Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 132

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Montreal
5
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The insistent city wind finds its way between the folds of my knotted scarf. I want
to touch the stones of the building and reassure myself these are the same
stones I used to lean against and write upon, that the city keeps everything I’ve
long forgotten.
How’s Sanjay, I ask. I know that her face is falling. Oh, haven’t you heard?
she says. I have heard but I want to hear her say it out loud. She says, I left him.
You left him, too? I ask. Him too, she says.
She asks me why I’m looking at her like that and I say, Just thinking. Think-
ing what? I can’t find the words to tell her that I don’t understand how the after-
images can burn so persistently, but I’m starting to forget what my own face
looks like and can she imagine, just imagine, what that’s like? It’s snowing, I say.
It’s not snowing, she says. Around me, Montreal is disappearing and growing
louder and because I can’t see it, I feel like I’m losing myself within it. You okay?
she asks. Her voice is the same, only lower, only slower, and there’s a catch in it
like a needle pulling thread. What do you see? I ask her. There’s a strangeness be-
tween us like the distance between two houses. That’s a nice shirt, she says, and
that makes me smile. Come in, she says, embarrassed, nervous. Or aren’t you
staying?
On est au milieu de nulle part, I had told her callously. In the middle of
nowhere, she had said, at least you can see a goddamn thing.
Now Renny takes my hand and pulls me nearer. My god, she says, what’s
wrong? Why are you looking at me like that? Her voice wavers like a held note
against my skin. When we were young, she used to hold my face in both her hands
so that she could kiss me in her soft and hopeful and lingering way. When she
speaks now, a clutch of memories come raging through but the dark stays dark,
the shades stay drawn. At this last possible moment, I’m falling short and I want
to turn and run back down the stairs, run to the Old Port where I can throw my vi-
sions into the ice-flecked water. At my age, eyes fail, it’s the way of things. I’ve
changed, I tell her, but I don’t know how to tell her all the ways and all the
means. We all want to, she says, and she opens the door a little bit wider.
End
Madeleine Thien, 34, a Canadian of Malaysian-Chinese descent, first studied dance before
switching to literature. Her very first collection of stories, “Simple Recipes,” won four
Canadian literary awards. Her first novel, “Certainty,” has also won several awards and has
been translated into 15 languages. Madeleine Thien lives in Montreal.