Little Fortress Read online

  How good have I been? I’ll tell you the story and let you decide. It begins in so many places, at so many times, loops back, repeats itself in infinite patterns. I’ll choose a place to begin, yet again.

  ONE

  Precinct of False Gods

  each instant we stand on the

  edge of the

  edge of event’s

  undecidable future

  – Daphne Marlatt,“harbouring”

  One

  Canada, 1921

  In the last days before we reached America, the air was biting with cold. Some nights, after the ladies were asleep, I would put on a coat, hat, scarf and gloves over my evening attire and go out on the deck. The ship’s staff told me not to, warned the cold was too much, it was dangerous. I ignored them, minced along the deck. A sharp chill wrapped around the ship, twisted around my ankles, legs, waist. The cold was pocketed in clouds of air I would walk into, a casing covering me until I blundered through to the other side. Eventually, we were so high in the Atlantic that I would watch icebergs calf and moan, float by as if apparitions. The slow movement of the liner against the steady drift of the bergs made it seem everything – water, land, sky, stars – was moving around and against each other, like parts in a clock. I would never last long, the cold slicing into me as mountains of ice lumbered by in dark water.

  We’d left England shrouded in fog that obscured the coastline, and Italy’s coast burned gold in my mind, blurred with sunlight. On the morning we approached the Atlantic coast of Canada, the light was so clear in the cold air that everything seemed sharply focused – each shadow etched on the rocky coast, every tree against every other tree. That was all I could see – rock and tree, light and shadow stark against each other. The ship steered out of the Atlantic into the Saint Lawrence, the rock gave way and then, aside from an occasional lighthouse and small croppings of tiny wooden houses perched on uncertain shores, there were only trees.

  We didn’t know for how long we’d be exiled in this country. I travelled as staff of the family – Duke Leone Caetani di Sermoneta, Ofelia and their four-year-old daughter, Sveva. It was she, not her mother, who watched with me as we passed into our new country. “Where are the people, Miss Jüül?” she asked.

  “I’m sure they’re in the cities, Sveva. We’ll meet them soon.”

  “Will we like them will they like us what will it all be like?” She spoke in one continual stream, a hybrid between Italian, French and English. I’d become accustomed to the mixed singsong of her speech.

  “I’m sure it will all be wonderful,” I told her, though, of course, I was not sure at all.

  Did I long for my own home? I thought often of my own family, people I had once known so well that I could recognize the cadence of footsteps, a cleared throat. Now they’d become more of a concept to me, like figures in a photograph, locked in time, fading. I had left them behind so long ago. Since then, I’d become separated from other people who felt more real to me, my desire for them keening just below the surface of my skin. One person in particular, though I would not name him. I had little idea of what my role would be in this new world, but I had grown accustomed to uncertainty, the spaces between, the ways I could slip into them.

  * * *

  “Oh, this is just awful,” Ofelia leaned into me and whispered. We had disembarked in Montreal and were checking into a hotel.

  “The hotel?”

  “No, everything – this cold air, their accents, even the calls of the birds. It’s all so strange, so shrill somehow.” She spoke to me in Italian. Ofelia did not like the sound of the English language. She had told me this every time we’d visited London, alternating her own speech between Italian and French. Around us in the lobby, we heard more French than English, but both languages seemed flatter, more nasal, coarser. Later, in the hotel restaurant, I overheard a Danish waiter serve a businessman from Copenhagen. It gave me some comfort, hearing my own language so far from home. I could hear in them my brothers, though I knew that I didn’t, not really. Our northern dialect was a blunter, lower Danish.

  We were in Montreal for three days to get our official papers sorted before we boarded a train. I didn’t sleep much, watched the country outside the window instead. Rock on rock, dense forest, huge stretches of lakes and long tracts that seemed locked in winter, the only variations in the way the cold covered the land – frosted over rock, stunting trees, textured in ice on lakes, flattened by wind or squalls of snow twisting upward before falling like curtains. Then, one day, the skies were saturated with blue pressing down on the pale prairie. Occasionally, a town or village with dirt streets, wooden sidewalks, tiny wooden churches, wooden houses with smoke rising out of thin stone chimneys and settling on the landscape. The cities – Winnipeg, Regina – were unlike those we were used to. There were paved roads and streetcars and buildings made of brick and stone, but on the outskirts of these, more wooden houses, more smoke. Once, I saw what looked like Native Indians – men, women and children – outside a train station, dressed like Europeans but without shoes, pulling wagons and wagons of what appeared to be hay.

  While I watched, Ofelia slept, or tried to sleep. I don’t know how much she saw from her berth. And I don’t know for what I hoped more – for her to see as little as possible, to minimize the shock, or for her to witness some of where we now were so that she could begin to familiarize herself with this place. I had spent my childhood on a farm in northern Denmark, so while Canada looked more vast, rougher, I could comprehend parts of it. For her, it would be completely foreign.

  The duke sat down across from me. “The Wild West, would you say?” He raised his eyebrow, looked amused. “Well, it will be an adventure.” He turned his face to the window for a moment, his expression more serious. “I’m not sure how Ofelia will adapt.”

  “No, neither am I.”

  He opened his cigarette case, slid one out, tapped the tip on his palm. “You’ll try to help her adjust?”

  “I will do my best.” I always did.

  “I’m thankful for that, you do know.”

  I nodded.

  “It will be an adjustment for all of us, but you and she will have each other.”

  Sveva came running down the aisle. “Daddy!” She’d been napping alongside Ofelia. I looked down the train to see if her mother was behind her.

  “Wurr-Burr!” He put his unlit cigarette back in his case and picked up Sveva as he stood. “Isn’t it a grand adventure, my girl?”

  “Yes!” She squirmed to get out of his hold and stood in front of me, took both of my hands and leaned across my lap, grin stretched as she strained her neck to bring her face close to mine. “A grand adventure, yes, Miss Jüül?”

  “Of course it is, sweetheart.” I rarely called her endearments. I was not Sveva’s nanny, though I would often be mistaken as such. I adored her, but she was her parents’ little girl, and I their employee. If nothing else, I had learned to know my place.

  “Do you think Mau-Mau is going to like it?” She pushed off from my lap and rebounded against the bench opposite me. “She’s been sleeping the whole time!” Sveva held her arms wide. “The whole time!”

  The duke reached for his daughter, one palm on her head, the other on her shoulder to calm her. He laughed. “Slow down, little one. Come.” He guided her into the aisle. “Let’s go see how your mother is doing, shall we?”

  She turned to me with her chin raised, a closed-lip smile broad across her face. Sveva looked proud in a way that only a four-year-old can, delighted with herself and her place in the world, secure with her father’s hand around hers.

  * * *

  As we moved west, the snow disappeared from the prairie and I saw instead fields of brown, flattened by weather, pocked with patches of new green. It seemed we had already moved through a continent of climate. We reached the Rocky Mountains, hulks of stone pushing up the sky high above us. We’d been on
the train four days. “In that time, we could have crossed the farthest reaches of Russia,” said Ofelia. She was out of the sleeping cabin for the first time since we’d boarded, wearing a watered silk dress, black pearls set against the collar, gloves on as though we were about to disembark to a formal dinner.

  “Inspiring, isn’t it?” said the duke. “This much land, this much potential.” He lifted his chest as though he, or those like him, were in some way responsible for the size of this country. Ofelia looked toward me and rolled her eyes, her fingers tracing each pearl around her neck as she looked out the window.

  We stayed for a month at the Banff Springs Hotel, where we watched from the windows as bears tracked dark shapes across the exposed slopes of mountains. One of the animals shambled into the village and was shot and removed quickly by men in hotel uniforms. It was the Wild West, complete with real redskins. We saw them in a performance put on by the hotel – The Noble Savage. Indian men with feathered headdresses rode bareback on horses that reared on their hind legs and thrashed their necks as though they might break. Those wild-eyed beasts were as much a part of the show as were the buckskinned, painted men who beat drums and mumbled guttural ditties. I watched the sinewed horses, felt the drums pounding up through my legs. I had become separated from the family during the performance. I saw them across the circle that the guests had formed. The duke had one arm around Ofelia’s waist and she leaned into him. In his other arm, he held Sveva. They were closer together as a family than I’d ever seen them in Europe.

  When the performance was over, Ofelia clapped politely, but the duke raised his long arms, applauded loudly, said, “Bravo, bravo!” I watched as Ofelia stepped away from him and reached for Sveva, who was beaming at her father, jumping from foot to foot, joining him in saying, “Bravo, bravo!” No one else did, the other patrons’ applause more subdued. I backed away from the crowd and made my way back to our rooms.

  That night in the dining room, I heard the duke talking to other guests. “I commend them. A country really must celebrate its natives. I think of parts of India – Benares, Kashmir – as well as Egypt, Turkey, Syria. Those places where the ancient and the modern meet and are celebrated, I find them to be the most fascinating, enlivening places in the world.”

  As he talked, Ofelia leaned toward me. “It’s grown tiresome, all this talk about the fascinating New World. Can we not be enlivened at home, in Italy, where we belong?”

  It wasn’t my place to say, either way.

  * * *

  After a month, we came down from the mountains, the train travelling along rivers, a thick white muscle of water below us, sending spray up to mist the windows. The water slowed to languid creeks and eventually the land smoothed into green valleys and what looked like the hills of Italy. We were told that the lakes here were aquamarine jewels between golden slopes, but what we saw as the train pulled into Vernon was one small, swampy lake rimmed with cattails and some sort of camp on the outskirts of town, high wooden fences and smoke rising from the other side.

  “This cannot be where we’re stopping.” Ofelia’s voice was sharp and desperate against my ear.

  It was.

  The duke and Ofelia believed that they were travelling lightly – and, for them, they were. I’d already become accustomed to what they carried with them, but no one in the tiny Western Canadian town could fathom the number of things we had. When all thirty large steamer trunks were set out on the platform, a crowd gathered around us. A young man pushed through it with a camera, a flashbulb going off, each of us wiping at our eyes as we looked around the tiny station. “Well, I hope that doesn’t end up in the daily,” the duke joked with the estate agent who was there to meet us.

  “Oh no, sir – I mean, Duke, Your Highness.” Leone waved his hand to indicate that formality wasn’t necessary. “The Vernon Daily News respects our citizens’ privacy. Of course, your arrival is news, but we wouldn’t print photographs of your possessions.” He didn’t understand that the duke was joking.

  “Good to know.” The duke nodded to him.

  A small crowd looked from the luggage to us, staring quite openly, as though we couldn’t see them watching us. I don’t know who was more stunned, the locals who had gathered to view our small group or Ofelia, who stood perfectly still on the platform. I sensed I was not noticed, not really, certainly not as much as the duke, Ofelia and even Sveva, who laughed as she spun circles around us. The man ensured that most of our belongings would be stored at the station, found a porter for our remaining luggage and ushered us to a waiting Ford. The duke took Sveva’s hand and I held my arm out to Ofelia like a thin ballast. She placed her fingers along my forearm, nothing more, though if she needed to steady herself it would be easy enough to wrap her hand into a grip.

  The man opened the door to the car with an almost exaggerated movement. “You have many of these in Europe yet?”

  “Automobiles? Oh yes, we’re not that far behind the times!” The duke lifted Sveva into the car, then helped Ofelia. I kept my hands at my side, nodded at him and got myself into the car before he closed the door. He sat in the front beside the man, who drove us two blocks over pitted dirt roads to a three-storey wooden structure on the main street of town. It was so close to the station that the porter had simply walked from there and was now ready to take our bags to our rooms. “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here.”

  We looked up at the building, Royal Hotel looped in fading paint. Ofelia leaned into me. “He’s sure, is he? He’s the only one then, I’m afraid.”

  Sveva ran up and down the boardwalk, delighted at the sound of her boots on the wood. Leone took Ofelia around the waist, smiled up at the building, squinted. When their daughter ran by the next time, I put out my arm to stop her, then knelt to her. “Go to your parents now. Tell them how happy you are to be here.” Someone should be. The duke was probably delighted, Ofelia horrified. I convinced myself I was used to being an afterthought, my reactions not entirely worth noting. If they had been, I would claim the territory between optimistic and noncommittal. I tried to convince myself I was still open to new experiences, though that word – open – hardly seemed to apply anymore, each move and change blocking off different parts of me, my mind a series of closed doors, storage trunks overfull, locked.

  * * *

  The next day, the estate agent came to pick up the duke to show him some houses for sale. Leone thought we might prefer to stay at the hotel. “Or go for a walk along Main Street, perhaps?”

  Ofelia stared at him, tilted her head – and did her eyes narrow, just a bit? “Oh no, we’re coming with you, darling. Who knows what you’ll purchase at this point – a teepee?”

  The duke rubbed his chin, looked above our heads as he said, “The Indians of this valley don’t live in teepees but in structures built into hills and mounds of earth. They’re called, depending on the area, quichis or kekulis.” When he looked back at us, his expression was earnest, as though he were quoting from an anthropological text, which he may well have been.

  “Fine, I also do not want to live in a mound of earth. Come, Sveva, Miss Jüül, we’re all going.”

  The man drove us around what there was of a town. We passed a large structure – an open-air factory, it seemed – stacked with large wooden crates. “The fruit-packing plant,” he explained.

  The duke turned to us and smiled. He put his hand on Ofelia’s. “See, darling – it really is warm enough here to grow fruit.” Ofelia nodded, something like a smile pulled tight across her mouth.

  “Oh yes, all sorts of fruit in this valley – perfect conditions, they say. We even have a fruit growers’ association now, a kind of union.” He let out a ragged laugh then cleared his throat. “Though I suppose you wouldn’t know much about unions, sir.”

  “Here you’re mistaken. I actually consider myself a union man.”

  “Oh?”

  “Being born a duke held me b
ack in Italy, but I did help those on our family’s holdings to form union-like groups, to take more ownership of the land.” He looked from Ofelia to me, nodding, as though looking for our confirmation. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve moved my family to Canada, a free country as they say, one in which we can be free of the narrow strictures of a culture based on blood, not merit.”

  Leone said all this in English and the man nodded along, though it seemed heavy conversation for a morning drive.

  We were passing the high wooden fencing we’d seen as we’d entered Vernon. “What is that?” asked Ofelia, also in English, perhaps the first I’d heard her speak the language since we arrived.

  “An internment camp left over from the war. Enemy aliens, Ukrainians and other Slavs – a precautionary measure, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, let’s hope we stay on the right side of the good Canadians!” Leone turned to us and laughed, though neither Ofelia nor I smiled in response. “Of course, I have a fair amount of Slavic blood myself. As does my daughter – you be careful, Sveva!” he called back to her.

  Sveva smiled as though she understood the joke, looked wide-eyed and blinking first toward her mother, then me. I reached out for her hand, gave it a squeeze and winked at her as though she and I were in on the same joke. Sveva beamed back at me.

  “But the war is over,” Ofelia said to me quietly in Italian.