Nikolski Read Free Page A

opposite the statue of old Dante Alighieri.
    The garbagemen have finished their work and are mopping their foreheads, wholly oblivious of the story they’ve just taken part in. I watch the truck effortlessly chew up the bags and swallow whatever was left of my mother.
    The end of an era; I find myself in virgin territory, without signposts. I look around nervously. The Nikolski compass is lying on the floor near the sleeping bag, forever indicating 34° W. I slip its cherry-red strap around my neck.
    The garbage truck drives away. In its wake, the moving van arrives.

Grampa

    NOAH WAKES UP WITH A START .
    Everything in the trailer is quiet. He hears nothing but the noise of a car travelling down the road. Curled up in her sleeping bag, Sarah is softly breathing in the lower bunk. He rolls over on his side, hoping to get back to sleep, but can no longer find a comfortable position. And yet this narrow bunk seemed so vast to him when he was five years old. Now not a night goes by without him garnering a bump on the skull or a bruised elbow.
    So he struggles in silence, looking for that comfortable position, only to find after a few minutes that he is fully awake. Sighing, he decides to get up, noiselessly climbs down the ladder, pulls on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
    Two Chipewyan Indians are seated at the kitchen table. Their long white hair is braided and their hands are wrinkled. Noah doesn’t know their names. One is his great-great-grandfather. As for the other … not thefaintest idea. Very little is known about them, except that they lived and died in northern Manitoba at the end of the nineteenth century.
    Noah greets them silently and goes out.
    The trailer is anchored in the middle of forty million hectares of rye shrouded in a fine mist, which is punctured here and there by a few electricity poles. The sun is still below the horizon and the air smells of wet hay. The rumble of a tractor can be heard in faraway spurts.
    Noah walks barefoot to the edge of the field. A thin thread of water runs at the bottom of the irrigation ditch. The pungent tang of diazinon blends with the scent of clay—familiar fragrances.
    Just as he starts to unbutton his fly, he hears a pickup truck approaching on the road. Hands on hips, he cuts short the procedure. An old red Ford comes into view, rushes past, speeds off toward the west. When it is far enough away, Noah sends a long stream of urine shimmering into the ditch.
    Walking back to the trailer, he reflects on this peculiar display of modesty. He can’t shake the unpleasant feeling that the vehicle was encroaching on their territory, as if Route 627 actually ran through their bathroom.
    On close examination, that image isn’t so very far from the truth.

    For years, when asked where he’d grown up, Noah would sputter some vague response—Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta—and swiftly change the subject, before any more questions were raised about this shadowy taboo.
    Rare indeed were the individuals to whom Noah would eventually disclose the true (though unlikely) story of his mother, Sarah Riel.
    The starting point was the summer of 1968, when she left the reservation where she had been born, near Portage la Prairie. She was sixteen and about to marry a certain Bill, who was from Leduc, Alberta. More often than not, his skin disappeared under a sheen of crude oil, but no one was fooled by the camouflage; the man was white—actually a little pink around the joints—and by marrying him Sarah lost her Indian status, and the right to reside in a reservation.
    The full significance of this administrative nicety loomed up ten months after her wedding, when Sarah bolted from her conjugal abode with a black eye, a garbage bag hastily stuffed with clothes and the firm intention never to look back. She
borrowed
Bill’s car and trailer and began to roam between the Rockies and Ontario, in step with seasonal employment.
    When the Department of Indian Affairs introduced certain