The Incident Report Read online

  He claimed he could locate any title in his collection in less than fifteen minutes, though he kept his books in no apparent order. One Saturday afternoon, my brother, my sister and I put him to the test. At first he refused. Then, seeing our determination, he succumbed. We went into the garage ahead of him, selected a book at random, then came out and told him the title he was to search for. In five minutes flat he placed in our hands the exact volume, the gorgeous cover of which had caught our eye: Great Composers of our Time. We passed it excitedly back and forth between us. Tiny, brightly coloured mandolins, flutes and violins, unfurling ribbons of musical notes, decorated the dust jacket.

  Several more times that afternoon, our father demonstrated his magical knowledge of his collection, delivering to us the very title we’d requested, proving beyond a doubt that within the chaos of his books an order reigned.

  INCIDENT REPORT 59

  Today, for the first time, I met Sheep Woman. She asked me for a book on poisons.

  “What sort of poisons?” I inquired.

  She leaned forward and whispered, “My daughter is trying to poison me.” Her breasts rested heavily on the Reference Desk. Her bright eyes examined me from between deep folds of skin.

  “Then, what you’d like is a book on how to detect poisons?” I suggested.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I have worked hard all my life,” she explained.

  She told me that in the region of France where she was born, the soil was poor. Her father was poor, her mother fertile. She was their ninth child, and she looked after the sheep. She knew how the weather behaved, the smell of an approaching storm. One afternoon she’d begun rounding up the flock to bring them down from the exposed hills.

  “The dog worked with me, running low to the ground,” she explained.

  She, the sheep and the dog had come partway down the slope when the sky became a dark lid. The sheep were frightened. The sky pressed itself down on the bleating animals and the rain hammered the ground. Then, with a terrible clatter, the lid that was the sky fell off, and rolled, and a white brilliance poured over everything.

  The leader of the sheep ran off, followed in blind obedience by the rest of the flock. The dog raced this way and that, barking and biting, attempting to redirect their course. As for her, she scrambled alongside, shouting, the rain turning her dress into a second skin—an awkward webbing between her legs.

  The rocks glowed; and between the slick stones, the trampled grass and the mud also glowed. There was nothing that did not glow. They came upon the old well. The leader of the sheep plunged into its comforting darkness and silence. The flock followed. Heaving into each other, pushing, trampling, they clambered over the low lip. Their luminous wool was tinged, for an instant, a sulfurous yellow against the dark sky. Then they vanished from sight.

  “When the last of my father’s sheep were drowned and I couldn’t hear any more bleating from inside the well, I walked away.”

  She did not go home. It was dark as night, and then it was night. She walked to the nearest city.

  Years later, she would own her own shoe store, give birth and raise children. Years later, she would hear a ringing in her ear.

  “I said to myself, ‘Father is slapping me for losing our sheep. He is the one making my ear ring.’ But it couldn’t have been him, because I never went home. I didn’t give him the chance to beat me.”

  After the storm, she did not see her parents again.

  “Once, when I heard the ringing in my ear, I imagined that my mother had a telephone at last, and wanted to speak to me. I worked hard. I was the proprietor of my own store. What happened to my parents and to my brothers and sisters? I don’t know. Sometimes in the street, when people squeeze together and crowd down the stairs, rushing underground to the subway, I hear bleating. My daughter tells me to rest. She wants me to rest forever.”

  Though I searched, I could not find a book on detecting poisons. I returned from the shelves, empty-handed.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I’m sorry, we don’t seem to have a book on poisons.”

  Sheep Woman leaned forward and whispered, “I will continue to refuse to eat the food my daughter prepares for me. She will never succeed in killing me.”

  INCIDENT REPORT 60

  I was ten years old when my father, who did not believe in God, became concerned by the fact that my younger brother and sister and I were receiving no religious education. My father had been raised an Anglican. His faith had held firm for the first twenty-eight years of his life. Then an event had occurred that caused his beliefs to collapse.

  I asked about the event and was promised an explanation at some future date. It was a Sunday evening. My father placed a Bible on the table and announced that we must decide for ourselves, that we ought not to be impeded from believing, simply because of his own inability.

  From then on, every Sunday, following dessert, seated at the head of the table, my father read, with an amused expression, a brief passage from the Bible. It was his expectation that for twenty minutes we’d exchange our views on the meaning of the story we’d just heard.

  We, his progeny, ranged in age from ten to five. My brother formulated his opinions by kicking my sister’s leg under the table; and when my brother tired of this pastime, he’d slyly offer to take his plate to the kitchen, and on his return journey he’d drop a cool metal spoon, a fork or an actual ice cube, something cold and unexpected, down the back of my sister’s shirt or dress, causing her to squeal as it slid along her warm skin.

  “Progeny” was a word I’d only recently discovered, and quite by chance, in one of my father’s unread books. Nobody knew I possessed it. It was mine. I was quite certain that one day it would prove useful—a source of surprise and defence. In the meantime, it added to my definition of myself. My skin felt tighter, my bones more solid. No matter what anyone said to me, I would not melt and form a puddle at anyone’s feet. Neither my brother nor sister suspected the existence of such a word as progeny. It had a pleasing sound.

  I watched my father drink his tea and wondered if it was really a single event or many that had caused him to lose his faith. I wondered if he’d felt a joke had been played on him, that someone had dropped something very cold and slippery down the back of his shirt, and that the shock and sudden discomfort of such a joke had dislodged his beliefs. I did not believe in God, and so had no faith to lose.

  INCIDENT REPORT 61

  A young patron, suspected of previous thefts, was caught at 10:30 this morning in the act of stealing a brand-new Mad magazine. He was warned that his behaviour was ill-advised. The magazine, though slightly torn, was reinstated in the collection.

  INCIDENT REPORT 62

  The time was 1:00 in the morning, and I pulled the sheet up to my chin. Beneath the sheet Janko’s hand warmed my belly. He told me that as a child he’d been uncertain of his existence.

  There was a person who answered to the name Janko, who was followed about the house by his mother; or perhaps she was not following him but cleaning the stairs and ironing the sheets and scrubbing the bathtub and calling out his name from habit, asking about his schoolwork, his friends, his socks and his hat, the food in his stomach; but for whatever reason, always, she was there.

  Everyone knew Janko, whose father worked for the post office, who had three sisters and two brothers, who lived with two of his grandmothers and one of his aunts, who read too much yet did not do well at school.

  But there was a boy whose name was also Janko, whom nobody knew of. When this boy sat at the table not speaking, they could not hear his thoughts. When he twisted a piece of wire around an old wine cork until it became a doll, and handed the tiny figure to his youngest sister, nobody knew what this Janko was thinking or who he was.

  INCIDENT REPORT 63

  This morning, for the first time, Suitcase Man spoke to me. The time was 11:15. He bowed, set his suitcase on the floor and sat down. Without preamble he began.

  He was a biochemist, h
e explained, and, shortly after his arrival in Canada as a visiting professor, he’d left his office and gone down the hall to speak with a colleague. He returned to find a note resembling a grocery list tucked inside a book on his desk. The note had appeared during his absence. He grew alarmed and studied it carefully: “Milk, onions, bread and tea.” He preserved the note, and from that moment on took great pains to lock his office door during even his briefest absences. Several weeks later a similar note appeared. Again it resembled a grocery list and was written in a hand that was not his own. His alarm increased. Whoever was attempting to communicate with him in this veiled and threatening fashion possessed a key to his office. Straightaway he requested that the university change the lock on his door. They granted him his wish and changed the lock. More notes, all of a similar nature, found their way into his office: “Tea, garlic, bread, lemons.” He asked that the lock be changed again.

  I waited for Suitcase Man to tell me more, but he got up from his chair. He was blushing. I could not tell if the colour suffusing his cheeks expressed shame or restrained anger. It seemed to me clear that the university had concluded that Suitcase Man was the very person they needed to keep out of Suitcase Man’s office.

  He stood in front of me, speaking in great haste and so softly that I could not understand a single word. Then he bowed politely, picked up his suitcase and walked briskly out of the library.

  INCIDENT REPORT 64

  At 8:25 PM, five minutes before closing, I made a quick tour of the children’s area to be sure no patrons remained. On the puppet stage in the story room, a sheet of paper caught my eye. Its message was in a handwriting with which I was becoming familiar. It encouraged somebody’s daughter to weep.

  Weep, weep, child, weep, let your tears flow, flow on my heart. Weep, weep, weep, let your tears flow on my heart. Weep, weep, weep, let your tears flow on my heart, weep on my heart, weep on my heart, ah, on my heart, ah! Let your tears flow, my daughter, my daughter, on my heart.

  I folded the note and slipped it into my desk drawer, though perhaps it was not directed to me. No mention was made of freckled hands.

  We, the staff of the Allan Gardens Library, closed up the building for the night. We turned out the lights, set the alarm and left by the back door. A few staff walked to the streetcar stop, others drove home, and I climbed on my bicycle and rode. As I glided slowly through the warm dark of the summer side streets, I started to cry, not only for my father but for Suitcase Man as well. The air felt soft. Then not far off a man began whistling. It wasn’t a song I knew. I stopped pedaling. In the middle of his tune the whistler changed directions, embroidering something new.

  INCIDENT REPORT 65

  “You are reading my book on Rothko?”

  “I can’t read it. It’s in Slovenian. I’m looking at the pictures.”

  “More ginger tea?”

  “It says, ‘Janko’ in the front, and also ‘Lizaveta.’”

  “The book was a present. It was given to both of us.”

  “She was the woman you lived with in Ljubljana? The one with the cat that climbed up into trees and couldn’t get down again?”

  “Yes. But not just trees, rooftops also.”

  “Lizaveta.”

  “The first time I saw a painting by Rothko I did not see just one. The room was full of them. I fell in love with Rothko’s work.”

  “Did Lizaveta have dark hair, a small, sharp nose, a heart-shaped face and skin like cream?”

  “No.”

  “That’s how I imagine her.”

  “Why?”

  “Her name and her cat.”

  “The first time I saw a Rothko I was living in Paris.”

  “I didn’t know you’d lived in Paris.”

  “I lived there only a short time. One day I wanted to see paintings by Chagall. I didn’t care which ones, so long as they showed how he used proportion and colour. But the gallery in the Centre Pompidou was closed for repairs. They sent me to the Musée d’Art Moderne at the Palais de Tokyo. People were waiting outside in the rain. They held their umbrellas over their heads and formed a long line from the steps of the Musée all the way along the sidewalk and around the corner. I had to wait with them. They’d come to see a special Rothko exhibit.

  “I knew very little about Rothko and thought I did not care about his work. When at last I got inside, I asked a guard if they had any Chagalls. “But of course, sir,” she answered. “We all have great sorrows.”

  “Because of my terrible pronunciation she’d understood “chagrins” not Chagalls—“Avez vous des chagrins?”

  “I told her that I agreed, about everyone having many sorrows. We laughed together, and then I went on my way. I passed quickly through several rooms until I came to the one small Chagall that was on display. There was only the one, and it disappointed me. I wandered into the Rothko exhibit.

  “The exhibit was a retrospective—room after room of his work. His paintings covered every wall, they erased the walls. His colours opened themselves wide, more open than windows. Nobody was moving. Yet everyone was travelling. They were going inside his colours. There were no lines to say, this part is closed and separate. But layer upon layer, and from between the layers light was escaping. Light leaked around the edges. No line declared, ‘Look in that direction over there! That way is the horizon.’ Everyone was travelling though nobody moved.”

  “Do you still love Rothko?”

  “Not the way I did, that day I came out of the rain and his paintings surrounded me and felt more real than my hands. That will not happen again. It does not need to happen again.”

  “How long did you stay in love with Rothko’s work?”

  “Five years. Maybe six. More ginger tea? Shall I make some more?”

  “Why more real than your hands? Why not more real than your legs or your feet?”

  “I don’t paint with my feet and I’ve never lost a toe.”

  “You’ve started worrying about your hands.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re anxious. I’ve told you too much about Rigoletto. He’s unsettling.”

  “I’m not worrying. Are you?”

  “He may be Suitcase Man.”

  Grocery lists slipped into books—I told this to Janko, who sat up alert. I reminded him of the opera score left on the photocopier, though perhaps by someone else.

  “At work you’ve told Irene, yes?”

  “Yes, Irene. And of course Nila finds out everything.”

  “I’m glad you’ve told Irene. Such things must not be kept secret.”

  “Should I be frightened?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I would love more ginger tea.”

  Janko placed his hand on my arm.

  INCIDENT REPORT 66

  A patron came to the Reference Desk at 3:04 this afternoon to report that a man was standing in the street in front of the library, directing traffic with a tea bag.

  INCIDENT REPORT 67

  At precisely 2:00 this afternoon, I received a telephone call from a patron who complained that the library ought not to hire librarians who “look like terrorists.” I thanked the caller for his advice and assured him that his concerns would be taken into consideration. He suggested that if all our librarians were dressed in cheerful uniforms, the public would feel less threatened by the severe demeanor and foreign physique of certain librarians. As soon as I’d hung up I reported his suggestion to our Branch Head, Irene Frenkel, thereby carrying out my end of the bargain. I remained uncertain as to what constituted his end of the bargain.

  INCIDENT REPORT 68

  The time was 11:00 AM, and the library quiet. I’d arrived at that place in “The Juniper Tree,” by the Brothers Grimm, where the stepmother offers her young stepson an apple, then cuts off his head. She uses as her knife the sharp-edged lid of the trunk into which the boy leans to select the piece of fruit she’s promised him. Next,
she sits the boy’s body in a chair by the door, and balances his head on his neck, tying a red kerchief around his wound.

  When the boy’s young sister returns home and sees her brother sitting with an apple in his lap, she asks for one also. The stepmother instructs the young girl to go ask her brother for his apple.

  “If he won’t give it to you, slap his cheek.”

  The girl does as she’s told. When her brother does not answer, she slaps his cheek, causing his head to fall off and roll on the ground. Overcome with horror, she runs to her stepmother.

  “See what you’ve done? You’ve killed him,” chastises the stepmother. “But I’ll protect you,” she reassures. “Nobody needs to know.”

  And the stepmother chops up the boy and cooks him in a stew. She sets the table, and calls in her unsuspecting husband. When he asks why his son has not come to dinner, she explains that she’s sent the boy on an errand to a neighbouring village.

  The father declares that the stew is delicious and requests a second helping. The little girl, weeping for her brother, crawls under the table where she gathers her brother’s bones in her handkerchief.

  Outside the house, the little girl buries the bones, and out of the ground springs a tree, and in the tree’s branches a bird alights and sings. This bird, eventually, will bring about the death of the stepmother, who will sink into the ground from which the boy will rise and come back to life.

  I wondered if the story was suitable to read to the adolescents I was preparing to visit at Covenant House, a shelter for teenagers living on the streets, runaways from their parents and perhaps themselves. I suspected they might relate to the violence and treachery in “The Juniper Tree.” It was a story that stared without wincing at human connivance. The stepmother’s horrible jealousy, her starkly exposed, calculating cruelty released an undeniable and fearsome energy. And the little girl’s love and innocence felt instinctive, not sentimental.