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1994-06-02
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109 lines
A Cold Montreal Winter
Copyright (c) 1994, Daniel Sendecki
All rights reserved
A Cold Montreal Winter
----------------------
for Andre Brereton
I.
The flat was dark, full of dull, disquieting silence. Light
tumbled in - old tired light, full of dust and age - and created a
mosaic on the floor. Long, long shadows crept slowly along like giant
ships on a gently rolling sea, playing with the hoary light that
spilled in through the old lace curtains.
The tiny clock ticked, and tocked, relentless,
uncomprehending, the minute hand swept across an expressionless face,
tick-tock, tick-tock; the refrigerator rattled and hummed, shaking
deliberately every now and then, sounding like a tiny band of
minstrels.
Yet, of all this the tenant was unaware. He could not hear
those tiny sounds, only silence and loneliness fell upon his ears.
His eyes did not wander, did not shine, did not contemplate those long
shadows of dusk. They were unfeeling, uncaring, and unknowing.
Sometime later, long after they carried my fallen grandfather
from his lonely apartment, I remembered praying, begging, that death
was gentle, that death was a tenderhearted doorman who shook the
burden from lifeless shoulders and ushered one into eternity.
That death did not carry a scythe.
II.
Snow hung from the wizened face of the Valliere Funeral Home
like tired whiskers. Snowflakes, falling to the earth like wearied
robins, saw it was a soft December night, fluttered once about the
building and found their nest in the smutty mire of gutter-snow.
My uncle and I stood just inside the parlor staring more at
our reflections in the frosty window, than the pedestrians who
shuffled by indifferently. My thoughts turned towards the few that
had come to spend one more afternoon with my grandfather.
"Who is Hans Sommers?", I asked.
My uncle smiled.
Even in his old age, Hans was enormous, a battleship of a man,
with arms like steam-shovels and a neck with the girth of an oak.
Coming in from the Montreal winter, he shook the snow from his
shoulders and stamped the slush from his boots. I had always fancied
myself a writer, and in turn a keen observer, but when I learned of
Hans' profession, I lost all faith in my deductive reasoning. Hans
stood six-foot-four, carried shoulders as wide as church doors, and
wore hands like vise grips to match, but, how he betrayed this keen
writer's eye. He was not a farmhand, nor a brick mason - in fact his
job entailed no manual labor. He was a baker.
"A baker?", I could not believe it.
"Sure, he used to own La Petite Boulangerie. Right behind the
flat on Jean Mance."
An absurd picture, this man standing over countless tiny
pastries, decorating them gingerly - a rhinoceros in a crystal shop
appeared as reasonable, knocking over fine crystalline with each
breath. Oh, but how he fooled me with his voice. Deep and resona
ting, it tolled like a bell - gigantic and impossibly melodic.
"Hans' voice," my grandmother would tell me later over tea,
"was impossibly beautiful. He would, while baking and decorating
pastries for the following day, sing well into the night. Perhaps
till three or four in the morning. And even though he sang loudly and
heartily, no one complained. His handsome voice was welcome relief of
the traffic on St. Bernard Street. I would lie awake and listen,
letting him sing me to sleep."
She paused.
"And the smells that came from there, they were so..." But
she could not find the words to describe them. Why? Perhaps because
every memory depreciates when resigned to description. In fact,
memories roost as birds in the heart, memories as delicate as
sparrows. In her silence I wondered if this was the bane of all
writers and storytellers - the need to relay some incredibly unique
feeling to the reader without the means to do so, the need to cast the
sparrows from their perch. I suppose the best writers, the very best,
have the balls to urge the bird into flight.
"I thought I would come to say goodbye," Hans had said,
earlier that day, breath thick with whiskey, wringing his tweed cap in
his tremendous hands, "Andre, you were a good neighbor, but alas..."
Indeed, memories roost as birds in one's heart. Outside, it
is concrete cold - like an obscene phone call from the Arctic.
Awakened, a spooked host of sparrows takes to the night only to freeze
and fall to the earth like concrete angels.