The Atlas

DISAPPOINTED BY THE WIND

West of the place where Niagara's turquoise marbles itself with foam and changes to cobalt, there are other blue veins in my atlas which idle between Lakes Erie and Ontario; north of them the eye is caught by Lake Ontario's burrowing nose which one's gaze traces from Burlington to Bronte, Oakville to Clarkson, Port Credit to Mississauga, and so up to the city of Toronto. In the autumn this way of going allows one to make the acquaintance of wide blonde and redhaired trees. There are coppery-leafed forests along the riverbanks, and lanes of leaves the milky green of English apples. Closer to Toronto they have all turned the hue of golden deliciouses or Mclntoshes; and in Toronto itself they have mainly left the trees. Looking once more at my atlas I discover the whole weight of northern Canada bearing down on Toronto. From James Bay roots of frosty rivers grow south, reaching.

In October, when I was visiting, a chilly wind blew always from the lake, piling up fog that was beige with whitish highlights like a field of October corn. I felt alone. On the subway people wore woolly jackets over their sweaters, sitting bowed against the dismalness of the growing cold. By January they would be long used to it, but that was because by then the summer would be dead and in a frozen grave, permitting the mourning to take place with detachment, irony, and eventually even joy as the extremists joined the strong fierce red-cheeked battalions of winter, gloating in fresh stinging winds; but at the moment summer was newly deceased, still paling and cooling and clotting on a bed of crunchy leaves. So each subway passenger was alone like some Arctic traveller who, homesick while the wind groaned, stretched a hand out of the sleeping bag and ate dry cereal, pushing the cold back a few steps. I knew a little about what cold was. Toronto was not cold yet. On the borders of Canada lay snowdrifts as pure and rich as cream. In summer the mud had been wet between them. It was just above freezing — much colder with the wind chill. Beside the Arctic Ocean was a ridge of pumice-like rock, and then a long low snow-ridge, flat on top like a barn roof, that was almost the same color as the sky. When I tried to read or write there my fingers quickly became numb. The wind grew more forceful; the tent-fly was caked with ice, and my wet boots froze. That was not cold yet; that was still summer. But now the sea had begun to freeze, and down in Toronto we knew that even without knowing it. On the subway we felt cold. Each passenger hunched with his hands in his pockets or deep inside his sleeves, longing to retract arms and legs within his heartwarmed torso to resist the cold, as a sphere of glowing blood. The men glared or sadly gazed; the women wrinkled themselves into frumpishness or followed the flashing stations with clear and angry eyes.

At night it was so much colder still that loneliness overcame lethargic sadness. That was why at night the girls in their thick coats seemed to offer promises of warm cuddlings. It was like Walter Benjamin in Moscow in 1926, pursuing Asja Lacis and scribbling: Moscow as it appears at the present reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution might fail or succeed.

Asja would not give herself to him anymore. Her hair was as weightless as milkweed down. But one evening they pushed their coats off the bed and he lay down with her on top of him. They started kissing. He put his hands inside her warm sweater.

As I rode the subway on those foggy Toronto nights, I looked at the women and felt that I could have gone home with them to be warm, but I never asked any of them, and when I reached my stop I went out without looking back.

This happened night after night. Night after night I derived pleasure from sitting across from the women of Toronto, imagining holding them in my arms in their dark warm bedrooms. Night after night I passed through the turnstile and ascended to Yonge Street, where the clammy wind tried to steal my hat. Then late one evening I came out into the silver, frosty air, and the wind was ready for me. It snatched my hat and whirled it over the roofs of buildings. It tweaked my nose and earlobes with burning mischievous fingers. It caught me up and lifted me above the lake. I saw my hat far ahead of me, a black star whirling higher to cap one of the delicious white stars of winter. Because I had fallen in love with the wind, I was permitted to become the white star, and my black cap sailed lovingly down onto my head. I was in the bedroom of the wind. The wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the wind all night.

In the morning I woke up naked on an island of dark wet gar-tersnakes and birches whose leaves were speckled and orange. The wind came to kiss me, and sent an orange rain upon the sand. When I stopped blinking, the trees were bare and the snakes had slipped underground.

I was not cold. My body was as red as a brick. It glowed and tingled and pricked. I found a thicket of Indian pipe in the sand and picked them, made black-jointed flutes with which to serenade the wind, and the wind, still loving me, raised the lake about me, sloshed cold violet-green water about me in glee until it burned pleasantly on the rims of my ears.

Then the wind got tired of me. I don't know why. I had striven to be entertaining and different at all times. My own joy had certainly not diminished. But it didn't matter. This was divorce. My clothes fell down upon me with a thump, and in the dead calm I began to shiver.

I crossed the lake in an old canoe and reached town just as the wind began again. Soccer players in blue jerseys were running amidst the leaves. A woman clutched the strap of her handbag, her face down in the wind. I wanted to ask her to marry me, but I was too cold. I found a street of brick houses and big dogs, where pillared porches and porticoes were overhung by pale orange leaves. Their tall narrow windows were as dull as the sky, reflecting the clouds that skidded before the wind.

I met a redhead in a long velvet jacket. She was holding her little boy's hand as they strode though fallen leaves.

I've been disappointed by the wind, too, she said.

At first I thought she was talking to me. But then I understood that she was only trying to smooth the sadness of her son whom the wind refused to take away.

The boy saw me. — Look, look! he cried to his mother. — His ears are red and happy. That means he's the wind's friend.

I smiled, said nothing, and walked away. Truly it was an ear-aching wind.

On the subway the grinning laborers in their pea-jackets, the bald owlish businessmen in wool coats, the ladies in furs all hunched against the cold. Only one person, a fanatical prophetess who wore sackcloth, was kin to me. But she would not see me or the wind; I left her alone.

Coming up the windy tunnel to Yonge Street, I found the boy, happily escaped, and running towards me amidst leaves and prayers blowing in circles. Men ran with their heads down, holding the brims of their caps. The boy begged me to bring him back over the feathery water of the windy lake to that khaki and ocher island of dying-leaved trees which lay so low in the lake that only windstruck people could find it. When I asked him how he knew about it, he said that his mother had told him. Then I knew that I had misconstrued my misconstruction, that she had been talking to me. I refused him, led him back through rolled-up leaves like trilobites on the sidewalks, and by subway we returned to the apple-colored maple leaves which curled on the trees of his neighborhood, swarming and wriggling down over the house pillars where girls in thick Indian sweaters and beaver ear-muffs ran shivering. The lady in the long velvet jacket was waiting for us. As she leaned forward to kiss me, the warm sighing breezes of her mouth reached my heart, and I melted into a puddle of water.