A Second Chance Read online

  The doctor is coming by at 9 a.m., and at that point the family will decide if they’re going to unplug Virgil.

  I can stay no longer, as I didn’t call in sick. Marta can’t take the day off either. Cornelia, Eugene and his wife will stay on, since Dora has no family here other than Nelly.

  Outside, the rain has eased up a bit, but I don’t have an umbrella and get soaked before I get to my car on the far side of the parking lot.

  I can’t pull myself together to teach. I tell the students I have a friend in hospital teetering between life and death, and that I’m in no shape to hold a class. I ask them to read a chapter from their mandatory reading: The Road to Chlifa.

  The girls put their hands over their mouths when I tell them the news. Why is it that women cover their lips when they’re surprised, afraid, or in shock? Is it to prevent themselves from crying out, yelling, or speaking? Young as they are, my female students have the same instincts as grown women.

  The kids are compassionate and do as I ask. They’re certainly happy with this unexpected change in their routine, which means there’ll be no boring grammar exercises today. Abla, Loïc, and Krystel come to tell me that they understand my distress, for they’ve already been through something similar when they lost an uncle, a grandmother, and a cousin. They even express their condolences.

  They imitate adults so well.

  I do the same thing in the next class. The students learn the news while they’re changing rooms, and the ones coming in surround my desk to ask if my friend is still alive. I tell them I don’t know anything yet. They read silently for a bit, then start whispering. I leave them be and turn my back on them, looking out the window. It’s pouring now. The schoolyard is already green. Further away, on the soccer field, a young man is playing with his dog.

  At noon, I check my email. Marta has just sent a group message to let us know that Virgil died at eleven o’clock. They started unplugging the machines at ten o’clock, but Virgil had already stopped fighting. He had practically been killed during the crash. The doctor’s job was to comfort the family. They had done everything possible, knowing that Virgil’s heart would never stand the shock. We all knew how sick he had been. He had had heart surgery twice, so we’d been sure he would be the first of us to die. Part of what shocks us about this is that it messes up our bets on his weak heart.

  I go to see Suzanne, the secretary, to ask her to find a substitute for my afternoon classes, as I’m not able to work. I explain the situation to her, and her hand flies to her mouth – the very same gesture.

  When I leave the school, I head straight to Dora’s. Their house is on a street that runs parallel to ours.

  Her living room is already packed with twenty people. Dora has stopped crying. They gave her a pill at the hospital, and now she looks dizzy, with the swollen cheeks and puffy eyes that come of a sleepless night.

  The younger members of our group are doing well. They’re shocked, of course, but death’s a thrill for them. Not for us. We’re scared, perhaps for the first time. Virgil’s death is the dress rehearsal.

  We can no longer really be newcomers if we’re burying one of our own. We’re becoming like other Canadians.

  The most active among us is Silvia, a young woman in her thirties that I hardly know. Dora and Virgil apparently spent part of their summer vacation with Silvia and her husband. Now she’s become a kind of master of ceremonies. She loves playing this role, which she does until she gets on our nerves, though we don’t much care as long as she does the job.

  First, she gets paper so we can put together a list of everything that has to be done for the funeral. She makes me the official scribe, since I’m the teacher.

  We start with the food that has to be bought today, as everyone who comes to the vigil will have to be fed. It becomes clear that we’re all going to hang around until Saturday, the day of the funeral. Silvia decides on some pastries from Serano’s, the Greek pastry shop, and Virgil’s favourite Spanish red wine.

  Virgil’s cousin Aline has found a bottle of rum in the basement. She gives us each a big glass, and we gulp it down, wishing the deceased peace to his soul. Tradition calls for us to spill a drop on the floor, but we don’t do that. We know how obsessed Dora is about her house.

  The rum perks us all up, and my pen starts gliding more easily across the paper, which I mark with arrows and numbers to show how many dishes, napkins, bottles of wine, salt sticks, spinach rolls, cheese pastries, and fancy cakes we’re going to need.

  We move on to Virgil’s suit, shirt, socks, and shoes. Someone says that people are buried barefoot over here, as they consider the deceased won’t be doing any walking. We’re all outraged. The winters are too harsh to leave a body shoeless!

  We now have to decide if we should follow the Orthodox tradition.

  The men really don’t care, but the women decide they want to – which is when things get a bit complicated. Virgil died without confession, with no candle, and no priest. That means we’ll need pomnets, a kind of white handkerchief with a coin tucked in one corner and a candle in the other. We’re going to need to prepare sixty of these, which will be lit by sixty men when the body is lowered into the grave. This way, we’ll be sure Virgil will be able to find his way up to heaven; the coin will pay for his passage on the other side. Someone asks how we can be so sure the money will pay his way up and not down. Someone else answers that the way down is free.

  We laugh for the first time.

  Silvia is appalled to notice that we have not yet covered the mirrors in the house. We do this at once, and Aline takes it upon herself to hang a black scarf outside, over the front door, to indicate there’s a dead body in the house.

  Where does this custom come from? From the time of the Black Death?

  At four o’clock, the wine and the spinach-and-cheese rolls arrive. Just in time, as we’re starving by now. More people are coming, everybody choosing to take the day off to be here. They’re all jealous of me, as I’m one of the last of his friends to have seen Virgil alive and well, for he and Dora dropped by on Saturday to take me for a walk. The group wants to know if he said something that suggested he knew he was going to die. No, there were no such signs, he just acted and talked as usual. They decide this was a sign.

  At nine in the evening, the house is bursting with people. The lucky ones, who had a comfortable place to sit, won’t budge for anything in the world, even if they could. Some people are sitting on the floor, the men in the middle of the living room, the women in the kitchen.

  I’m still the scribe, wielding the pen at Silvia’s command. She asks me to be alert, and write down everything I hear and everything I myself remember of the traditions we grew up with and carried across the ocean.

  So, there is this boutique on Notre-Dame Street; we have to send someone there for candles. We’ll need to change money for the sixty coins, and we mustn’t forget white cotton and scissors for the pomnets. Very important: we have to buy either a small Orthodox cross or a tiny icon with any saint protector for the casket. From the men’s corner, a voice pipes up to tell us we’d better put one of Virgil’s models inside, one of the miniature planes and helicopters he made as a hobby.

  This gives me an idea for what I can write in the condolence book at the funeral home. I jot it down quietly on a piece of paper and slip it into my pocket: Safe flight, Virgil.

  Dora is busy explaining what happened to each newcomer. She keeps saying it’s driving her crazy that we left Virgil alone in a refrigerated box at the morgue.

  By midnight people start leaving the house. I suddenly remember Adam. I grab my bag, put on my shoes and leave without saying goodbye. So many people are lining up to kiss Dora, and I can’t wait. I ask Marta to make my apologies for me.

  The rain has stopped. I take a deep breath, hoping to smell flowers, but all I can smell is the wet earth and the snow. Winter may still make a co
meback.

  Adam is watching TV. When he hears the key in the door, he comes up the stairs to greet me. He doesn’t really remember the reason I’m late. When I tell him, he asks me about the place this person occupied in our life. This remains Adam’s greatest concern, to know exactly what our life consisted of. Was this Virgil important to us? Did we really like him? Are we really affected by his death?

  I sit down with him on the sofa and explain that Virgil was our neighbour, that we spent the last ten years together, ever since we bought this house, that in summer they used to invite us to their pool, and that sometimes we went for walks together in the park.

  He says nothing and bends his head. He needs time to figure this out before asking another question. I admire his prudence.

  He finally asks if Dora and Virgil were happily married. I say they probably were. People are happily married when they can’t imagine living alone any more.

  I ask him if he ate, and he says yes. I then suggest we brush our teeth and go to bed. I’m exhausted.

  The next day, we try to get back to normal, but it’s impossible. By noon, we’re all back in Dora’s living room, sacrificing our bank of sick days and our holidays to hang around and listen to the same stories.

  Immigration had, until now, spared us this kind of experience, but Virgil’s death is adding a few new twists to our migrant existence. We learn that the corpse goes directly from the morgue to the funeral home with a stop en route for the embalming. We have to find a Catholic cemetery willing to accept the Orthodox, which is not the case in every neighbourhood. And we discovered there are catering services offered by countless companies that can spare us, the women, the job of cooking for well over a hundred people.

  We know how to party, how to celebrate birthdays, marriages, and baptisms, but we don’t know how to organize a funeral. We make mental notes, learning as we go.

  It’s a challenge to find a priest. Virgil was a non-believer and profoundly disliked our black-robed servants of God. We figure we have to care about doing things properly to save his soul.

  It turns out that at a recent commemorative feast for the mother of a friend, he got talking with a young priest who charmed him not with his faith, but with his good humour. We decide to find out who this good shepherd is and from which of our seven churches. Nelly’s future mother-in-law takes charge of this, shutting herself in Virgil’s office to make phone calls. When she finally finds our good Samaritan, she comes out with the phone for everybody to hear the situation.

  The priest has a baptism on Saturday, but he could do the funeral too, if we agree to postpone it by half an hour. We happily agree, relieved to be able to tick off another of the tasks on my list.

  On Thursday evening, we start tailoring the pomnets. Somebody has bought the cotton and a pair of scissors that cut in a zigzag pattern. The women are all amazed at this, and we each try them out on a piece of fabric.

  Five women sit in the living room making the sixty handkerchiefs. Two wrap twenty-five cent coins in one corner of the fabric, while three others attach the long yellow candle to the opposite corner. It’s Lily, Eugene’s wife, who knew of the religious store on Notre-Dame Street where they sell these particular candles handmade out of natural wax. When we go to church, we pay a dollar each for them without ever wondering where they came from.

  We’re as solemn as the Pythia presiding over a sacred ceremony. We enjoy the prestige we have in the eyes of the mourners. No one dares disturb us. New arrivals enquire discreetly what we’re doing, and we’re proud to explain. People tell funny stories about funerals they went to as children in their villages and their neighbourhoods.

  For the pomnets we’ve decided to follow the southern tradition, in spite of the fact that Virgil was born in Bucharest and did not give a damn about any of this. He belonged to an army family that was forbidden, by the Communist Party, from entering the church. He had a PhD in mathematics and another in aerospace, which Dora thought had something to do with his atheism. Maybe calculus and jumbo jets persuaded him there was no God.

  This does not keep us from working on our pomnets.

  Cornelia tells us we have a knot in the thread we’re using for the coin and the candle, and that this is bad luck. We’re halfway through and don’t let this stop us. It would be just too much to undo and then redo so many pockets, and we’ve already had enough of this merde.

  Virgil’s co-workers tell us wonderful stories about how skilled he was, how good a friend, how kind a colleague. These are engineers from Bell Helicopter and also from Bombardier, where he used to work. Some people are here from the workshop, too, paying homage to their boss.

  Dora listens in astonishment. The husband she knew was short-tempered and he never gave her any credit or accorded her any respect. He used to put her down in public, in front of their guests. We all knew this intolerant side of Virgil.

  Virgil and I once argued about cats. I had mentioned that there were studies that suggest cats can carry a virus that makes their owners more aggressive. This is something I’d read in Maclean’s, which Virgil abhorred from that day on. This virus survives in parts of the Third World but long ago was essentially eradicated in the West, except when it’s passed on by a cat. A case in point is that of Colonel Russell Williams, who had been accused of sexually abusing and killing two women. It was when he got a cat, apparently, that his aggressiveness escalated.

  We all look over at Virgil’s cat, which has never budged from the front door, in spite of all the comings and goings. She just lies on the rug and stares at everyone who goes by. When one of the men tries to move her, she bites his foot. Dora hates this cat, and the feeling is mutual.

  We spend five days together. Dora is looking much better and even starts joking about finding someone else. We feel we’re not as welcome now, after days of keeping an eye on her, but we cannot stop ourselves from coming here. We can’t get back to our lives until we see Virgil to his grave.

  On Friday evening, the body is finally revealed in the funeral home. The embalmers did quite the job, we have to admit. There’s no sign of the deformed creature we last saw, with purple skin and bruises, connected to transparent tubing like an Alien. He’s a bit swollen, but we recognize his scowling face and black mood, poised to contradict every one of us. The left side of his head, which was shaved for surgery, is masked by white roses. The right side is darker.

  The accident happened at a red light. He had just picked his motorbike up from the repair shop, where he’d had the front wheel fixed. The mechanic had warned him to make a few turns on a quiet street before going into traffic, in order to clear the oil from the tire. What he told the police is that Virgil was dismissive. “Look at my white hair,” he would say. “You really think I still need you to tell me how to drive?”

  So he rode straight into the traffic and the wheel started to lose its grip. Instead of slowing down, he accelerated, hoping to regain equilibrium. Fatal error. The motorcycle rose up on its back wheel, and Virgil went down, with 300 kilograms of hardware crashing on top of him.

  Dora still has it in her to provide all these details.

  At six o’clock in the evening, the priest comes to do the first Mass. Dora doesn’t want to sit down, so five of us prop her up. From time to time she tries to push us away, for the room is already hot. We’re so tired that the music makes us sleepy. A few rows back, some of the women start sobbing. These are more distant acquaintances who have just learned the news.

  After half an hour we can finally go downstairs into a large dining room to eat and have coffee. We greatly appreciate the new items some of our friends have brought; after four days, we’ve had enough of Serano’s pastries. We’re happy to feast on taramasalata, oysters with cream cheese, pita bread with hummus, and sesame biscuits.

  We’re fed up seeing the same faces and hearing the same stories.

  By nine o’clock, silence has fallen
on the lounge. People sneak a look at their watches. We’re all impatient for the funeral home to close its doors.

  For some time now, Dora has been standing next to the casket. It looks as though she’s whispering something in Virgil’s ear.

  This evening, I brought Adam with me. Now that we’re all eager to leave this place, people look at him more often and with greater interest. He doesn’t raise his eyes. At one point, he whispers in my ear that all these people look very old.

  He’s right. We’ve all become old, all of a sudden.

  Do they think Adam is the one who should be lying over there?

  I look at them whenever they stare too insistently at Adam. If there is someone above us who decides these things, he figured Adam was worthy of hanging around a bit longer. I’m determined to support this decision.

  At ten o’clock sharp, I take Adam’s hand and quietly ask him to get up. I think he’s understood my contempt. Before we leave the room, he lifts his head and greets the group joyfully.

  I don’t bring Adam with me to the cemetery. I know it will be long and his leg won’t be up to it.

  The priest holds the farewell Mass in the funeral parlour, and I find it particularly beautiful. This is the first time I have listened to it so closely. The young priest has a wonderful voice, which really makes up for all these centuries-old Byzantine songs. People are crowding around to listen and gaze at the casket. There are newcomers who are still able to sob. We of the old guard are as silent as fish.

  My God, Virgil was able to gather all these people together. Or is this an attempt to reassure ourselves that we’re not just immigrants any more? We’re starting to belong in this country.

  Dora insists that the cortège take a detour to her street on its way to the cemetery. She wants to stop in front of the house for a few minutes to let Virgil have a last look. He bought this house ten years ago, an old building like all the others in the neighbourhood, and renovated it from top to bottom. He changed the wooden flooring, knocked down walls, changed all the doors, widened the living room, added a glassed-in porch, dug a pool, and planted a hedge that he used to prune meticulously.