The Communist's Daughter Read online

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  It occurs to me, before we proceed any further, that you might be interested to know something of the Bethune history. Let me assure you that it is not my intention to speak harshly of anyone in this family, least of all your paternal grandfather. But let me say also that fairness and truth shall reign, that is my promise to you. He was, in the end, only a man; and, as such, his decent character and natural goodness waged a silent war with the anger he carried within him. Over time that war spread, as does this present war in China, to consume the life and thoughts of his older son, your absent father.

  My mother and father were introduced in 1883 in Hawaii—that flowery paradise so unlike these sparse mountains—by the charismatic preacher of a church that had wrenched her all the way from Plymouth to do its Christian work, namely, to bring salvation to the heathens. Apparently it did not take my father, a traveller in search of business opportunities, long to see the light as well. A coconut might have fallen from a nearby tree, or perhaps a bird sang hidden somewhere in its palm fronds, a sign to a young man looking to change his fortunes. We can only imagine.

  I am told that my father, Malcolm Nicolson Bethune, a Canadian, timidly shook the hand of the evangelical English missionary Elizabeth Ann Goodwin in that paradise on earth, by then an Eden in decline, an island of lost promise. That he took her hand, made her his, and that together they sailed for Canada.

  But did my dear mother know what she was getting into? Knowing her as only a son can, now an adult older and wiser than the innocent evangelist she was then, and bracketed by my own failures in love that we’ll get to later, I can only answer that no, she did not. It is true that her tutelage only strengthened my father’s sanctimony. He was a machine waiting to be tooled, to be sure. But did she know to what extent he would embrace this new salvation? My mother, I believe, lived to regret it.

  Once married and back home, in the village of Gravenhurst, Ontario, he became minister of the Knox Presbyterian Church at number 315 Muskoka Road, though in the years to come we would move constantly. This is where your father comes into the picture. A village known as the sawdust city, Gravenhurst smelled of amputated trees and manure. But its greatest promise, this new job, was my father’s rock-solid guarantee of a lifetime of rectitude. He was respected, as were all men of the cloth in his day, and both feared and hated by all but the most forgiving of souls.

  His father before him—whose profession and name, Henry Norman Bethune, I proudly share—was, in 1850 in Toronto, a founding member of the Trinity College Medical School, a good man and a disappointed father. I never heard that truth spoken openly and neither will you, but at the age of seven I saw in his eyes, as his fingers delicately picked at the tired sheets, the regret of a defeated man. After he died they tied his jaw shut with a red handkerchief and took him away: my first experience of death. His secret grief soon became my silent companion. And your grandfather, my dad, was free to do as he pleased, now that the only authority on this earth greater than his had been silenced forever.

  My father was a sedentary, slow-moving man. We lived in a quiet house. I recall the nature of his fierce concentration, which the whole house was taught to respect, and those moments when he would emerge from his study and stare off into space. It always seemed to me that he was plotting some exquisite coup de grâce against all the unbelievers surrounding him. He was a strong man, both of body and spirit, though as I recall his only two forms of physical exercise—the first powered by a steady stride, the second by those unaccountably gnarled fists—were his twice daily walks to church and the vigorous thrashings he doled out to his children.

  I was carefree before the troubles between me and my father began. We were well loved and warm and fed, my siblings and I, and in this silence I now thank my mother and father for basic comforts that in those days we all took for granted. I can say we benefited from the favours that came to the family of a respected man of God. I suppose you might even argue that God has not failed me in that sense. In fact, I’ll admit that I enjoyed time spent with my father. So you see, it was not all fire and brimstone. I took pride in his strength and the respect he commanded in town and enjoyed the family histories he regaled us with as we gathered by the kitchen fire on a cold winter’s night. He was at times a warm man, and he held us close in his big arms as he told stories of the world he’d seen before crossing over to the Lord—of Hawaii and the prairies of Canada, the Maritime provinces and other places he’d been to and ultimately renounced for the small world we now inhabited. The Lord was All and All was the Lord, he would say, Amen. What a grand spectacle and delight was Creation. You will see it one day, God willing, he would say. Our mother looked on, a contented woman at those times, I’m sure, busying herself with needle and thread or reading Shakespeare and Ibsen and Saint Theresa. These were fine moments, and to this day I cherish their memory.

  My mother, a woman of great imagination, never failed to encourage the natural curiosity that was brewing deep down inside me. She left books on my bedside table and two or three days later would sit with me and listen patiently as I described the adventures of Tom Sawyer or Jim Hawkins or White Fang. Evenings, when the house was quiet, you would find her reading at the kitchen table over a cup of tea, as I was in my bedroom, the covers pulled to my chin. We were both very bookish then. I still remember the magic spell a volume from her evangelical days cast over me, a large, musty old thing that told the story of a Catholic missionary’s travels through Mongolia. She hadn’t said a word about it, but one evening I found it under my pillow. There was no telling what my father would have thought of all those Catholics and Buddhists traipsing through the clouds together; it was best not to invite scrutiny. She was eager, I think, to have me pick up where she left off. The world of the mind, of travel, of good works. The great world awaited me, as it had awaited her in her day, in all its glory and sin, before motherhood overcame her.

  Envelope Two

  I should tell you that my scientific nature began to manifest itself at an early age. I wonder if we will have that in common, this interest in the workings of the natural world. For my tenth birthday I was given a jackknife, so I suppose my parents had me figured out by then. My experiments with this handy tool were in the beginning barely a step ahead of the frog hunting and ant burning of my peers. But one day, early the following summer, the single most important idea of my young life leapt out at me from the bony cavity of a battered and eyeless gull—at first glance no different from any other dead animal, yet my interest in it would fire the opening salvo in the war between father and son.

  We were living in Owen Sound then, a small community northwest of Toronto that clings for life to the southern tip of Georgian Bay. It was lovely and wild, the bay, changing from day to day, hour to hour, its rocky edge a rich playground of delight and discovery for a boy my age. It seemed to me possessed by rebellious spirits I couldn’t help but identify with. I felt its moods, I believed, and it felt mine. Such was my fanciful imagination. In any case, it was a sunny afternoon, with only a spot of cloud hanging in the east. The bird was nestled snugly in an open tomb of cracked shale and warped driftwood and pulsating with maggots. I recall the feeling that overcame me, even now as I write, so many years later—the feeling of something turning inside me, some new and unusual consciousness. I cannot say what it was in this animal that coaxed such trembling from my fingertips, such pure excitement. Perhaps overnight I had turned the right age to finally appreciate the breadth of my world and its unsubtle avian tragedies. Whatever the reason, it was as if a thunderbolt had struck me between the eyes. I realized in an instant that I was completely alone in the world, and that all that my father had taught us about the Good Book and angels and the Resurrection was lies.

  After hacking at it with my jackknife, I decided not to bury the bird behind the cedar woodpile, pray for it or utter a child’s fairy tale of last rites, as I usually did. No, I left it right where I’d found it and visited
it day after day, watching it wither before my eyes. I didn’t study the bird’s inner workings but instead focused on its descent into nothingness. It was a remarkable experience, for my curiosity burned with the meaning of life itself.

  Every day the gull grew smaller and the maggots grew fatter and more numerous, and then it was the maggots’ turn to die. One day, it stood to reason, my turn would come. Before the next rainstorm the bird was no more than a hollow shack of bones and feathers. For so long my quiet neighbourhood, including that rocky shoreline, had been ruled by my father’s silent God; and now, suddenly, it was not. I fail to describe adequately the force such a revelation had on my young mind. Perhaps one day you will have such a moment yourself and understand what I am talking about.

  *

  One early evening, at the end of a glorious summer’s day, the dinner bell rang. As we took our seats at the kitchen table, I felt somehow that my life was about to change, that poor bird doubtless having prepared me for the impending confrontation. My father’s sharp hands formed a spire in front of his face. His moustache back then was as bushy as a raccoon’s tail. “Let us pray,” he said, and we did.

  O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much

  seek to be consoled as to console,

  not so much to be understood as to understand,

  not so much to be loved as to love;

  for it is in giving that we receive,

  it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

  it is in dying that we awake to eternal life.

  He then asked God to bless our food, and continued with a brief prayer for each of us, speaking our names in the tired crescendo I knew so well from his sermons. The secret I held—the second, really, the first being that look in my dying grandfather’s eyes—had practically throbbed against the bones in my skinny chest as we spoke the words of Saint Francis of Assisi. We prayed along with my father—myself, mother, brother and sister—and when we finished we offered a humble Amen, then set to eating our chicken and green beans and potatoes—a meal I remember so clearly—in silent gratitude.

  I don’t pretend to blame him for the violence that followed. My impertinence and love of words often outran my deference and good sense in those days, and this is something I have trouble with from time to time even now. Clearing my throat, I put down my fork and knife and stood. “Father, say a farmer’s son has no taste for his father’s rutabagas—what then?” My family looked up from their plates.

  “Well, then, he eats carrots,” said my sister, Janet, rather sensibly.

  “Norman, sit down, please,” my father said.

  Vexed, I refused. “Nor carrots! What if he doesn’t like carrots either!”

  What I was trying to say—and eventually did—was that one was not required to love vegetables simply because one’s father earned his living farming the fields, and though a boy’s father was the minister of the church in a certain small town, he himself might be right in considering Jesus less real than a rutabaga or carrot.

  My heart racing, I glowed with defiance and pride. My father’s face turned pale as a sheet, then flashed bright red. His eyes narrowed. He rose like thunder from the head of the table, slammed a fist down against it—upsetting the plates and glasses—and seized my right ear in his other spade-like hand. The rest of me followed out the door and was soon sprawled upon the ground. It was a hot evening. The squirrels chattering in the overhead branches fell silent. My mother stood in the doorway, young Malcolm and Janet under either arm. None moved to help me but I could not blame them, either then or now. This was my battle.

  Well, he was too angry to do anything but push my face into the ground and hold it there, grinding. It wasn’t much of a fight, and I won’t hide the fact that I began to cry. He lowered his mouth to my ear—this deaf one, the left—and I could feel his hot breath on my skin. I suspect it was here he saw himself for what he had become, a brute, a bully, a man who would smite a child, and he began sobbing. “Children are the heritage of the Lord,” I heard him say as he collapsed over me. My mother rushed forward and lifted him off, then took me in her arms and wept and begged for mercy for her injured family. She held me, and together we wept like saplings snapped in a storm.

  *

  The little things you remember—sometimes it amazes me. Today Ho walked past my door with a crate of empty bottles of some sort or other, and that sound got me to thinking about Spain. This was how we got blood up to the front, after we packed the bottles in ice in the back of the Ford. I don’t think I ever consciously listened to that sound at the time, but now I can remember it so clearly. After the first few trips we found ice was more reliable than the Electrolux refrigeration units I’d brought down from London. Sometimes we would stop the Ford on the way up the Guadarrama Pass, which separates the provinces of Madrid and Segovia, and there, just shy of the summit, cool the bottles in one of the streams that ran down the south face of the sierra, while we waded barefoot under the bony pines.

  After thinking about it for some time I have decided that in war, the lucky man is one who has something of a serene resignation regarding his fate. It is not whether he lives or dies but that he knows he has no choice in the matter that makes the difference. That should make things a great deal easier. I’m certainly not saying I don’t care one way or the other, only that death out here is too random to think otherwise. I don’t want to scare you, or myself. I fully intend to keep my head down. But I suppose I am resigned, as much as is possible. You see it in the eyes of the partisans here. I think they know, each of them, that the end of the day belongs to chance. I am aware of that resignation in their eyes, since I see it every day; it is so very close to an absence, I think, that I often find myself looking again to see if I’m understanding it quite right. Well, the truth is that a man prepares himself for death up here, and the faster he does it the better off he is. That’s all well and good, at least when you’re surrounded by people who are out to kill you, but the nihilism your mother spoke of had claimed a part of all of us in Spain in a way it does not in China. One does not hear of suicide in China, nor is there much drunkenness. I can’t say why we feel differently about it here, and perhaps this is only my own bias showing through.

  In Spain I saw many men fail to find the resignation I’m talking about. You saw it when a man took his own life so that another was denied the pleasure of doing it for him. I think alcohol also helped, though it did not stop you from getting killed. I knew that well enough from my time in the Great War. Regarding matters of life and death, some men wore a strange nobility and patience, which others characterized as madness or ignorance. Some died with the fervour of the righteous. Others sought their death with a blind fury. Some didn’t care either way, and those were the fortunate ones. Very few mentioned a wish to speak of God or other spiritual matters, and none asked for last communion as this was frowned upon mightily. The common expression of the time was I s——t on God or I s——t on the Virgin or I s——t in the Milk of the Virgin. I was shocked by the blasphemy at first, but in times like those you get used to so many things so very quickly.

  Fewer men died after we got the clinic up and running in Madrid, a consolation I try to remember, but we were only a small group. The ones we were not able to get to lay awake and lucid as they watched their own blood spill into the earth and soak it with curious indifference and puddle deep, as if a storm of black rain had passed unseen over their heads. Many of them lay murmuring with their faces to the ground and their thoughts consumed by the furious negotiating of the dying, which on occasion you heard coming across the fields: O That I May Live One Day More, O That I Do Not Die. But this negotiation rarely prevailed, and the earth grew darker and the negotiating more frenzied. Then gradually it grew fainter, and soon there was little thinking and no negotiating, just the quiet calm of resignation as thunder and chaos pealed through the sky. Sometimes a gentle hand came out of nowhere, really, to close the eyes of the dead. When th
is hand failed to appear the eyes were left open to stare blankly upon the streaked ground, and some men were carried to me in this fashion, confused with those wounded but still alive.

  The strange slowness of the fighting continued through February and March of 1937. We were a besieged city. The fighting at the western edge of the capital continued and we went to it almost every day. If a man fell to the earth to escape a raking of fire he might choose to close with his thumbs the sightless eyes of the fallen man beside him, if he himself believed this simple kindness might come in line with his own private negotiations with fate, this respect for the dead as payment in lieu of one’s own death. But in fact there were very few men who still believed the dead could be abused or desecrated any further, and so the many who had yet to die fought on, mindless of the bodies piling up on the landscape, and instead turned their thoughts to survival, not salvation. I did not blame them one bit.