The Darling of Kandahar Read online

  We’re members of a community only as long as that community wants us, and it forces us to do what it thinks right. We belong to a group for as long as the group makes our decisions for us. An immigrant community is a sort of enlightened socialist world in which a human being dedicates himself to the community’s interests while the community itself takes care of protecting us, keeping us on the right path, and giving our voice authority.

  This was no longer my mother’s case. Searching for a church in which to spend Christmas and Easter in the Orthodox way had nothing to do either with religion or with her community.

  Before deciding which church to opt for, my mother visited all of them. For her, the main question was their membership in different patriarchies that modified the Orthodox mass. Two of them were linked to the motherland and therefore submitted to the Patriarch of Bucharest: the two others were loyal to the Patriarch Nathanael, based in Chicago, a kind of dissident church born in the aftermath of the Second World War when the Communists came to power and there was a massive exodus of Orthodox Russians, Romanians, Serbs, and Bulgarians.

  My mother did not sympathize with those dissident churches, which had shortened the mass to cater to Americanized Orthodox believers. She did not like progressive priests who softened the harsh Byzantine canon and flouted the old Orthodox rules. One example being that a priest had to marry a virgin and was certainly not allowed to marry a divorced woman, as had happened in one instance.

  Personally, I think the main reason for her discontent was aesthetic. When Orthodox missions lacked the money to build their own churches, they usually rented other Christian churches from Catholics or Protestants. My mother found this hybridization repugnant. What she especially disapproved of was the absence of the iconostasis, a kind of wall covered with orthodox icons that is supposed to keep the priest hidden from view during mass. The metamorphosis of the bread and the wine had to be kept from ordinary mortals’ comprehension and sight, and remain as secret as the Eleusinian mysteries.

  After two years of searching, my mother had narrowed her search down to two Romanian missions that had succeeded in building their own Orthodox churches. The bigger of the two was on Christophe-Colombe Street, led since the 1950s by an authoritarian priest with a reputation of having been an ultranationalist Legionary partisan. My mother disliked his tyrannical way of conducting the business of the church and his secret involvement in community quarrels.

  One Easter evening, my mother finally decided on the church on Masson Street, a colourful wooden building with a huge iconostasis covered in icons donated by community artists, and topped by a starry blue ceiling. People said the old priest had been a spy for the Romanian Secret Service before the fall of the Communist regime. The money used to build the church had been donated by the Romanian Patriarchy, so how could you not suspect that the Secret Service was involved? Where else could this sudden interest in the Diaspora have come from, given that monasteries and churches were being toppled at the time in Romania itself?

  On the night of Resurrection, when my mother made up her mind, the mass was dreadfully long, respecting all the old Orthodox rules. Four hours of religious songs, incense, and prayers! My mother thought this right, since we had travelled such a long way to attend the service. The choir was run by professionals trained in theological institutes, and she was especially pleased that all the choristers were men. But what convinced my mother to remain faithful to this particular church was that, at the end, the priest gave us each a small glass of wine with some bread, the flesh and the blood of Christ. This was unexpected; the other missions gave people breadcrumbs, which appalled my mother. How dare they disgrace The Last Supper when – the Bible was explicit on this matter – the Lord had poured his blood into his disciple’s glasses?

  So my mother stopped roaming and settled on this church. She went only at Christmas and Easter, and for a few years I accompanied her. Later on, I refused to go, and my mother, uncomfortable about crossing the city alone at midnight, also stopped going.

  All of which is to say that I remain an Orthodox Christian. At Villa Maria my religion did not bother me, and as long as it was not embarrassing, why would I want to change it? I attended the Catholic mass and sang in the church choir.

  The reason I’ve been talking about my religion is that Yannis, as a Greek, was Orthodox, too. Right from the beginning of our relationship, that seemed like a sign to me. His name was Greek for John, and St. John was the one who paved the way to the Messiah. He was a baptizer despite himself, but I will not take this any further.

  I was talking about my time at Villa Maria.

  On the school’s centenary, the Archbishop made a speech that included a definition of Catholicism later printed in our school paper: “Coming from the Greek, Catholic means universal. Your school is universal because it is open towards the big wide world. It is universal because it welcomes young people from all cultures and religions. It is universal because it refers to Jesus’s teachings on what we consider today to be the civilization of love. Only someone who does not truly understand Catholicism would be ashamed of it?”

  I was touched by this Catholic education that made me familiar with religious matters. I have a better understanding today of why Catholics have so much trouble getting rid of the totalitarian universe of their faith. Their love for the Lord is strongly tied to a holy atmosphere carefully created over many centuries. The paintings, the extravagant architecture, the magnificent music, all play an important role in keeping the faith alive. When a Catholic loses his faith, he is banished from a beautiful place, a kind of an antechamber to heaven. Unfortunately, those who get rid of God do not drop their secret hope that Paradise still exists.

  In my little Orthodox family, the love of God comes and goes easily, according to circumstances and our mood. As for the holy atmosphere, priests in Canada preferred to rent Anglican or Baptist buildings because they were smaller. The worst, however, according to my mother, was an Orthodox mass in a deserted Catholic cathedral with clerics who closed their eyes to this sacrilege in order to pay the heating bills. That was one way to deny the past and reconcile two religions that continue their age-old conflict over a few words – and that had chosen to miss out on every chance they had to get along. An Orthodox mass performed in a Catholic church was not just strange; it was blasphemy.

  One morning after I got the second letter from Yannis, I woke up thinking about the Archbishop’s speech, but not because of his view of Catholicism. There was another passage in which he mentioned a woman’s comments about men going to war. What had struck me at the time was that the Archbishop said this woman was a Jew. Why didn’t he say just that it was a woman – a wife or a mother torn apart by the distress of seeing her husband or son facing death? This was the question I asked myself: Why did he specify that she was Jewish?

  Still in my pajamas, I asked my mother to help me find the box with my old school stuff, for she had saved all of it.

  “This is our only heritage,” she had said at the time. “It doesn’t mean anything to you yet, but for your children it will.” For those who arrive with their entire fortune packed into two suitcases, children’s memories are all that matter.

  My mother helped me find the box without asking why. Since Yannis had come into my life, she probably thought everything I did concerned him in one way or another.

  I quickly found the bulletin with the photograph of the Archbishop in front of the school chapel. And there was the passage I was looking for: “I have been struck by some lines written by a Jewish woman called Lilly. She said that as long as women refuse to come out onto the world stage, the world will be mutilated. The first value women will bring to the world will be peace. How can a woman let the man she loves or her son go to war? Women know what life is because they create it.”

  My best friend at Villa Maria was Marika, whose parents were Dutch. Right from the beginning, an un
conscious intimacy was established between us, what Goethe called an elective affinity. I don’t know much about this kind of friendship between girls, but this was what we surely both experienced: an elective affinity. Young people are more aware than adults who their best friends are, and they always make the right choice. I have never had such a good relationship since with anyone of my age and gender.

  Later on, after continuing her studies at Brébeuf, Marika enrolled in an architecture program in Amsterdam, where her parents went back to live after their retirement. Her departure was another reason for me not to respond to my classmates’ invitations. It would have been more difficult to refuse Marika. I was able to get out of invitations from others easily enough. My mother had taken that story of the cold sore from me, but my old classmates were less cunning than her friend the writer, and they always believed me.

  What particularly tied me to Marika were the religious plays she and I used to stage in her basement about the first religious mission to Montreal. Along with a few Chinese classmates, we used to recreate the days when about fifty French men and women came to live in New France to build the mystical city of Marie – Ville Marie or Villa Maria.

  I think I should tell you more about these plays, for they were what I loved most in my high school years.

  Marika lived in a nice house not far from the school, and we went there to play those brave men and women who were guided by faith and led by the soldier Paul Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, and by the nurse Jeanne Mance.

  Because of her tennis training and her stature, Marika took some of the male roles, and I played some of the women. She was Maisonneuve, and I was Jeanne Mance. We cut our costumes out of old curtains we found in her mother’s storeroom. For the rosaries, we ruined an antique wooden-beaded abacus that her mother used to keep on the mantelpiece.

  So every Saturday afternoon we played those devout Christians, keepers of the faith that was to crumble in the Old World because of bloody conflicts between Catholics and Huguenots. New France would reinvigorate Catholicism, this universal religion – as the Archbishop would have it – open towards the whole world, and create a civilization of love. A free life, without fear and without danger, was to be established in the small Indian village of Hochelaga on the island of Montreal.

  Our religious theatre focused on the period between the arrival of the settlers, in 1642, and the abandonment of the fort, in 1683. Set design demanded some ingenuity, for we needed to recreate a point between on the St. Lawrence River. What helped was a visit organized by our school to the Pointe-à-Callière Museum, which had apparently been built on the ruins of the old Ville Marie fort. From this base on the shores of the St. Lawrence, people could keep one eye on the river and the other on the slopes of Mont Royal, where the Indians were hiding.

  For the location of the fort, we relied on rough drawings that researchers from McGill had found somewhere in the United States. The map sketched by royal engineer Jean Bourdon shows a few buildings – the governor’s house, other residences, a shop, a chapel, a forge and a kitchen – clustered around an armory. During recent excavations archeologists have found the remnants of a well and a large oven, surrounded by a pile of ashes and the bones of various animals. This was likely where the first settlers butchered game and cooked it. The oven was linked to a sewage pit by a corridor also used as a sanitary chute. In the same spot they also found handicrafts, gun stones, pipes, French pottery, Indian tools, and ceramic beads used for trading.

  Since our plays went back to very beginnings of the city of Montreal, we began with Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière and the first steps towards creating what would become the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal. Le Royer had been educated by the Jesuits, though they doubted the sincerity of his faith. Nobody could deny that the Montreal enterprise was the fruit of his feverish activity.

  Marika portrayed him as a plump country gentleman, as we wanted to make fun of the man who campaigned for the Christianization of lands he never set foot on and that he only knew from stories circulated by the Jesuits. We imagined that his religious fervour had little in common with faith, although there is some evidence that he was devout.

  Here he is knocking on the nobles’ doors, welcomed by the gracious hostesses, and making an effort to convince them of the need to implant a piece of France among the natives; educate them, get them to kneel before the Cross, leave their smelly huts for proper houses, and put an end to the sin in which they lived.

  Unfortunately, this good man was not wealthy. A poor manager with a big family to feed, he was unable to hold on to his capital, let alone increase it. His strength was in persuasion, and he eventually found a wealthy associate, Pierre Chevrier, Baron de Fancamp, who agreed to finance this noble enterprise. After long negotiations between the Church and the royal court, they were granted the island of Montreal on December 17, 1640.

  Why did they insist on Montreal, where no French settler was living at the time? Why this passion for a no man’s land traveled by the Algonquin people and periodically besieged by their sworn enemies, the Agniers?

  From a military point of view, Montreal had no importance as a colony; in the war between the Indian tribes, the island was dangerously exposed and would be the first place to fall. Economic considerations were clearly unimportant to Le Royer and de Chevrier, and it was widely known by that time that the Silk Road did not cross the Canadian prairies.

  Embarrassing as it may seem today, what interested them was simply the apostolic goal. They saw the island of Montreal as the New Jerusalem for which they were ready to set up a new Crusade. From their comfortable homes, they dreamed of reuniting the Indian hunters and gathering them into a Christian community.

  The departure from New France of the three missionary ships in 1639 had a big impact in France. The first recruitment consisted of 37 men sailing in two convoys leaving from La Rochelle and Dieppe.

  On one vessel was Paul Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, to whom Le Royer had entrusted the expedition. A career soldier aged 29, he asked for nothing better than to put himself at the service of God, King and the New World missionaries.

  Paul had been born into an impoverished noble family in 1612 in Neuville-sur-Vanne, in the Champagne region. For young man in his position, the army offered the best chance of making a modest fortune. At 14, he enrolled in the Dutch army, which was the only one waging war in Europe at the time. The horrors he experienced on the battlefield distressed him, however. When he got back home, he tried to forget the terrors that haunted his nights by spending his time reading works of philosophy and poetry. These solitary hours transformed him into a lonely and dreamy person.

  A book we found in the school library showed portraits of Paul and Jeanne at the time they left for the New World. Paul’s face is long and flat, with a fringe cut above the forehead, a strong nose, and a protruding chin that was apparently a feature common to people in Champagne.

  Jeanne has the same kind of nose, but her small chin and her big eyes give her a very fragile look. The tiny oil painting that is signed by Dugardin along with an inscription reading, “True portrait of Mademoiselle Mance before she came to Canada in 1638” is preserved in the Archives of Les soeurs hospitalières de Montréal. Jeanne is dressed in the bourgeois style, her curly hair tucked under the veil that frames her pleasant face. This picture was quite different from the one hanging in our school library, which showed Jeanne with a rounder face, and a dark cape concealing her shoulders.

  Among Paul’s entourage in Champagne, people were talking more and more about the Canadian mission. But how could he tell his father that he was going to leave the family and that he had no intention of getting married, having children or running the ancestral property? How could he explain why he wanted to sail on one of those rickety ships and live next to naked cannibals in the name of a faith that, much like the French fleet, was in danger of sinking around them?

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nbsp; Paul had no choice but to lie to his father about the aim of this journey. He persuaded his father of the rightness of his decision by talking about material gain rather than about religious aims. He told wonderful stories about huge fortunes amassed from nothing, and this eventually convinced his father to give Paul his blessing. If the gentleman was insensitive to lofty ideals, he apparently had no argument with the prospect of wealth.

  So Paul boarded a ship bound for Canada along with 25 other men. Le Royer had unhesitatingly assigned him the mission of the Notre Dame Society, whose apostolic aim was to convert the Indian peoples of New France. On board with him, Paul took a sword and a few books, including Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, which was the one he valued most.

  Jeanne Mance left at the same time on another vessel. It was at this point in the story that I moved on stage as this bourgeois woman, while Marika moved out of the role of Le Royer and donned Maisonneuve’s cape.

  Jeanne had been born in 1601, and she took her vow of chastity at the age of seven. When she was 17, her mother passed away, leaving Jeanne in charge of a household of 12 children. In 1631, her father’s death left her as the sole support of her sisters and brothers. She studied with the Ursulines, showing a special vocation early on for charitable work, and she devoted herself to the care of the sick during the plague that devastated La Rochelle in 1637.

  One day, her routine was disrupted when her cousin, Nicolas Dolebeau, who was a Jesuit, told her stories about Canada. What interested her most was the discovery that, in New France, women were for the first time allowed to take part in a religious mission to foreign lands. Her cousin also told her about the enthusiasm created in Paris by a visit from Madame de la Peltrie and Marie de l’Incarnation, two missionaries from Canada who had returned to solicit funding from the French aristocracy to help build a hospital in Quebec.

  Jeanne Mance was enthralled. If women were permitted to help get this terra incognita converted to Christianity, might she herself not be one of those skirted apostles? By 1640, Jeanne was free of responsibility. Despite fragile health, she signed up for the Montreal mission.