho Girl will . . . be . . . right . . .
back.
She goes outside with the gas can. The guard dogs bark
up a storm. After a minute, she returns, with the nearly
empty can.
dave: What?
annie: Looks like Cindy’s really got the hots for you
now. Finally. In fact, she’s burning up, hotter than
she’s ever, ever been before, hotter than a firecracker.
dave: What do you mean?
annie: Cindy’s on fire for you!
dave: What do you mean? What’d you do?
annie: All I did was light the match. You supplied the
motivation.
dave: For what?
annie: I set fire to your truck.
dave: I don’t think so. Even you’re not that nuts.
annie: Just look. Look. See for yourself.
Flicker of flames seen through window. She goes close
to him.
annie: Look me right in the eye. Your . . . truck . . . is . . .
on . . . fire. I . . . set . . . fire . . . to . . . your . . . truck.
He listens, cranes his neck to see out the window.
The flames flicker brighter. Crackling can be heard.
dave: You crazy bitch, it’s true! My truck! Christ
Almighty Jesus! My truck! (He shakes the fence
violently.) Let me out. I got to put the fire out, I got to
stop it. Let me out. Jesus!
Annie doesn’t move or speak. Dave starts to cry a little.
dave: Please, Annie, I got to get out there. I’m sorry for
any bad things I may have done to you. Please. Please.
I live in that truck. That truck is my life.
Sirens in the distance, approaching.
annie: Funny, isn’t it, when the shoe is on the other
foot?
to find out what happens when the
media and the mayor get involved, and
dave and annie get on closer terms,
visit walrusmagazine.com/bigticket.
81
 j uly /au g u s t 2 0 0 7

food

S ufi
G our met
Turkey’s most respected food writer unites cuisine and poetry

by Marcello Di Cintio
photography by Lana Šlezić

evlana, the thirteenth-century lies shrouded in green cloth embroi- instead of the headscarves most wom-

M mystic and poet, never knew dered with gold tulips. There is a green en in Konya wear, and it makes her look
the taste of a tomato. I know turban on the head of the stone — typical regal. She is royalty, in a way. Nevin is
this because Nevin Halıcı told me, and for the graves of Mevlevi Sufis. Nevin one of Turkey’s most respected food
these are the sorts of things she knows. tells me that women suffering from writers and a leading authority on trad-
She also told me that the sweetest fevers come to pray here sometimes. itional Turkish cuisine. She consults
peaches in Turkey grow in Bursa and They hope that “he who plays with fire” with chefs at some of the country’s top
that the honey from Kars is particularly can coax their own fire away. Most vis- restaurants and hotels, holds a Ph.D.
fine. She told me that mothers in Afyon itors, though, come for the salt. There in food sciences, and has authored
used to lull their babies to sleep with is a tray of white salt in the corner of ten books.
poppy seed paste, that Turks in Konya the mausoleum. The juxtaposition of I first learned of Nevin, and of Ateş-
were drinking coffee three centuries be- the salt and the great chef is a holy one, baz Veli, when I came across Nevin’s
fore it arrived in Istanbul, and that the and pilgrims believe that taking a pinch most recent cookbook, Sufi Cuisine. In
best yufka bread is so thin you can read from here to their own kitchens will it, Nevin recounts the history of Mev-
a newspaper through it. ensure good health and enhance their lana, known better in the West as Rumi,
“Mevlana also never ate peppers,” own cooking. introduces readers to Ateş-baz, and ex-
Nevin says from the backseat of her I spoon some of the salt into a bag plains the kitchen rituals of the Mevlevi
brother’s car. “Tomatoes and peppers and tuck it into my pocket, then join dervishes. Most of the book, though,
were not popular in Anatolia at that Nevin outside the tomb. She is speak- is made up of recipes for dishes men-
time.” Nevin’s brother pilots the car ing with the woman who lives in the tioned in Mevlana’s poetry: stewed
into Meram, a suburb of Konya, in cen- adjoining house and who is Ateş-baz’s quince, sour spinach, sweet buttery
tral Turkey. We follow a dirt road along- caretaker. Nevin asks if she can unlock soup. The result is a remarkable work
side a field until we reach the tomb of the tomb’s lower chamber so we can see that is at once a cookbook, a book of an-
Ateş-baz Veli, a Sufi saint and Mevla- the actual ground under which the Sufi cient verse, and a treatise on the spiri-
na’s beloved chef. chef is buried, but the woman shakes tual importance of food and eating.
Nevin eases herself out of the car, her head. “She is old,” Nevin explains, Food was one of Mevlana’s favourite
smoothes down her jacket with her “and she can’t find the key.” sources for metaphors. He wrote that his
palms, and asks for my camera. “I will On the way back to the centre of life could be summed up in the words
take a picture of you beside the famous town, Nevin says, “Konya has produced “I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned.”
chef,” she says. I smile, but Nevin has two famous chefs. The first is Ateş-baz. The references to food and drink that
trouble with my digital camera, leaning Do you know the other? ” fill his poetry are allusions to higher,
too far back to see the viewscreen, the I look back at her. She is smiling. “Is more philosophical ideals. Those who
same way my mother does. it you? ” I ask. have not yet turned toward God are
We climb the stone steps of the mau- Nevin tilts her head back to laugh, unripe fruit. A man aroused by faith
soleum. “The bricks are the colour of and sunlight flashes from a chip in her is a chickpea dancing in a boiling pot
fire,” Nevin says. “ ‘Ateş-baz Veli’ means bifocals. “You are correct! It makes me or a fish flipping in a pan. God’s grace
‘he who plays with fire.’ ” I follow her happy that you say that!” is sweet almond helva. For Mevlana, for
inside the chamber, where a gravestone Nevin wears a tight, neat turban the dervishes that follow his path and,

83
 t h e wa l r u s
indeed, for Nevin, the language of food
is the language of faith.
Eventually your beloved becomes your
bread and your water, your lighting can-
dle and your beauty, your meze and
your wine.
told the maitre’d at Kösk Konya Mut-
I fagı I was there to meet Nevin Halıcı.
He led me to a second-floor dining room
with a wood-planked roof and tables
laid out with gold linen. Nevin was
waiting for me with her brother and
two sisters. She stood to shake my hand
and invited me to sit. “I will put you
on a program to learn about the food
of Konya. Tonight we will have Konya
‘home food,’ ” she said, and signalled for
the waiter that we were ready to eat.
The meal began with a typical Turkish
salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and on-
ions alongside paper-thin yufka bread.
Then came a bowl of mantı, a sort of
Turkish ravioli made of pasta so deli-
cate it could hardly contain the lumps
of ground meat. This was sprinkled
with dried mint and drizzled with yo-
gourt and burnt butter. I told Nevin it
was the best mantı I’d ever had. She nod-


up at them. The boys relayed her in-
structions to the kitchen, brought a lit-
tle more of whatever Nevin asked for,
and cleared away the plates and silver-
ware between each course. I was relieved
when one of the servers came to take
away our helva — I had eaten far too
much — but then the man returned bear-
ing a bowl of tart tomato soup with
dried okra. “Something sour should
always follow something sweet,” Nev-
in explained. “It helps get you ready for
the next menu.”
Apparently we were not done. Once
we finished the soup, our waiter set
down a platter of grape leaves stuffed
with minced meat and rice. Called sarma,
they were much shorter than the stuff-
ed grape leaves I’d had elsewhere. Nevin
told me of an archaic belief that a woman
who makes her sarma too long is not
virtuous. “If a woman makes her sarma
longer than the tip of her finger, her hus-
band can send her back to her father’s
house.” Then we had a second dessert
of flaky Konya-style baklava. The arriv-
al of Turkish coffee signalled that the
meal was finally, mercifully, finished.
The sequence of courses — savoury
dishes followed by something sweet,
something sour, then another series of

ded. “That is because a woman cooked savouries — was a typical Konya ban-
it. Women cook from their heart.” quet menu. The whole process could

 


A dish of sweet white onions stewed
in pomegranate syrup came next, then
a bowl of creamy yogourt. Grilled lamb
be repeated up to six times. I assumed
that such banquets were reserved only
for grand occasions such as weddings,
cubes on puréed eggplant, tomato, and but Nevin shook her head. “Just receiv-
76 Madrona Dr. green pepper followed. By the time ing a guest is special occasion enough.
Galiano Island dessert came, a helva made with fresh “There is another tradition. A host
British Columbia cream, I could hardly eat anymore. Nevin must give her guest a gift at the end of
Canada V0N 1P0
(250) 539-3340 pushed the plate of helva toward me. a meal. It is for ‘tooth rent.’ I borrowed
“You are young,” she said. “You can eat.” your teeth to eat this meal so I must
ltrent@uniserve.com Because I am Canadian, Nevin told pay rent.” She pulled a carved wooden
me about her childhood dream of visit- spoon from her purse and handed it to
ing Niagara Falls, but mostly we talked me. “In Ottoman times, they used to put
about food. She told me about her fa- a golden chickpea in the pilaf. You only
vourite restaurants in Istanbul, like Hacı get a spoon.” She laughed. Only my
Abdullah, whose chefs have a hundred offer to pay for the meal chased away
Ottoman-era recipes in their arsenal. her smile. She would not accept a dime.
When I showed her a picture of my wife,
she said, “You are lucky to have such
Enough, be silent, words cannot take the
a beautiful wife. You should wake up
place of opinions, as pomegranates and
each morning and make her breakfast.”
apples cannot take the place of plums.
For Nevin, cooking is the essential ex-
pression of love.
Nevin had the army of blue-shirted iltered sunlight drifts through the
young waiters at her command; they
sprang to our table whenever she glanced
F skylights of the covered market.
Below, women lift white grapes from

84

wooden crates, crouch over plastic tubs
of tiny cucumbers, and scoop crimson
tomato paste into clear plastic bags.
Strings of dried eggplants and red pep-
pers hang over shop doorways, ready
to be rehydrated and stuffed with rice
and mince. Garlands of tiny dried okra
seem suited to drape on a Christmas
tree. Lemon slices and slender green
chilies decorate vats of wrinkled black
olives. There are mounds of green and
black figs. Fruit vendors split open yel-
low-skinned plums to show the pink
flesh inside.
Nevin’s brother dropped us at the
Kadınlar Pazarı, formerly the Ladies’
Market, where Konya women used to
sell the produce from their home gar-
dens. Larger producers dominate the
market these days, and the vendors are
mostly men. Still, this is Nevin’s favour-
ite place to shop in Konya. She is a ce-
lebrity here. The merchants fall over
themselves to offer us tart pickles and
slices of dried beef pastırma. They wave
at her to come and try their cheese. One
man gives us a handful of peanuts as if
we’d never seen such things before.
I follow Nevin to her favourite cheese
vendor. The shopkeeper invites me to
dip my bare fingers into a ceramic vat of
soft cheese. I scoop out a tiny smear on
my fingernail, but the man is not sat-
isfied until I sink two fingers into the
cheese down to my second knuckle,
and lift a great glob into my mouth.
Next, at his urging, I dip my fingers into
a vat of whipped butter, then break
off a chunk of crumbly cheese that is
furry with black-blue mould. I spot
tulum, my favourite Turkish cheese,
still robed in the goat skins in which
it cures. The hairy masses sit in glass-
fronted cases under anemic fluorescent
light, like freakish exhibits in a side-
show museum.
In a nearby shop, a display case
holds a heap of severed sheep heads,
still bloody, destined for soup caul-
drons. Nevin pauses and points at the
gory pile. “All of this would be gone if
we joined Europe,” she sighs, speaking
of the strict regulations that will come
into force if Turkey ever completes its
marathon to European Union member-
ship. “It is not fair. They eat haggis in
Britain. Why can’t we eat these?” She
shakes her head, and I wonder what
Food
the European health officials would
think of my licked-finger sampling at
the cheese shop.
Almond helva fashioned from His wal-
nuts, His almonds, His sugar, does not
only sweeten my palate, but floods my
vision with light.
A fterwards, Nevin and I make our
way to Cemo Restaurant for etliek-
mek, another Konya specialty. Inside,
a trio of chefs stand guard in front of a
wood-burning oven. Their oddly femi-
nine red-and-pink aprons seem at odds
with their identical moustaches. Nev-
in waves at them — she knows them
all — and they nod respectfully back at
her. The proprietor rushes over to greet
Nevin and leads us to a table. Nevin in-
sists I take a chair facing the oven and
places an order. I stretch my neck to
watch as the bakers roll out lengths
of dough, spread them with toppings,
then slide them into the oven next to a
heap of roasting green chilies.
Our first dish arrives in minutes: a
slab of thin and crispy bread dough,
shining with melted butter, and longer
than my arm. It is covered with sea-
soned minced lamb and a smear of to-
matoes. The waiter brings us a plate of
fresh parsley, sliced tomatoes, lemon
wedges, onions dusted with sumac, and
some of those scorched chilies. Nev-
in shows me how to roll the fresh top-
pings into the steaming dough, squirt
with lemon, and eat with my hands.
My fingertips become black from the
charred dough and greasy from the
butter.
A waiter drops another arm’s length
of freshly baked bread; this one is cov-
ered with cheese. We are barely through
it when a third arrives with just minced
meat. Then a fourth with larger cubes
of chewy, aromatic lamb.
The waiter calls this last dish mevla-
na pide, and Nevin wags her finger at
him. “It is not mevlana pide. There is
no such thing. It is called Konya böregi.”
The server nods an apology and backs
away from the table. Nevin tells me she
abhors how Mevlana’s name is exploit-
ed to appeal to the tourists who come
to Konya to visit his tomb. “There is
a foundation in Konya that wants to
85
 t h e wa l r u s
change this. It is not good that his name
is on everything. Travel agencies. Car
repair shops. Beauty salons. It shows
no respect.”
I hold up the last piece of Konya bö-
ONLINE regi. “But wasn’t this Mevlana’s favour-
ite food?” I joke.
Now I get the finger wag. “No. His
favourite food was helva. Almond hel-
! va.” Nevin grins. It makes her happy
NEWS that she knows such things.
THE WALRUS LED Having tried all the variations of
THE FIELD WITH etliekmek on Cemo’s menu, it is time
51 NATIONAL MAGAZINE to go. The gluttony has rendered me
nearly immobile, but I lug myself out
AWARD NOMINATIONS of my chair and follow Nevin into the
INCLUDING parking lot. “The day after tomorrow
MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR. you will come to my house for break-
fast,” she says. (I love how invitations in
FOR THE FULL LIST OF the Middle East are so often expressed
AWARDS WON, VISIT as prophesies.) “I will prepare for you
dishes from all seven regions of Tur-
walrusmagazine.com/
key. But tomorrow you will go out on
awards your own. You will find firin kebab. It
is another specialty of Konya. Be sure
to eat with your hands; you will fly.
! And, of course, you will go to Mevla-
WALRUSPRIME na’s tomb.”
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Aş te -baz Veli was embarrassed that
he’d burned his toe. It wasn’t the
burn itself that bothered him. After all,
you could expect a chef, especially “one
who plays with fire,” to earn the occa-
sional blister. And it wasn’t the unlike-
! ly location of the burn that fazed him.
MEDIACENTRE It was the fact that his burned toe was
PODCASTS evidence of a brief lapse of faith.
GALLERIES Earlier that day, Ateş-baz complained
to Mevlana, his friend and master, that
THE WALRUS BLOG there was no wood left to fuel the stove.
AND MORE Mevlana told the chef to place his feet
walrusmagazine.com/ below the stove. When Ateş-baz did
mediacentre this, a flame burst from his toes and
set the pot boiling, but because he had
doubts about this strange miracle, his
left big toe burned. Mevlana heard
YOUR MAGAZINE. about Ateş-baz’s injury and scolded
ONLINE. his apparent lack of conviction. Ateş-
baz tried to hide his scorched left digit
WALRUSMAGAZINE.COM
by covering it with his right foot.
Since that day, when Mevlevi der-
86
vishes engage in the centuries-old whirl-
ing ritual for which they are famous,
they begin by placing their right big
toe over their left. This is a reminder
of Ateş-baz Veli and that odd day in
the kitchen.
I obeyed Nevin’s instructions and
made my way to Mevlana’s tomb. The
shrine is part of a grand museum com-
plex built out of a thirteenth-century
dervish lodge, or tariqat. I paid my ad-
mission fee, plucked plastic shower
caps from a bin in front of the entrance
to the shrine, stretched them over my
shoes, and entered the complex where
the great poet tries to rest amid the
camera flashes. Mevlana’s gravestone
is enormous and topped with two green
turbans. Pillars rise above him to sup-
port a dome made of carved and paint-
ed wood. Every surface of the shrine is
softly lit and adorned with verses of his
poetry written in gold.
I spent only a moment there among
the throngs — the schoolchildren, the
quietly praying Turks, and the Western
New Agers who’ve adopted Mevlevi
Sufism as the next fashionable mysti-
cism — before leaving the shrine for
another sort of pilgrimage. I found the
ancient dervish kitchen in a different
part of the museum. For Mevlevi Sufis,
the kitchen was a sacred place and
heart of the tariqat. Here, everyday
labours were elevated to a sort of medi-
tation. The operation of the kitchen was
divided into eighteen precise duties,
which were assigned to individual aco-
lytes. The Master of the Cupboard was
in charge of cleaning the cupboards and
maintaining the utensils within. This
was his only job. The Coffee Grinder
only ground coffee. The Purchaser of
Provisions did the daily shopping. He
hung a symbolic set of tongs, called
pazarci tongs, from his belt. The tongs
identified him as a Mevlevi Sufi to the
market vendors and they would, in
theory, sell him goods at a lower price.
Everyone laboured under the super-
vision of the Chief of the Kitchen and
Master of Ceremonies, the spiritual de-
scendant of Ateş-baz Veli.
Aspirants to the Mevlevi order would
begin their Sufi training in a small al-
cove, called a saka postu, on the left side
of the kitchen’s entrance. They would
sit there for three days in silence and
 Food

observe the work of the dervishes. ( The
saka postu in the museum’s kitchen is
still intact and occupied by a kneeling
mannequin.) After his three days of ob-
servation, the dervish-to-be had to run
errands for eighteen days before begin-
ning his formal apprenticeship under
the Keeper of the Cauldron, the kitch-
en’s second-in-command. This period
of repetitive labour and intense scru-
tiny would last 1,001 days. If an aspi-
rant survived the ordeal and showed
the sort of patience and endurance re-
quired of a Mevlevi dervish, he would
then become a member of the order.
I thought of Ateş-baz Veli’s toe as I
stood in the doorway of his kitchen. I
didn’t know for certain whether this
was the original kitchen where Ateş -
baz worked, or whether the stone stove
in the corner was once lit with the great
chef ’s flaming feet, but I decided to be-
lieve that it was. That is the pilgrim’s
prerogative.
a half-dozen kinds of cheese, sausages,
fresh herbs, and a dish of mountain
butter. “It is a little salty,” she says of
the butter. “Have it with my rose-petal
jam. It is Mevlana’s rose-petal jam.”
After breakfast, we relax in her living
room with tiny cups of Turkish coffee.
I mention that I visited Mevlana’s tomb
yesterday, and Nevin tells me that be-
fore the tariqats closed in the 1920s, the
dervishes used to give out food to the
community. “It wasn’t just for the poor.
It was for everybody. People would come
to take it because it came from a special
place. Mothers thought the food would
give their children intelligence because
it came from Mevlana.” The practice
ended before Nevin was born, but her
parents and older brother ate food from
the tariqat. “Because my mother ate, it
came to me, and that is why I am so
good now,” Nevin says, laughing.
We finish our coffee, licking away
the fine grounds that stain our lips, and
drive back out to Meram and Ateş-baz
Veli’s mausoleum. She enters the cham-
ber to say a prayer, just as she did a few
days before. She tells me that she visits
Ateş-baz all the time. I ask her what the
place means to her. She glances up at
the red stones. “I feel so much I cannot
say.” Tears rise in her eyes. “I feel he
gives his hand to me.” A
—
Visit walrusmagazine.com/more to get
a few of Nevin Halıcı’s recipes.

What a kiss, what a kiss, neither hel-

va nor samsa baklava are as sweet; it
even drew milk gushing from a stone;
dig not, for the spade has not the power
for that.

n Ateş-baz’s day, a visitor wouldn’t

I have dared to enter such holy environs
without an invitation. The kitchen had a
soul that shouldn’t be disturbed. Nevin
is much more welcoming. The next
morning, when I visit her, the soul of
her kitchen smells of melted butter. She
is making mirtoga. I watch as Nevin ro-

!2D2E2F2
tates a wooden spoon in a pan with flour
and butter. “You stir until it becomes
pink,” she says. “Then you add the eggs.”
She tips in a bowl of eggs with bril-
liant yellow yolks and stirs until they
set. “Now we can have our breakfast.”
Nevin, who is wearing a dressing gown
and furry white moccasins, brings the
mirtoga into the dining room. The table
has already been set with dishes from
all around Turkey. There are olives from
Antaky, shining with pomegranate syr-
up. Hazelnuts from the Black Sea and
poppy seed paste from the Aegean. The
mirtoga is a common breakfast dish in
eastern Turkey, Nevin says, and she
!"#$$%&'"()$*+,-."-/$*."((0$
urges me to drizzle my portion with
$11123''2(/2.-$4$56789$6:;<6;=>?$=@:$A(/'B-0#$C(-B?$!(,(/+(
Toros mountain honey. There are also

87
t h e wa l r u s

88

I n Par i s w ith Mav i s Ga l la n t,
Wr iter
Canada’s great exiled storyteller defies categories and remains an enigma
“M ’ excuser, monsieur. Je cherche
des livres par Mavis Gallant.
Où peux-je les trouver? ”
I asked the bookseller my question
and then braced for his answer. This
was an upmarket bookstore in Mont-
parnasse, after all, and I was fumbling
at the counter with Ontario schoolboy
French. If my prior encounters in Paris
were a reliable guide, my effort would
be met with a practised combination of
annoyance, pity, amusement, and with-
ering contempt. But this time proved dif-
ferent. The bookseller ignored how rudely
I had chewed through his native tongue.
“Pardon. Je sais que nous devons avoir
ses livres, mais nous ne les avons pas,” he
said in a sheepish, apologetic way, as if
he were acknowledging a failure of lit-
erary responsibility. He knew he ought
to have Mavis Gallant’s books on offer,
but he didn’t. I would expect an exchange
like this in a Canadian bookstore, but it
was surprising here, in Paris, in Gallant’s
own neighbourhood, in a city she’s been
living in for some five decades. I was
about to meet her at a restaurant across
the street and had ducked into the book-
store, curious to see where, not if, Gal-
lant was placed on the shelves. She had
chosen the restaurant and agreed to a
conversation on a Sunday afternoon
this past October through a correspon-
dence that had stretched over a year.
Though eighty-four, frail by her own
admission, and exhausted from par-
ticipating in two recently filmed docu-
mentaries about her life and work, she
eventually agreed to my request.
july/august 2007
literature
by Randy Boyagoda
photography by John Reeves
The Parisian bookseller’s response
was a familiar one. People don’t read
Mavis Gallant so much as know they
ought to. In preparing for the interview,
I canvassed well-read friends, academ-
ic colleagues, editors, and fellow writ-
ers about their responses to her work.
Her name elicited high regard in both
Canadian and American settings. But
across the board, there was compara-
tively little in the way of particulars. “I
love ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the
Street.’ It was in an anthology. I really
should read more of her stuff.” “I enjoy
her stories. They used to come in the
New Yorker all the time, years ago. But
I never knew what to make of them by
the end.” “Gallant? Oh yes, she’s one of
those writer’s writers . . .”
The last of these responses is perhaps
the most telling in terms of Gallant’s
standing in the contemporary literary
world. At a November 2006 event held in
her honour in New York, Russell Banks,
Michael Ondaatje, and Jhumpa Lahiri
lined up to offer high-minded appreci-
ations. Their speeches were uniformly
glowing, but gave off a proprietary ad-
miration — fellow members of the guild
paying respects to one of their betters. A
writer’s writer — the phrase implies that
only someone intimate with the art can
discern the full extent of the brilliance at
play. With a readership perhaps better
understood in terms of quality rather
than quantity, one wonders if the ef-
fect of Gallant winning so much esoter-
ic praise has been, in part, to close her
writing off from a wider readership.
89
n the Canadian context, at first glance
I it’s not the difficulty of reading Gal-
lant so much as the difficulty of locat-
ing her that has denied her a native
audience commensurate with her inter-
national standing. In fact, we’ve devised
a deviously effective storyline to make
sense of this writer, a storyline that gives
Gallant her due and also gives us a rea-
son to avoid reading her.
Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant
had a peripatetic childhood, marked
by time in both Canada and the United
States. As a young woman, she gave up
a career in journalism with the Mont-
real Standard and moved to Europe in
1950, submitting three short stories to
the New Yorker with the idea that if she
were to find success with this first set
of submissions, she’d commit to writ-
ing for good. She met with immediate
success, and through her recurrent ap-
pearances in the New Yorker and from
the short story collections that were
thereby assembled, Gallant developed
an impressive position in international
circles. She was, however, little known
or read in her native Canada before
the late 1970s, when Macmillan of Can-
ada and then McClelland and Stewart
started publishing her work. She won a
Governor General’s Award in 1981, and
thereafter received a series of awards
and honorary doctorates. Her early story
collections were reissued with admiring
introductions and afterwords by Ondaat-
je, Banks, and Mordecai Richler.
And yet, Gallant has never enjoyed
a standing in Canada comparable with
 t h e wa l r u s

the writer who shares her native ori- to the theme. She recalled a 2002 trip to
gins, chosen genre, and international Montreal — “her native city” as she said
renown — Alice Munro. The reason is with fondness. But this was a trip made
ostensibly geographic: Munro’s life and in ambivalence because her physical
work represent an emphatic and sym- mobility was limited; she went with the
pathetic commitment to verifiably Can- knowledge that she’d “never see the
adian concerns and settings, whereas city again.” Gallant didn’t linger in the
Gallant comes across, in personality and elegiac for very long when discussing
sensibility, as detached. As such, she her time in Montreal, or on any other
can only command so much attention matter. That’s because her personal
from a literary culture obsessed with feelings and geographies aren’t nearly
national textures, which often frame as important to her as her vocation.
the reading of native writers as a good Asked about how she’d like to be read
citizen’s patriotic duty. and remembered, she answered, “Gal-
Leaving aside the politics of who and lant, writer.” We could describe her
why Canada reads, Gallant can be a very with any number of adjectives — the
difficult writer to encounter. There are Paris-based-expatriate-Quebecer-anglo-
demanding moments in Munro’s fic- phone - Canadian - Protestant - female -
tion, to be sure, but these are mostly short - story-writer Mavis Gallant. But
borne of the intensities of emotion and doing so ignores Gallant’s primary am-
epiphanic insights that come of her bition, and the degree to which she has
genius for detailing the complex inner achieved it, in becoming simply, formid-
lives of ordinary people. Ultimately, ably, a writer.
though, Munro’s are comforting fic- In a preface to her 1996 collected
tions: the governing sensibility of her works, currently out of print in North
short stories is wise, melancholic, and America, Gallant describes literature’s
compassionate. Gallant, on the other purpose as evoking “a climate of the
hand, forces us to confront sterility, dis- mind.” Like much (and there’s not much)
placement, and alienation in her stor- of what Gallant has said when asked
ies, often without a final resolution of to comment on what she does, the de-
the human difficulties therein revealed. scription is terse and opaque. But then,
She brings a cold voice and a hard eye her stories speak for themselves, doing
to bear on the world, and has created exactly what they’re supposed to with-
a body of work that reads as a basic out need of authorial clarifications and
rejection of the Canadian literary com- embellishments. Consider, for instance,
mitment to imagining the humble vir- this passage from “Between Zero and
tues and humbling vices of modest One” (1975), one of Gallant’s Linnet Muir
local lives. series of stories on a young woman’s
time in a bygone Montreal:

july 13th - 15th 2007 There was also a joint past that lay all
around us in heaps of charred stone. The
www.mypubliclibrary.ca/participants.htm
streets still smelled of terror and ashes,
particularly after rain. Every stone held
down a ghost or a frozen life, or a dread-
ful secret. — “An Alien Flower” (1972)
uring our conversation, at a grand
D old restaurant where Paris families
were stretching their languorous Sun-
day brunches into afternoon coffees, it
was clear that Gallant had little interest
in addressing her relationship to Can-
ada and Canadian writing. She treated
my questions on this subject like house-
flies and was palpably interested in
moving on to other things. There was
only one moment where she warmed
I remember a day of dark spring snow-
storms, ourselves reflected on the black
windows, the pools of warm light here
and there, the green-shaded lamps, the
dramatic hiss and gurgle of the radi-
ators that always sounded like the back-
ground to some emotional outburst,
the sudden slackening at the end of
the afternoon when every molecule
of oxygen in the room had turned in-
to poison.
The intensity and beauty of this pas-
sage come not just from its choice and
expression of detail, but from the even-
ness of tone Gallant achieves while
building to its startling last word, which
gathers unto itself the unsettling impli-
cations of the preceding parts of the

90

sentence. This evokes an office setting
in World War II-era Montreal, or, more
precisely, a climate of the mind borne
of the smallish, bitter lives that come
together and break apart in that office
over the course of the story.
Measuring the passage’s veracity by
the historical record, or determining
how much of the narrator’s experiences
are variations on the author’s time in
Montreal as a journalist with the Stan-
dard in the 1940s, is much like uncover-
ing which Mississippi streets and Civil
War sites Faulkner knew firsthand. The
result may be a frisson of local pride,
but this is a distraction when approach-
ing a great writer. The prospect of such
a reading experience is made all the
more enticing in Gallant’s case because
of her chosen form: the short story. In
her handling, the short story works
up intensely concentrated encounters
between people, around which move
whole constellations of discreet mean-
ings. To engage such art requires a com-
mitment of intellect and imagination
capable of meeting and withstanding
Gallant’s vision of the world: a some-
times fatalistic, sometimes sympathetic
regard for the all-too-human longings
and occasionally funny cruelties that
people visit upon each other. And this
is a regard that proceeds from an un-
flinching commitment to revelation for
its own sake.
Gallant takes offence at efforts by
others to undermine that commitment
by attaching it to secondary interests.
She once dismissed academic commen-
taries, in a piece reprinted in Paris Note-
books, her collected non-fiction, as “the
fleas of literature.” Reminded of this dis-
missal, she was immediately amused.
“Did I? ” she said with a smile, her eye-
brows turned up. “Well I believe it, be-
cause I’m apt to say things are ‘the fleas
of.’ ” The self-effacement quickly gave
way to stronger feelings. “I’ll tell you
what my thing is with academics,” she
continued in a harder tone. “They take
something that is complete, say a story,
that is not material to work with — it’s
complete; it is to the writer anyway —
and they take it as crude ore that they’re
taking out of the ground, to suit some
purpose of their own, and I find this
outrageous.”
We’d met in front of La Coupole, a
Literat ure
Montparnasse institution that, in earli-
er days, “was as dim as a night train and
served terrible food,” where “out-of-
town diners used to search for a glimpse
of Sartre or Beckett and try to make out
if the forks were clean.” The descrip-
tion comes from one of Gallant’s Henri
Grippes stories, which concern a con-
genitally unlikable, comedic character
whom the author gleefully described,
in an aside, as “absolutely awful.” La
Coupole has changed; it’s a clean, well-
lighted place now, its bohemian history
homogenized by guidebooks into a lit-
erary tourist’s stop. Gallant was grate-
ful for assistance out of her taxi; candid
about the inevitable weakening of her
constitution, she was nevertheless live-
ly and canny throughout our conversa-
tion, ignoring respectful queries about
whether it was getting late and dismiss-
ing the tape recorder when the cassettes
stopped.
elping an elegantly dressed old
H woman out of her cab soon gave
way to working hard to keep up with
the pace and range of her conversa-
tion. We sat and talked for some two
hours, and Gallant would often answer
a straightforward question with a nar-
rative that moved across personal, his-
torical, and geographic terrains. Asked,
for instance, to distinguish between
Catholic culture in Quebec and France,
she replied, “It depends which period
you’re talking about. If it’s now, in Que-
bec, it barely exists, it’s much more lib-
eral. But then . . . ” She trailed away for a
moment, then explained her point via
story and image. “I lived two years in
Spain, under Franco, and there were
things allowed in a couple of book-
stores that wouldn’t have been allowed
in Quebec. There was Trotsky’s Hist-
ory of the Russian Revolution, in two
volumes in English, which you could
find there.”
This digression held much in the way
of answering my question, but men-
tion of her time in Spain sent her into
another recollection. “I remember be-
ing twice in a bus in Madrid and seeing,
one, a Scotsman in a kilt, walking along
a street looking in windows, and fol-
lowed by boys who thought this was
hilarious.” Again she paused for a
moment, but then offered her second
91

“The other was a woman in slacks, in
Well, in Quebec, if it had been a mujer
What to read next
Participating booksellers at
www.booksforeverybody.com
‘Although I am a Christian, I have noth-
t h e wa l r u s
strange sighting on a bus in Madrid.
1952.” Here she leaned in a little, to under-
score the comparative absurdity of this
finding. “The people in the bus got up
and came over to my side and were
talking about the mujer in pantalones.
in shorts, there would have been a cop
called, right away. But that’s so long ago.”
Gallant enjoyed clarifying her point
about religion in France, where the
Church “is smaller now” and the second
religion is Islam. “It’s Catholic, Muslim,
Jewish,” she said, then broke into a high-
pitched voice while making a falling
gesture with her hands, “and way down
there, a few Protestants, poor little things,
an endangered species.” While the
Church may be in decline in France,
its presence is inherently part of the
life of the nation: “But it’s a culture,”
Gallant explained, “that’s it.” She made
several points in this concise, emphat-
ic way. There was much matter behind
any one instance, but there’s no time
for clarification; she assumes you’re
with her and moves on.
“One of the things I’ve always no-
ticed in France: that they use Christian
and Catholic to mean the same thing. I
remember a woman once saying to me,
ing against Jews or Protestants.’ ” The
genial satire on display here gave way
to a sharper sort of humour on other
topics. She was (correctly, it turns out)
dubious about the odds of Ségolène
Royal becoming France’s first woman
president, because while “women have
rights in France, still the men have an
attitude” — one that she demonstrated,
wordlessly, by pulling her face into a
Gaullic male grimace at the notion of a
woman assuming the country’s highest
office. As for the 1968 Generation, now
the establishment in France, she was
particularly lethal in her assessment
of the Socialists: “These are people who
have ideas but have never had to wait
for a bus.” She was equally efficient
with writers whom she holds in low
regard. “He’s basically bourgeois,” she
said, dismissing the controversial Mi-
chel Houellebecq.
When queried about her feelings to-
ward the New Yorker, she was initially
even shorter. “I pass,” she said coolly.
92
But then she opened up to the question
about the magazine where her writing
has appeared almost exclusively for
her entire career. “When I placed my
first story, it was still Harold Ross, the
founder. I never met him, he died a year
later. And then came [William] Shawn,
and then came [Robert] Gottlieb, then
came . . . Lady Godiva, who came and
went.” She laughed, enjoying this par-
ticular description of the controversial
editorship of Tina Brown. She spoke
well of the current editor, David Rem-
nick: “A very good journalist. The mag-
azine shows that, it’s journalism with a
slot for fiction.”
Describing the latest formulation of
the New Yorker this way brought Gal-
lant nearer to an understandable lament.
The magazine used to feature two stories
per issue, she explained. She said this
wistfully, but my attempt at a sympa-
thetic response put a stop to that. Her
voice cooled once more and then be-
came emphatic. “There’s no point —
when it’s changed, it’s changed. And
apart from deploring it, you think, ‘Well
maybe I’m immune to change,’ and
I don’t want to become that way, but
after all I’m eighty-four. I have to keep
that in mind.” She served notice that
she’s “not like that about other things,”
then abandoned the whole matter. “I
think I should just shut up.”
Don’t forget me, Grippes silently prayed,
standing at the periodicals table in La
Hune, the Left Bank bookstore, looking
for his own name in those quarterlies
no one ever took home. Don’t praise me.
Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m
dead. — “Grippes and Poche” (1982)
arsh here, as she was elsewhere on
H other matters, Gallant was liveliest
when she interrupted herself with an
excited “Oh!” in the midst of answer-
ing a formal question. In one instance,
when discussing the status of Arab in-
tellectuals within the ranks of Paris’s
chattering classes, she recalled a story
that she much preferred to tell. She
described a Christmastime ride taken
with a Muslim cab driver, when return-
ing home after a late evening with friends.
After Gallant passed on to the driver a
gift of chocolates she’d received, the
 Literat ure

two struck up an animated conversa- endings of her strongest stories feature

tion on an array of subjects, ranging a distancing from the prior intimacy upcoming in
from diabetes, marriage, and children, that has developed between reader and
to prayer schedules, divine inspiration, character. “Some summer or another
and writing. While she told the story, I would always be walking on her grave”
found myself presuming each turn had is a strangely worded, estranging close
reached the insight of the story, only to to “In the Tunnel,” resolving very lit-
follow her to another turn, and another, tle for us; the core meaning remains
and still another. The telling ended not within the character herself. Here, and
with a sage statement on religion, or on at the end of many other of her stories —
Paris’s new immigrants, or pluralism “When We Were Nearly Young” (1960),
in action, but on a light and devious “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973), “The Four
note, with Gallant tricking the cabbie Seasons” (1975), and “Scarves, Beads, The Dubai Miracle
into letting her pay the fare after he in- Sandals” (1995) come to mind — Gal- by Deborah Campbell
sisted that their conversation was pay- lant invests her characters with the dig-
ment enough. nity of independence, in thought and Northern Exposure
It was inevitable, while Gallant sat emotion, to keep doing as they see fit, by Franklyn Griffiths
across from me and told that tale and however blinkered they may be. Gal-
others, that I would try to discern in lant’s opaque endings free her charac-
them some form of symmetry with her ters from the tainting designs of anyone Corporate Canada,
stories, but I also knew that this was a positioned outside the world of the story, Global Buying Spree
fool’s game. Gallant’s fictions are intri- whether author, reader, reviewer, or foot- by Roger Martin & Gordon Nixon
cate and precise creations. As she said, noting academic flea. At the end of the
“I will rewrite a whole page for a sen- very best of her stories, I leave with the The New Man
tence.” But listening to her recount her impression that I’ve been taken as close by Mark Czarnecki
exchange with a cab driver, as when I to the truth of a human life as I can be
was listening to her story of the kilted by a work of literature. But equally, Gal- Quantum Computing,
Scotsman in Madrid, put me in mind of lant reveals the greater depths of that
Reborn
a defining feature of her short stories, truth, which she refuses to collapse into
by Alex Hutchinson
one that makes them such a draw on the more easily exposed meanings that har-
reader’s imagination and intellect: their monize with impressive theories and
ability to work up a compelling situation cultural patriotisms, meanings that can Tragedy in Lebanon
and dwell patiently and economically in be contained within the soothing sym- by Martin Patriquin
its intersecting complications, gradually metries, ironies, and reversals that we
coming to a culminating moment that’s look for in stories. East Coast Takeaway
postponed and shifts, however many by Noah Richler
times, before the story ends with a deft
deflection of our expectations. T he coffees had cooled, and the tables
in La Coupole were emptying, the
waiters mostly standing around, wait-
George Fetherling, Janice Galloway
“I n the Tunnel” (1971) moves along ing for the evening to start. And I had
these lines. It’s the story of a young yet to ask Gallant about her formation
woman, Sarah, who pursues an ill-starred as a writer. I had a feeling that she’d
Brian Payton, Christine Pountney
Bill Reynolds, and R. M. Vaughan
summer fling with an older man to prove treat the questions like those house-
she’s not the headstrong danger to her- fly queries about Canada—inevitable,
self that her father thinks she is. And so annoying, unwanted. When I did raise student
it goes: “In love, she had to show her the matter, she invoked the Russians,
own face, and speak in a true voice, particularly Chekhov, and also cited
Field Notes
contest
and she was visible from all directions.” Hemingway. “He’s taught us all how to
Sarah’s story is excruciating because of write dialogue.” As would be expected,
the many assumed turns toward less she prefers his short stories to his novels: Win $$$ and Fame
hopeless conclusions that pass by, but “I read some so often, I almost knew them
also because the story manages to be at by heart, like music.” And when we See walrusmagazine.com /contests
once cruel, funny, and sympathetic. turned, finally, to the matter of her writ-
Deadline: August 31, 2007
This is the difficult pleasure of read- ing, Gallant drew on Hemingway again.
ing Gallant. Whereas the best of Munro Her responses were uniformly terse. “I
builds to reconfirmation of humanity rewrite a lot, but I don’t change much.”
in its daily struggling, Gallant at her “It’s mostly pruning you know.” “Every-
best is elliptical and recalcitrant. The thing starts off too long.”

93

“If God intended reasonable
men and women to worship Him
without embarrassment, why did
He create Christopher Hitchens?
It was a fatal miscalculation . . .
This is a profoundly clever book, addressing
the most pressing social issue of our time, by
one of the finest writers in the land.”
—Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation
Perhaps growing anxious at the
thought of discussing her work, she
offered a casual but conclusive self-
reproach, “I’m a traitor to my own
cause,” which brought the conversa-
tion to its close. Of the few answers
Gallant did give about her writing,
the most revealing had to do with
how she balanced the relationship be-
tween depth and concision, so crucial
to the short story form. I asked her how
she knew when to take and when to
give back.
“It comes on its own.”
There’s word of Gallant publishing
the journals she’s kept for years. Bio-
graphies and critical studies of all sorts
will inevitably be written, but one should
be skeptical of how far into, or beyond,
these five words such material will go
toward making sense of why and how
Gallant has accomplished as much as

# 1
NATIONAL
she has. Writers of the highest order
cannot explain themselves or be ex-
plained to a standard matching their
greatness, because in a very real way
BESTSELLER
there’s nothing to explain, including
why they left one place to live in an-
other or what they make of the place
they left. Their work, if successfully
brought off, is a testament unto itself.
Everything else, Gallant’s example sug-
gests, should be silence; otherwise the
work is overshadowed by the obvious
and the incidental. Our discomfort
before such reticence may be a sign of
our insecurity before a writer whose
greatness stands independent of a na-
tional culture, a minority position, or
a regional tradition. This is someone
confident enough of her craft to be
known, simply, as Gallant, writer.
After the bill was settled, with a doub-
ly amused Gallant negotiating between
a fumbling young waiter and me with
my credit card and my poor French, I
walked her to a cab stand. We strolled
up Montparnasse to a busy corner just
coming under its first shadows. She con-
sidered an invitation to dinner while

clined and left.

—

waiting for a car to come up. She de-

“Impressive and enjoyable.... Hitchens’s erudition is

Randy Boyagoda and Walrus arts and lit-
on display [in this] serious and deeply felt book.” erature editor Daniel Baird discuss short
—The New York Times fiction and the works of Mavis Gallant, on-
McCLELLAND & STEWART line this month at walrusmagazine.com/
www.mcclelland.com more.


Toronto Images

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ACA Gallery

[\[]^_`ab\]c[d^`d[
—art can change the world—
183 Queen Street East
Tel. 416-823-4039
Toronto, M5A 1S2, Canada

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Ñ°¯Ò¯°¶»µ³·
 t h e wa l r u s

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Brainteasers
by Fraser Simpson
11 12

1. Bob always takes A minutes and B

13
seconds to make a paper airplane,
where A and B are single-digit numbers.
14 15 In terms of A and B, how long in hours
and minutes will it take Bob to make
16 17 sixty paper airplanes?

18 19 20 21 2. Change the first letter in each of the

following four words to create a phrase
22 23 24 25 describing an uncomfortable person.

26 27 28 WISH CUT IF LATER

29 30 31 3. The letters of the word GOVERNESS

can be rearranged to spell a typical
32 Canadian Idol performance and one part
of that performance. What are these
33 34 two words?

35 36 4. Insert the same four-letter word into

each set of blanks to create three five-
letter words that match the definitions.

A Little Bit Longer ____E type of tree

by Fraser Simpson
Sticky stuff concerning failings (6) ____T tree, e.g.
Some clue answers are a little bit longer 33
than their designated spaces and stick out 34 Really likes quarters (4) ____K item made from a tree
past the grid’s border by a single letter. The 35 Strangely, ten deer came in (7)
exterior letters, reading clockwise from the 36 Audibly walk off with brace (5)
top left corner of the grid, spell four related 5. Finish this mini-crossword by inserting
down
words. Their relationship, which solvers something that has a point.
1 A property claim of a foreign
must determine, is appropriate to this
country (5)
puzzle. p o a c h e r
2 Wittiest drunk means to fasten a
across garbage bag (5-3) i n c l u d e
1 Ray straddles white line in a crude 3 Unique uprising seizes a pop duo on
way (5) the run (7)
e x e m p t s
6 Stare at front half of boxy summer 4 Problem answered, providing Grand
house (6) Prix site (2,4)
11 Celebrity tellin’ fibs in my ear (4) 5 Scholarly Reed, first off, accepts
6. What title used for a type of ruler could
12 Mumble “mother” in German (6) ticket (8)
be represented by BUGABOO in a
13 Colour a green sign about stumbling 7 Organized pie chart having more
cryptogram?
block (7,4) inconsistencies (8)
14 Timeless aquatic bird in each lake (7) 8 Her hunk’s written up books on
15 I invested with fat Scottish medicinal plants (7)
landowner (5) 9 Nobelist exhibits daggers (5)
16 Opening statements in reverse order (6) 10 New and Old Testament vessels go small
is the new
17 Old aircraft flight path (8) straight through (2,5)
18 A Kleenex on the table (2,5) 19 Endure as wrecks, like the Titanic (8)

20 Lets out arsenic-laced wine
sediment (6)
22 Democrat with ultimatum (6)
24 Shrinking body of water Mr. Gore’s
found in vicinity (4,3)
26 Announced Greek goddess led around
daughter (8)
27 Promotes Rugrats outside
university (5)
29 Mad bee caught by bug killer (5)
31 Crimson bishop drooled nastily (5-3)
32 Found out bar tried to find salt (10)
BIG!
20 Heather goes after boy serving soup (7)
21 Egrets on different hormone (8)
22 Swapping two characters in deed and
offering an unpromising future (4-3)
23 Like bishops embracing a
headwaiter (6,1)
25 Technology hater identified turning in
minstrel’s instrument (7) For more information on re t a i l
27 Liston hacked up something in advertising with The Walrus, email
throat (6) a d v e r t i s e @walrusmagazine.com
or call 416- 971-5004 x22 3.
28 Just know one karate instructor (6)
30 Attend strike (4)

96
 T h i n k Ta n k

A Summer Place 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

by Craig Kasper
13 14 15 16

across
17 18 19
1 Casa ____ (Toronto landmark)
5 ____ II (razor brand)
9 Commedia dell’____ 20 21 22
13 Many residents of 16-Across
15 Favourite bar of bubbly people? 23 24 25 26
16 Site of Al Jazeera’s headquarters
17 Tendon 27 28 29 30 31
18 2000 summer blockbuster filmed
primarily in southern Ontario 32 33 34
19 They may be after the big bucks
20 Niche market’s supplier, often 35 36 37 38
23 “Thrilla in Manila” fighter
24 Whammy 39 40
25 Bricks unit
26 hbo competitor, in TV listings 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
27 Breathers
30 Tim Horton’s purchase
48 49 50 51 52
32 Two-time World Series winner with
the Blue Jays
34 Top quality 53 54 55 56
35 It allows airline passengers to
breathe easy 57 58 59
39 Holds up
40 Disgraced televangelist Robert 60 61 62
41 Shoe part
44 City founded by Jesuits in 1554 63 64 65
48 Paean
49 Keanu’s role in a movie trilogy
51 Fruit-flavoured dairy-beverage brand
52 With “The,” a Prairie capital’s nickname 35 Prepare for digesting?
53 Leaf-eating pest 36 Like some disputed ballots in 2000
57 Not fooled by 37 Hunch
58 Gartner of the fifth estate 38 More drenched
59 Keep away from 39 Filled with hilarity
60 Internet surfer, e.g. 42 Cover letter abbr.
61 Actor Bana of Munich 43 Bird with a showy mate
62 Repetitive drills 45 Pulling an all-nighter, say
63 Examined, as by a doctor 46 Summit participant
64 Michelangelo’s David, for one 47 Shrek’s Princess Fiona, notably
65 ____ libre (poetry style) 50 City on Ishikari Bay Western Canada’s Luxury
54 Having divided loyalties Diesel Motorcoach Specialists
down
1 Indian Ocean boatsman 55 Title woman in a Barenaked Exclusive Dealer for MONACO and BEAVER
2 Camden Yards ballplayer Ladies song 1-800-665-7100 • guaranteerv.ca
3 Insect with religiosa in its 56 Ukrainian city near the Polish border
species name
4 Become an accessory For answers to current and past
5 Like Status Indians, for example crossword puzzles, please visit
6 Do-____ walrusmagazine.com/thinktank.
7 Fail to be
8 Birth control option pattern as bugaboo.
9 Puts two and two together? 6. empress has the same letter-substitution
10 Supports from the bleachers
11 Cologne’s river
e x e m p t s
p y r a m i d
12 Softball, in an interview i n c l u d e
14 Language of Kenya’s national anthem 5. p o a c h e r
21 Board, as an airplane 4. Insert plan to make plane, plant, and plank.
22 Palindromic Burmese prime minister 3. song and verse
28 Brewski from south of the border 2. fish out of water
and 60 seconds = 1 minute.
29 Exotic wraps change the units, because 60 minutes = 1 hour
31 Animals 1. A hours and B minutes. You only need to
33 Baton-passing event brainteasers answers

97
 Parallel Universe by Graham Roumieu

Santa unleashes his elves over the summer in a desperate bid to retain
Christmas’s status as the most wonderful time of the year.

98
 THE CONCEPT BEHIND OUR
TRIPLE PROTECTION SYSTEM

GILLETTE CLEAR GEL ANTIPERSPIRANT WITH TRIPLE PROTECTION SYSTEM

Gillette ®

© 2007 P&G www.aguything.ca

Be Remembered

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