Black Bird (24 page)

“What I’ve learned is that these opposites have no meaning. Thinking of them as the reverse of one another has no meaning. Believing I’ve come to some spiritual awakening has no meaning. I don’t believe I’ve discovered any kind of a truth, because that kind of a truth would be too simple and a lie. But I no longer believe it’s even possible to lie about anything.

“What I’m saying isn’t absurd, or paradoxical, even if I don’t quite understand it myself. For the first time in my life I’ve been giving long thought to puzzling questions, and I can only say that I’m trying to live with my experience even when I know it must be faulty. Yet I continue to experience it as reality.

“And I don’t expect that my saying this can do anyone any good. But it’s made me feel better to tell someone.”

When his grandfather left him to his cell, Jean-Baptiste thought about this strange confession. How it revealed a man living unsuspected beneath the grave-robbing reprobate, how the simplest of lives was no shield from the mysteries of Being, and how time itself reshapes our experience so that, at the end of our lives, their beginnings appear entirely different than when we lived through them. He took a pen and scrounged together some napkins, and in the time-honoured tradition of writers in prisons, began to write.

Prison was a place Marie had avoided as best she could. She’d known enough felquistes who’d spent time inside, even some who still were. It was common wisdom among them not to visit friends in jail. Signing the guest book was registering yourself with the police as a fellow-traveller. But this time it was different. She could hardly refuse to visit her brother. It was an awkward family obligation for everyone, since they were all angry over the play. But Marie couldn’t help feeling guilty for his plight. So when they pushed her, she went.

It was always difficult between them. They knew each other so little, all they knew were their differences. Marie, nervous and claustrophobic in prison, fell back on sarcasm, the only opening she could find. “I hear you were arrested for reading poetry.”

Jean-Baptiste wasn’t happy to see her in the first place, and her opening words were irritating. “I was arrested because you planted illiterate propaganda in my boxes. It’s your fault I’m here.”

She tried to steer the conversation into banter. “It’s true I wasn’t there, but I’m sure if I’d been subjected to your verse, I would have called the cops too.”

“I can’t believe you.
You’re
actually mad at
me
, aren’t you? What the hell for?”

Marie was lost. Everything she said made him furious. She didn’t know how to answer. “You’re stealing the show. You’re making us look like fools.”

“Excuse me, but
I’m
the one in jail, here. None of this has worked out for me at all.”

Marie sighed angrily. She had nothing left but a bitter defensiveness. “Sorry to disrupt your bourgeois ambitions.”

“Ambitions nothing. That play wasn’t what I wanted onstage. I got precious little of my own work up there. But I’m blamed for everything. The family hates me, but they don’t understand how little control I had over the play.”

“It’s a little too late to start pleading innocence, Jean-Baptiste.”

“For Christ’s sake, no one even heard any of the poetry I was reading. Now I’m stuck in here, people think I actually wrote that trash of a play, and my family hates me.”

“Stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”

“Why are you mad at
me
? What do you want from me?”

Marie found herself yelling. “You never helped me. You never did anything for me or my friends. You won’t help your own people. You refused to write for us, to join us, to help us or support us in any way.”

“I never helped you? My family thinks I was fucking my sister the night Angus died, but I never helped you? Fuck you.”

Marie was stung. She turned from him as her eyes welled up.

“Why the hell should I help?” Jean-Baptiste rushed on. “I don’t agree with you. I’m not interested in politics. Politics is full of hypocrites. It’s either Thieves for Democracy or Fascists for a Fundamentalist Dictatorship. I hate to think which you are.”

They were silent a moment, looking away from each other.

“I expected more from you.” Marie wiped her eyes. “You’re smart, but you’re wasting yourself on scribblings that do no one any good.” She stood to leave.

“Well, I’m sure I won’t be doing much more scribbling.” Jean-Baptiste waved a hand in the air, like Woland. “My reputation will precede me now. I’ll never live this down.”

“I brought you some chocolate.” She put a candy bar on the table.

He sighed. Quietly, he asked, “Have you got any paper?”

When Hubert disappeared Marie thought taking over as de facto leader was simply picking up another chore he’d left undone, like the dishes or the house-cleaning. But when she’d actually organized and implemented the pamphleteering campaign, she realized two things:

The others had accepted her leadership.

It felt good.

For once, her ideas had not been dismissed or trivialized. For once, she’d found herself directing the actions of others, and they’d seen the results in the newspapers. The whole town was abuzz with their actions.

From then on she was tacitly acknowledged the leader of her cell. She organized meetings just as she had in the past, scheduling them, making sure word got around, acting as general secretary and chair. Yet now, whenever a question came up, whenever a decision was to be made, it was left to her: her vote was supreme. And the actions and ideas discussed were all referred through her; she approved them, dismissed them, supported them or ridiculed them. And her approval was the cell’s decision.

She’d always seen the struggle in Quebec as a struggle against the past, a struggle for the future. Everyone involved knew they might never personally see the changes they so desperately wanted, might never benefit from the kind of society—a French society—they envisaged for Quebec, the independent nation of the future. But they knew their children and their grandchildren would enjoy an autonomy that had never been possible for them, an identity as a fully recognized people in the world community.

But somehow, now that she was herself in some small part in charge of the necessary tasks to propel them towards that goal, Marie began to feel quite differently about the future, about what the results of her actions would be. She began to feel protective of her people and her cause; she began to accept the sacrifices they would all have to make—even as Angus had—for the benefit of the future generations. She realized some of these might be unspeakable, unthinkable, inhuman. But the future of Quebec and its people occupied a new place in her heart, not one simply of a youthful, rebellious nature but of an eternal, living affection that could never be shaken or broken, even if it could be disappointed. The children of the future, of the new Quebec, were Marie’s children. They might be ungrateful, they might be disobedient, they might even be unforgiving.

But they would always be hers, and she would do anything for them.

Hubert haunted Marie like a guilty conscience. He would have been the father of her child, and they had killed him. They weren’t even Anglos; these cops were fellow Québécois. But that hadn’t stopped them from beating him to death. They were so blind to the problems that had made thugs of them that they couldn’t see he was their saviour, not their enemy. And they had created the conditions that forced her to abort her child. How could she have given birth to another soul under these intolerable circumstances, which set siblings against each other, tore generations and families apart, weakened the well-being of the nation itself? How could she bring up a child as she herself had been brought up, under the yoke of economic and social oppression, without the means of determining her own destiny?

So many forces had been marshalled against them all their lives. The money didn’t care for the underclass, the English didn’t care for the French, and the politicians openly snubbed the electorate. And the successful French all followed the path of assimilation, of Uncle Tom. And the press, French and English, so controlled by the money at the top, which trickled down just enough to its middle-class servants to slake their bourgeois aspirations, couldn’t fail to be against her friends. Not just in editorials constantly denouncing the felquistes as murderers and thugs, but even in the supposedly factual articles, so slanted against the FLQ for the sake of petty sensationalism and emotionalism, in the name of circulation figures. They cared nothing for their
brethren without jobs, without education, without dignity … without real lives.

It was unbearable to think things would always remain the way they were. That families like hers would always suffer the miserable, grey winter that was life in Montreal. Forced into crime for a living, forced into belittling subservience for spiritual sustenance, forced into sleeping through life to avoid its pain. Grandfather, Aline, Mother. Even Jean-Baptiste she pitied; in this rare moment of reflection about her brother’s world, she saw him, too, caught between reality and his dreams, saw how it was crushing him.

If they could kill and imprison her friends, if they could suppress her own ambitions and everyone else’s, what chance did any hypothetical children ever have? If no one acted, if no one effected change, there would be no point in anyone ever having a family. What would happen to the family of the Québécois themselves? Her family?

She agonized for days. She wandered the city looking for a purpose, for a reason to continue, one way or another, any way at all. She spent time in Parc du Mont-Royal, walking the gravel road to the summit and the cross of iron; she gazed out over the city towards the river, the Pont Jacques-Cartier and the South Shore beyond. She wound her way through the tiny, quiet streets of Westmount; so isolated and rarely visited except by these residents. Million-dollar homes, huge shiny cars, but no sidewalks inviting riff-raff into the neighbourhood.

Something must be done to shake this up. There had to be a more fulfilling life for the Québécois than shovelling snow for the Anglos. There must be an act capable of awakening a sleeping people to their rights, their dignity, their destiny.

She was at a turning point in her work, her life, her relations with people, with politics, with her family—with herself. She had to accept the fact that there wasn’t anything she could do to achieve her goals, that what she wanted was beyond her means. That her years of work and struggle had been wasted. Or she could accept that the work was bigger than she was, that the goals were larger than a single person could expect to meet, and give up everything else in her life to struggle for whatever progress might be possible—to let others see that things did matter, that things did change, if you were willing to take the long view.

It was a question of placing herself in a different context regarding the Great Work. It was a matter of recognizing that the Great Work was her master and she was the servant, not the reverse. She would write no more scripts in her head, have no more expectations that she was in charge or would get the results she anticipated. The Work existed separately from her, of its own accord and for its own reasons, and she was only an instrument of its desires.

If this made Marie recognize just how small she was, it made her see just how Great the Work was: it controlled people and events beyond their ability or even desire to stop it, just as money did, just as society did. Now she knew how hard her task would
be. How foolish she’d been to think that a mere few years of campaigning would shift the balance between the great forces of Change and Inertia.

And that’s what she was really fighting. Not just money and social conventions and apathy: Inertia. But now she saw the opposition as people just like herself—if only they knew it—people who had given their lives up to their own causes, people who’d been unknowingly mastered by their own ideals.

She was at that point where people shed their dreams, stop complaining and slip into the mainstream of life, into repetitive work and small comforts. Or where they consciously step fully outside, shed any sentimental or emotional attachments and get down to work: coldly, methodically and, very often, cruelly.