SAMPLE PASSAGES 

Having suffered a stroke at the age of seventy, Nathan Gelder is lying in a state of paralysis in a Toronto hospital. As part of his condition, he imagines he is floating in a pool of his life’s memories. At the same time, despite his immobility, he can hear his visitors and members of the hospital staff converse around him. In the following passage, Nathan is recounting a memory from his childhood in Holland. The year is 1935. It is worth observing that Nathan is of mixed origins: his father is protestant, and his mother is Jewish. 

Some six months later, my mother and I visited the downtown region. After shopping for some towels and other household goods, we entered the city’s central station and waited for our streetcar to appear. I was busy playing on a platform bench – it was a raft on the Nile and I was fending off some crocodiles – while my mother was standing off to one side and feeding coins into a vending machine. At the end of the platform, some fifteen meters down, a man kept peeping around the station’s boundary, as if by looking he could hurry on the tram’s arrival. The problem was the track was curved and a fast moving car could approach without warning - a sign spoke of the danger but the man kept peering.

    Did I hear him scream? Not that I remember. I did see a streetcar barrel round the corner and its bright yellow grill shear his head from his trunk. It happened in a clean flow of motion, without any check to the tram’s momentum, as if the guy had been made of cardboard all along.

    The streetcar stopped in front of me. I was saying to myself it hadn’t really happened, the man hadn’t really lost his head to the tram, but the blood on the grill kept insisting he had - red it was, a screaming shade of ochre, and you don’t know the meaning of red until you’ve seen a man’s blood on a canary-yellow streetcar grill. The doors banged open and the passengers streamed out and someone was yelling something over a speaker and a woman was emptying her guts on the track and a staid man was trying to still his confusion and people were pleading for a doctor to show and the driver was mumbling his head his head, as if we needed help putting two and two together.

    Something drew my eyes to the end of the platform. Something. My first thought was it didn’t make sense, a headless body made no sense at all. Then I saw his arm was stretched in my direction, as if the guy were straining to shake my hand, were pleading for something solid to hold onto until he adjusted to his new configuration. I could have sworn he was lying on a luxuriant carpet, so widespread and lurid was the effect of his bleeding. There was something square protruding from his raincoat – a diary with his day’s appointments perhaps, or a bar of chocolate from the vending machine.

    The vending machine. My mother, there she was, hurrying toward me, her expression blank with disbelief, like someone who’s received alarming news from the doctor. Although it was odd how, with all those people around, each of them in motion and talking all at once, I could hear her heels against the station’s concrete, click click click, as if she were performing a tap dance routine. As she reached my side, an official passed, a horse-sized man with a badge on his jacket and a smell of sweat dogging him like a second shadow. He was carrying a blanket and heading straight for the victim. When the crowd caught sight of him, they let him through, relieved there was someone to look after this mess. While the official spread the blanket wide and the crowd gathered round for one last glimpse of the disaster, my mother took my arm in hers and hauled me to the exit. The fear with which she clutched her purse proved how small she was in the face of this man’s ruin.

    “I can’t believe he’s dead,” I said, some thirty minutes later when we were seated in our kitchen.

    “Of course he’s dead. That’s what happens when you do something stupid.”

    “It’s all a matter of timing, isn’t it?”

    “What does that mean? I don’t understand.”

    “If he’d drawn his head back he’d still be alive, a mere half second would have made all the difference.”

    “The problem is we don’t know when to duck.”

    “Do you think he’s in heaven?”

    “I know nothing about heaven. Even if it exists, people still don’t want to die.”

    “But what do you think happens? Where did he end up?”

    “I really can’t say. Although I’m sure he’s not alone,” she added, catching sight of the fear in my eyes, “I mean, wherever he is, he’s with the people he loves. Or he certainly will be when they join him later.”

    “So I’ll see you and Dad after I die?”

    “Of course. Do you think we’d let all of this run to waste?” she said, motioning to the house and the love it contained.

    “Then it could be worse, dying I mean.”

    My mother hugged me briefly and began to fix supper. The sight of her putting potatoes on the boil is the last impression of my first years to survive.

In this second extract, Nathan recalls his departure from Europe. It is March, 1940. While Holland is still at peace for the most part, Nathan’s parents have a bad feeling about the future and have decided to send their son to a wealthy relative in Canada. 

The night before my departure arrived. My trunk was packed and standing by the entrance. It was getting on for one o’clock but we wished to take advantage of our remaining time together. Not that anything weighty was discussed as that would have spoiled the illusion my trip was merely pleasurable.

     “I’d like to try a hamburger,” my mother spoke.

    “While driving across the prairies,” my father added, “In one of those big American sedans.”

    “Or paddling down a river on a birch bark canoe.”

    “Then we’d go see a movie.”

    “No, we’d stop off in a bar.”

    “I’d order a whisky and tell the man to make it snappy.” They giggled at this reference to American slang.

    “Why don’t you come?” I gently suggested, as my mother sliced us another piece of cake.

    “You’ll scout things out for us,” she replied, in a tone that belied the anguish inside her.

   “Not all of us can play,” my father said, “Enjoy your leisure while it lasts.”

    Not wanting to upset them I asked about Niagara Falls. My parents started to joke again, grateful I was helping them keep their tears in check. But it’s funny. Long after the war would end, after the wreckage would be cleared and new buildings would arise, after parks would cover the graves of the victims, I’d replay that final chat to myself, returning to the scene not as a nervous adolescent but as a cynic of fifty with the hindsight of the Holocaust.

    “Why don’t you come?” I ask again, my features now as wrinkled as my father’s.

    “You’ll scout things out for us,” my mother says.

    “Do you know what will happen?” I virtually scream, “Have you any idea of the mess that awaits you?”

    “Not all of us can play,” my father pitches in.

    “I’m talking about death!” I yell in annoyance because they haven’t read the reports or seen the films for themselves. How can’t they know? I list the atrocities, the sites of execution, the personalities involved, the unbelievable numbers. 

    “Enjoy your leisure while it lasts,” my father quips.

    The following day went by in a trance. I remember my father took the day off from work and we journeyed to Rotterdam and boarded my ship. What was said, the weather that day, the clothes we were dressed in, these details are lost, as if the cameraman hired to record these events departed for lunch at the worst possible moment. There is only one quick exchange I remember. My mother was nervous and had to visit the washroom, so my father and I were alone for a minute.

    “Don’t worry about us,” he kept insisting, “Things have a way of turning out for the best.”

    “But this could be the very last time I see you.”

    My father paused and his eyes met mine. His instinct was to reply that I was talking nonsense but, aware the occasion required him to be truthful, he stroked his cheek and nodded slowly.

    “Yes,” he said, “The very last time.”

   He embraced me fiercely. He was choking back his tears. I wanted to speak but couldn’t think of the words, my father, the man who’d brought home pastries from work, the righteous gentile among a crop of crazy Jews. The last time I’d see him. The very last.

    “Nothing can extinguish our love,” he whispered.

    My mother approached.

    “Did you hear me?” he continued. “Some things last forever and ever, even if the world has been reduced to cinders.”

    These were his last words as recorded by my memory. They were by far his greatest gift to me and would soothe me in my bleakest moments. At the same time they only made my impending loss more difficult – and convince me more than ever that Leonard’s death was well deserved.

    A horn signalled I was leaving and my parents disembarked. I eyed them without blinking as they waved farewell and such a weight of grief constrained me that I could barely gesture back, could hardly answer their cries that they loved me. A short distance from shore a fogbank engulfed us and suddenly snatched my parents from sight, only to reveal them some ten seconds later. They were waving, waving more frantically than ever…. And then they were no more. Their figures, the quay, the harbour, the city were nothing but a shifting haze of grey and… nostalgia.

    As I stared and stared at the receding lines of Europe, I kept looking for a sign that might make sense of my departure. The only object that seemed the right sort of omen was a distant beacon, fiery and brilliant, that kept spinning in every direction at once, like the sword of flame that was set before the garden to prevent its exiled souls from slinking back.  

In this last sample extract, Nathan is visiting Chicago. As a faltering senior, he has decided he must do something to avenge his parents, and the figure he has his eyes on is the mega-rock-star Leonard Barvis. To determine whether this man is an appropriate target for his vengence, Nathan has been following him around the US on his Melting Pot album tour. Flattered by Nathan’s interest, Barvis has been meeting his nemesis after each concert. 

When the concert was over, I again climbed the stage and hooked up with Leonard in the stadium’s bowels. He looked exactly as he had the week before – his hair was the same length, his jacket met his jodhpurs at the same crisp angle, his muscles still gleamed with WD40 – except that he was carrying a thick wooden club, dangling from his belt it was, a second membrum, uncircumcised and lethal. Again we left the stadium in silence, cut a swathe through his devotees and drove off in the limo, two satellites twisted in each other’s orbit.

    We cruised the downtown area awhile, passing restaurants and cinemas and bookshops and theatres whose patrons, as they stood in line, seemed vaguely disaffected, were wondering if these pleasures made up for their labours. Further on, beside an all-night diner, I spied a storefront synagogue that a group of pious Jews was leaving, startled by the night air after their forays into Kabbalah.

    “I don’t want to know!” Leonard barked at them in passing.

    We stopped beneath a viaduct and the car’s horn sounded. From behind a pillar a figure emerged. Approaching the car he held up a club, exactly like the one Leonard was holding, and the locks disengaged and he sat beside me, the car sagging noticeably beneath his weight. I shivered slightly. This figure was immense and draped entirely in black, his face included. His massive hands alone were visible, but despite the strength their veins suggested, he seemed piteous, vulnerable even, like an extra in a sci-fi film whose role is to be eaten by some three-headed creature.

    We arrived at the hotel some ten minutes later – with not a word uttered aloud – and the car let us off in the back of the building. Behind a wall of garbage bins an open, unlit elevator stood waiting – its interior came to life as soon as we crossed its threshold. As we took it to the penthouse suite, its speakers blared God’s Defenestration – ‘He fell to earth, with no more worth, than the defects he possessed at birth’. Leonard kept the time by beating his club against the carpeting.

    The elevator opened on a spacious living-room. There wasn’t any time to take the trappings in, or the groupies for that matter who were crowded round a blue-lit bar, as Leonard was heading down a wainscotted hallway, and I couldn’t waste a moment if I wanted to keep up. Two androgynous servants were floating by his side, and as he progressed towards his destination, they somehow removed his trademark clothing and replaced it with a silken gown, its folds emblazoned with a giant dragon, gold, imperious, on the brink of catching fire. He didn’t relinquish his club, however. 

    We wound up in a salon with a cathedral ceiling and expensive objects – a gilded mirror and chairs with heavy padding and a table whose legs had been intricately carved. The walls were ochre-coloured and hung with prints, bullfighting scenes as far as I could tell. An enormous picture window looked onto the lake whose surface was foggy and stretched on forever, as if there were nothing but water now, as if our moorings had slipped and we were falling, falling – in the wake of God’s defenestration perhaps.

    “Smoke and mirrors, blood and tears, what if you don’t wanna die?” Leonard boomed.

    Instinctively I braced myself. A storm was brewing.

    “Skin and bone, dust to dust, what if you’re six inches high?” He passed within a foot of me, and the sleeve of his kimono brushed against my fingers. Just as suddenly he turned on his heel and gave the guy whose face was veiled a blow to the gut with the tip of his weapon. The man buckled over and clutched his stomach, but apart from gasping didn’t breathe a sound.

    “What if you don’t wanna go?” Leonard cried, circling the room then closing in again. The stranger was ready and took a swing of his own. Leonard’s response was too quick to keep track of: one moment he was there, in the line of fire; the next he was behind the guy and whacking his instep, causing him to topple over, as in Jack and the Beanstalk when the ogre takes a tumble.

    “If you don’t want to go,” Leonard spoke to the room, battering the table with his trusty club, “You’ve got to pump yourself up till you’re too big to expire. You’ve got to climb into their skulls and neutralize their fuses until day and night they’re high as a kite and dream of Leonard B thy kingdom come in god we trust amen.”

    The stranger tried to throw a punch but missed him by a mile. Again my eye couldn’t follow the manoeuver, but when I saw the guy next his nose was like putty and he was breathing like an engine in need of a lube job.

    “But what about them!” Leonard raged. He hurled his club at the picture window and the double pane exploded, dispatching shards to the fog outside. By chance there was a terrace below, whose flowerbeds and saplings caught the glass in mid-air, but Leonard hadn’t known that when he’d busted the window.

    An early winter blast whistled into the room. Its ice-cold touch brought the stranger to life, and he rose up on one arm and had another go at Leonard. Although his back was turned, he rolled with the blow and expropriated the club with a twist of his fingers. He also damaged the stranger’s leg in passing, who was clutching his right knee and twitching in pain. Advancing on the broken window, Leonard used the club to clear the glass from the frame, then leaned his figure into the night, his rock star essentials a hairbreadth from eternity.

    “What about THEM!” he screamed, setting fire to the sky with his venom, “What should I do with the ones who reject me?”

    It would only take a nudge. But I still couldn’t tell. And my parents – how to put it – they weren’t signalling yet.

    “They refuse me in their eyes, on their thighs, telling lies. They won’t read my scriptures, won’t listen to my tunes, drunk as they are on the COM-PE-TI-TION, a grievous sin for which I’ll one day whip their asses.”

    I stared at my hands and wondered if….

    “I don’t want to know!” he roared, insulting everything outside himself, with nothing to clutch onto if suddenly thrust from behind….

    A stick-like figure entered the room. He was naked and grinning and his prick was engorged. Although I didn’t recognize his face straight off, I inferred this was Lice from the scar on his calf. He was Leonard’s veteran drummer and a few years back he’d asked for a greater cut of the take, threatening to quit if his demands weren’t met. That’s when Leonard stuck him with a fork, which it took a team of experts half an hour to extract.

    “This joker’s leg is broken.”

    Retreating from the window Leonard studied the scene, like an asteroid that’s crashed to earth and misses his place among the constellations.

    “We’d better fetch the doc,” Lice laughed, “And maybe at the same time we can order up some cheese. Cheddar for sure, and maybe some Havarti.”

    I decided I’d had my fill for the moment. Even as Leonard’s foot was on the guy’s neck, and Lice was calling down to someone at the front desk, I left the salon and hurried to the lift, the words from ‘Melting Pot’ streaming from my nostrils.

    I still didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.