Dancing Hand: A Novel

By David Essig

The first novel by one of Canada's most well-loved singer-songwriters. A story that moves from a bakery on the Lido in Venice, to a coffeehouse in Nelson, BC in the golden days of the early 70's, to current-day Cambodia - a powerful new work from one of Canada's great narrative voices. In reviewing his latest CD, Penguin Eggs magazine called David Essig "one of our most cherished touchstones for the Canadian way of life." Dancing Hand is further proof of this high praise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483501338

Book preview

ONE

Prelude

Seng Veha looks down where his left leg used to be. He had been walking along the edge of his family’s catfish pond when he ran to chase the soccer ball that his brother had kicked across the water and into the bushes. As he retrieved the ball, his left foot came down on the detonator of an M-18 Claymore mine. A flash of light and a dull explosion sent him rolling towards the edge of the pond. He was on his back, one hand in the murky water of the pond, as the sky turned black and disappeared in pain.

When he woke up in the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Siem Reap, his grandmother quietly touched his arm and said, Veha, you will survive this bad fortune. He looked down and saw the bandaged stump where his left leg had been, just two days before.

It is now a year later and Seng Veha is the newest resident at the school. Karen hands him a glass of juice and helps him with his newly fitted prosthesis. Printed on the side of the titanium leg with the rotating ankle joint are the words: Donated by the Lions Club of Belleville, Ontario, Canada.

Even with the ceiling fans, it is hot in the school building. Karen pushes her dark curls away from her face and says in Khmer, Come on now, Veha, you can do it. We’ll have you walking again… She wants to say before you know it, but realizes the idiom is wrong. Instead, she takes his arm and says tomorrow. With Veha hopping on his remaining leg, she guides him to the window. Karen waves out the window to her five-year-old daughter Apsarah who waves back from the swing in the school yard.

Karen pretends to shield her eyes from the glaring noonday sun. As she runs her hand across her face to wipe away the tears, she speaks again in Khmer to the small mahogany boy, Come on, Veha, you little brown banana, you can do it. The little boy, who has been staring down at the device attached to his left knee, looks up at her and smiles.

Prajit, she says and helps him again to stand on his new leg.

1.

When Luigi Cartieri died, there was no will. Everyone assumed that his wife would take over the store and that, once the rabbi had come out from Winnipeg and done the job, it would be business as usual at the Casa di Formaggi: Brandon’s first and finest Italian grocery. But Armanda was feeling that 40 years of retail was enough for her. She sold the store to the DeLuca brothers in Winnipeg and moved out to the farm to live with her daughter and her family. Her daughter insisted that Armanda could not live alone in the big city –even though Brandon was far smaller than her hometown in Italy. Armanda agreed to the arrangement with a sense of foreboding.

They gave her the spare room off the kitchen – a convenient arrangement since Armanda spent all day cooking and watching soap operas on the TV that stood on the dish dresser, next to the fridge. The stove and the TV were her relief from the tedium of daily life on 600 acres of canola and winter rye.

There could hardly be an odder family in all of southwestern Manitoba - an aging Sicilian Jew, her resolutely Mennonite daughter, her equally resolute Mennonite but detached son-in-law, and their miserable 12 year old daughter. Harold worked in the fields or in the barn, taking his lunch with him – gone at dawn and not returning until supper time. Armanda had named her daughter Costanza in honour of Mozart’s wife, but it didn’t take and her daughter now called herself Connie. She was completely immersed in life of the church and spent all her time either at meetings in the Mennonite meeting hall in town or on the phone, arranging prayer groups and yet more meetings.

Armanda’s only bright light in this dreary scene was her granddaughter Sarah, who had been an adorable little kid but was becoming more withdrawn as puberty kicked in. Dinner conversation revolved around crop prices and gossip from the church. Harold and Connie liked to watch religious TV programmes in the evening. Sarah and her grandmother would do the dishes together and then go to their rooms and close their doors. It was their only escape from the incessant presence of Billy Graham in their household. Sarah practiced her flute or read; Armanda sat in the old easy chair by the window in her bedroom and sipped the sherry from a bottle she kept hidden in her bottom drawer. She would look at the pictures of herself and Luigi as young immigrants – mementoes that she kept in a small leather box in the same drawer with her Brights Tawny Supreme. She had a small portable record player and a collection of opera LPs. Sometimes she listened to Verdi and held her head in her hands, asking herself how it had come to this.

Luigi and Armanda had emigrated from Sicily just after the Great War; after crossing the Atlantic, they took the train directly from Montreal to Brandon and opened the store. Luigi had arrived in Canada with a pregnant wife, a small inheritance and the uncompromising advice of his father: stai un po` fuori la citta` – stay a little outside of town – do your business away from the competition and high rents of downtown. Find a good product, and they’ll find you, the old man would recite at their family dinners in the garden behind the family store in Stranalta, a small village in Catania known for its cheese and dried meats – a place where wealthy urban Sicilians made gastronomic pilgrimages on the weekends, crowding the narrow lanes of the village with their limited-edition Alfa Romeos.

Luigi took this advice to heart when he arrived in Canada and did not as much as pass a night in the Italian community of Montreal, nor those of Toronto and Winnipeg. His father had given him a pocket atlas as a going away gift. In the front he had written a farewell salutation in Hebrew, followed by the Italian words, mai citta` – never the city.

Halfway across the Atlantic on the MV Bremerhaven, Luigi had announced to Armanda that they were going to Brandon, or Brandona, as he called it. He told Armanda that it looked like a nice small town, not too close to the city of Winnipeg, yet not so isolated that they could not run a business. He took her in his arms as they stood on the rail of the ship and said that Brandon meant the arms of a woman. It was a stretch for Armanda to accept the idea that the name of the little prairie town could be so construed – after all, she was trained as a school teacher and had little patience with what her professors in Palermo had called inferential linguistics. But at that moment she was more concerned with her pregnancy than with half-baked semiotics. I can see that, Luigi she had said. "Bra d’un’ donna - I suppose it is a bit like Brandon." She let it pass, kissing Luigi and calling him the smart one in the family, while secretly believing that the title belonged to her.

She was right about that. In Brandon, Luigi proved to be an effective frontman for their new store, quick to engage the customers but far off the mark when it came to figuring out how they were going to make a go of the grocery business. At first, they had called the store Luigi’s Grocery – it looked and felt like a thousand similar corner stores across the Prairies. Luigi’s idea of management was to cut prices on Fridays and give free ice creams to the kids in town on Saturday. And, of course, he ran open accounts for most of his poorer customers. As the Dirty Thirties progressed across the prairies, most of these accounts were never paid.

It was Armanda’s idea – it came to her the year after Costanza was born – to change the name, to start importing cheeses from Italy and to become a specialty shop. Luigi had balked, of course, but Armanda made her points well – presenting Luigi with what we would now call a business plan and making the unimpeachable case that people would drive out from Winnipeg, and even Regina, if the product was good. She wrote to suppliers in Europe, New York and Montreal and was able to arrange rail shipments of cheeses whose characters were sufficiently hardy to endure the long times in transit. For more delicate products, she found producers in Central Ontario and British Columbia who were willing to cost-share on shipping fresh cheeses by bus in aluminum thermal pouches.

The business proved successful. As the Depression wound down towards the preparations for war, there was more money to spend on luxury commodities like imported cheese. In their own Brandon community, the Cartieris were the local grocers, providing the staples and credit for their neighbours to make it through the dreary days of winter. But for the small and wealthy European elites in Winnipeg and Regina, ordering from their store played an important part of gastronomic display culture. Hostesses in Tuxedo Park and College Heights would bask warmly in their guests’ praise of hors d’oeuvre plates featuring cheeses from the Casa di Formaggi in Brandon.

Armanda’s final stroke of business genius was to find a food wholesaler in Tuscany who was willing to ship to her Kosher Italian products made in the Jewish enclave at Pitigliano. Armanda never had made much about the fact that her mother’s family had left Pitigliano for the south during the Savonarolo years. She considered herself a Sicilian and after all, it had been hundreds of years ago – tan’ lontan’ e ba’ cosi, she would whisper – far away and enough of that.

At this time, World War II was still just an exciting prospect on the Generals’ planning tables so it was possible to do business across the Atlantic – to arrange shipments of kosher products from Florence by train to Genoa and then by sea to Montreal. In a time well before niche-marketing, Armanda managed to do just that. Word spread among the Italian Jewish communities in Canada about the small store in Brandon with its authentic Parve from Italy. While Luigi fiddled with the 3x5 cards for his local customers’ monthly tabs, Armanda filled mail orders for Kosher Italian products from patrons across the country.

Caro, e` come siamo in casa encora, – my dear, it’s like we’re home again – Armanda had said to Luigi after one particularly hard day at the store. This turned out to be the very day that Costanza, now 18 and just finished high school, announced that she was moving to Pinsluch – a small Mennonite community 30 miles west of Brandon where she was planning to marry Harold Friesen and start a new life. Harold, eh? Not like the Harold in Italy, Luigi said – trying to make a joke. Armanda picked up the reference to Berlioz but found it wasn’t funny . She just held her head in her hands for a moment and then looked up, OK, ‘Stanza mia, what am I to say? We all did the same. Leaving home is part of growing up. Now you must do it too. But, I’m worrying about this Mennonite thing.

Her voice trailed off for a moment as she turned to the cupboard in the back room of the grocery and pulled out a 40-pounder of Brights Sherry. She rinsed out three plastic water glasses at the produce sink and filled them with sherry. None for me, Mom. We Mennonites don’t believe in drinking. Oh, Dio Mio, do you believe in breathing?, Armanda said. "Now what - you’re going to start lecturing your mamma about the evils of wine…?"

I’m not lecturing, Mom, it’s just something that we believe.

Well, I hope you and your Mennonites believe in Goldoni too, because the next thing I know they’ll be calling me La Nona Cartieri. Costanza missed the reference to condoms and carried on: No, you don’t understand, this is different. Harold’s a really sweet and sincere person – this is so different. None of that creepy Sicilian shepherd-boy-in-the-night stuff like in the old country.

I guess you’ve got a point, Armanda said to her across the top of her plastic cup full of sherry. Vero, Luigi concurred.

2.

Bob’s sitting on the very edge of his seat in Legion – he wobbles as he talks and slips off his stool. The bartender, a compact ex-Navy diver from Newfoundland, pours Bob another rye and says, jeezo, Bob, what the?… did you shit yourself or what? Get back on your stool and settle down. Bob regains his balance and his seat and is in the moment of his story:

So there’s this Harold Freisen, just about the most pussy-less character that ever grew up here. Anyways, he’s been brought up straight as the blade on your skate: right out there in Pinsluch with those other bible-thumpin’ square-heads – and I’m not talking about your screw bits either. Those there Mennonites are the squarest heads in Canada’s little green acre. And you look at their women – round little glasses and hair all done up in a bun – and they’ve got those skirts on top of their skirts and you’re wondering, jeez, that must be something mighty precious in there to keep it wrapped up like that.

Anyways, the young Freisen lad takes a fancy to this I-talian girl from town. Now, we all know what they’re sayin’ about the i-Tee girls – real little torque wrenches they are – especially when you get ‘em in bed. You don’t even need a bed - they’ll do it on the floor. Anyways, none of us at the seed plant can’t even imagine young Harold buckin’ his way to glory with one of these pizza-pies. But he does! Next thing we know, they’re all going down the aisle: turns out she’s already showing – the whole thing is legal like nuthin happened – picture in the paper and all. Of course, I get invited to play the squeeze box at the party – no booze in there, damn it to hell, being they’re Mennonite and all, but I’m out in the parking lot with a mickey of rye and getting so pissed I can hardly pull a note out of the box. Make it through Maple Sugar and then tell ‘em, fuck it, go turn on the juke box.

So they go and they have this kid – what a sweetie - grows up good – great big eyes and curly hair. Played flute in the high school band - I heard was she went to college, then pissed off to Europe or some other foreign place. I got a buddy in Kelowna who said he seen her years ago in BC – in some crapped out town in the Kootenays – fuckin’ hippy heaven like Cranbrook or someplace like that. Hey, it’s all about dope in BC anyways – what do I know?

3.

In a box of her mother’s effects from the attic in Nelson, Karen Freisen found a small black-and-white composition book with the following passage written in pencil in a neat hand, surrounded by little drawings of flowers and birds.

I hate this damn farm. It’s so stupid. I hate the town too which is the place where most of the people live around here. I can’t stand the hockey and the snow and way it never ends. Grade Six is stupid. Pinsluch is a really dumb town and I hate taking the bus to the Mennonite school every morning. I love my flute but I hate the stupid music teacher. I think he’s a queer. Or maybe not – sometimes he looks at me funny and I want to barf. I would like barf on him if I could but I would probably get kicked out of band and then my Mom would be even more mad at me than she is now. Oh well, at least maybe someday I can go to Winnipeg. It’s bigger than Brandon and really bigger than stupid Pinsluch. Pinsluch is like mars, but I am stuck here for now. At least my grandma is not an idiot. She even gives me sherry when no one is around. At first it tasted gross but now I like it OK. I think it is booze. Ha ha on us Mennonites if it is.

Love, Sarah

4.

The first cello lesson went better than he had expected. He was almost 16 then, and finally the hormones had given him his height and his strength. For the first time, he had a real full-sized European cello, rather than the boxy three-quarter sized student model he had been learning on since he started taking lessons in Grade Four.

That November, his mother had taken him to a small shop on Queen Street that specialized in bowed instruments. The boy’s too big for this thing, she said to the shop owner, who readily agreed, happy to take the small cello in trade. Leonard picked out a peach-coloured Czech beauty with credible lows and passable highs, and a good, rich mid-range. It was the singing tone of these middle strings that drew him to this particular instrument. His mother