Robert wanted to cover himself but he didn’t know how to do that without making it look as if that was what he was doing. He thought of rolling over—but that would expose his backside.
‘You oughtn’t to be ashamed, you know,’ said Ella. ‘There’s lotsa fellows do what you done. Specially the first time. An’—hell—I wish I could even begin to tell ya how many fellows can’t do nothin’.’
Robert sat up. He pulled the sheets across his lap.
‘Look,’ said Ella; ‘we got all night: give yourself a little rest an’ then—’
Robert stared at the floor.
‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘If you don’t take the cake!’ Now she was angry. ‘Dontcha un’erstand—if you don’t do me I don’t get paid!’
Finally, Robert looked at her.
‘How would anyone know…?’ he asked.
‘She’ll know from the way you walk down them stairs,’ said Ella. ‘Guys that done it got a way o’ walkin’. An’ guys that haven’t done it got a way o’ walkin’, too. She’ll know. She c’n tell.’
‘But what difference does it make?’ Robert asked.
‘We ain’t workin’ if we don’t do it, she says. Don’t ask me. It’s just her rule. Everybody’s s’posed to enjoy themselfs.’ She imitated Maria. ‘Minkle! Minkle! Ever’body gotta minkle ’n screw!’ Ella laughed at herself. Then she got serious again. ‘She says if you go away unlaid, her house’ll get a bad reputation. No one’s s’posed to go away unlaid. That’s her rule.’
Robert heard a thump in the next room.
Then there were several other thumps and the sound of someone being slapped. Robert was sorry you could hear through the walls. He thought: now someone knows about me.
Ella got off the bed and tip-toed to the wall. Robert thought she was going to listen—but, instead, she leaned in close and placed her eye to one of the lilacs. She stood this way for several seconds and then she waved at him to join her.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. He thought she’d gone peculiar, poking her face at the wall and staring at the lilacs, waving at him like that.
‘Shhh!’ said Ella. ‘Hush and come here.’
Robert shuffled across the floor—wrapped in the sheet.
‘Lookit,’ she said, when he arrived beside her. She took him by the back of the neck and pushed him forward. The lilacs blurred, and he wondered what it was she meant to do with him and what sort of perversion this was and then he saw that one of the lilacs wasn’t a lilac at all but a camouflaged hole. He could see right through to the room next door.
Ella’s hand remained on the back of his neck so he couldn’t step aside, even if he’d wanted to. But what he saw so confused him that he stood there of his own volition—desperately trying to comprehend. There were certainly two naked people—but all he could see at first was backs and arms and legs. Whoever it was who was there was standing in the middle of the floor hitting whoever else was there—striking out with all their force. Robert turned aside and leaned with his back against the wall. He’d never even dreamed of such a thing—of being hit and wanting to be hit. Beaten. Or of striking someone else because they’d asked you to. At school they’d done strange things but nothing as strange as this.
Ella took his place at the spy hole and after a few more seconds—she was giggling.
How could it possibly be funny?
Ella was like a child. She pulled him back and made him look again, laying her finger on his lips for silence.
Robert stared—one-eyed and breathless.
The pummelling had stopped and, at first, he could not locate the people in the room. Then he heard them. Breathing. They were breathing in tandem—just like two people running side by side. But where? He shifted his position. The bed could just be seen. Since Robert could only use one eye, everything was flat and undimensional. The bed appeared to be stuck against the wall like a picture. And on it there were two undimensional people—one as pale as the other was dark. One was lying on his back with his back arched off the mattress while the other sat astride his groin exactly like a rider. The one who played the horse was bucking—lifting his torso high off the bed, lifting the weight of the rider with his shoulders and his knees—and bucking, just like the mustangs Robert and the others had broken in the summer. The rider was using a long silk scarf as reins and the horse was biting into the other end with his teeth. The only sound was the sound of breathing and of bedsprings. The rider held the reins in one hand and, using a soldier’s stiff-peaked cap, beat the horse on the thighs—one side and then the other. And the two—both horse and rider—were staring into one another’s eyes with an intensity unlike any other Robert had ever seen in a human face. Panic.
Robert’s heart was beating so fast he thought it would explode. Even when he looked away and Ella took his place again he went on hearing and seeing everything he’d heard and seen in his mind and his mind began to stammer the way it always did whenever it was challenged by something it could not accept. He walked across the room and sat on the bed. He picked up a boot and held it in his hand. Its weight alarmed him and the texture of its leather skin appalled him with its human feel. He threw the boot across the room and shattered the mirror.
Then he threw the other boot and broke the water jug.
Ella ran and crouched in the corner—folding her arms across her head, afraid.
Robert didn’t move.
Tick-tick-tick went the water.
Tick—tick—tick.
—
THE MAN BEING RIDDEN was Taffler. The rider was the Swede.
Goliath.
18 Robert remained at Lethbridge the whole of that autumn till late in November when he was sent back to Kingston, Ontario for further studies in military law and trajectory mathematics. Taffler had long since gone and the rumour was he’d been returned to France, although his picture appeared in the Canadian Illustrated—showing him in London with Lady Barbara d’Orsey: HERO AND DAUGHTER OF MARQUIS!
Passing through Regina, Robert saw a band of Indians—twelve or fourteen of them—standing by the railroad track. They all wore blankets, held against the winter wind. This was very early in the morning. All the soldiers pressed against the windows looking out. One of the Indians sat on a horse. The horse’s head was bowed. Even though the wind blew—even though the snow was lifted from the ground and blown around their feet, the Indians did not make any motion to depart. They stood and stared at all the faces—ghosts through the frosted glass. Their eyes were pitchy black. Robert wanted everyone to raise an arm in greeting. Why should the Indians not be greeted standing by the railroad track? But nobody moved. Everyone was frozen in their places—staring till the train removed them—slowly tearing them apart like paper torn in half. All across the prairie, down through Winnipeg into the forests, pushing north of Superior past the Sleeping Giant, stuttering through the Sault and down, down, down the arms of rock and the broken, frozen fingers of nameless rivers, heralded by steam and whirling snow, the train returned him to his heritage of farms and cottages and cattle caught in fields by fences. Then he could smell the city of his birth—even though it lay about him in the dark—and he stood and he stared as he passed the fires of his father’s factories, every furnace blasting red in the night. What had become of all the spires and the formal, comforting shapes of commerce he remembered—banks and shops and business palaces with flags? Where were the streets with houses ranged behind their lawns under the gentle awnings of the elms? What had happened here in so short a time that he could not recall his absence? What were all these fires—and where did his father and his mother sleep beneath the pall of smoke reflecting orange and red and yellow flames? Where, in this dark, was the world he’d known and where was he being taken to so fast there wasn’t even time to stop?
Transcript: Marian Turner—2
‘What you people who weren’t yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dog
s that barked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed all that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization—sleep was different everywhere…’
19 Robert and his brother officers were not in Kingston long. Every aspect of the war had worsened. Gallipoli had proved to be disaster. The Allies would have to withdraw. The Germans and the Austrians had reached deep into Russia—three hundred miles to the Pripet Marshes. Poland had fallen. Serbia was about to fall. All the Allies could think to do was to change their leaders in the field. Haig replaced French—the Tsar replaced his cousin, the Grand Duke Nicholas—Joffre was thrown the whole of the French Command in a gesture of desperate consolidation. (General French retired to his bed and wrote his King that General Haig was ‘mad’.) All the

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