A Cold Montreal Winter
Copyright (c) 1994, Daniel Sendecki
All rights reserved

 
 
                           A Cold Montreal Winter
                           ----------------------        
                             for Andre Brereton


 
                                     I.
 
 
        The flat was dark, full of dull, disquieting silence.  Light 
tumbled in - old tired light, full of dust and age - and created a 
mosaic on the floor.  Long, long shadows crept slowly along like giant 
ships on a gently rolling sea, playing with the hoary light that 
spilled in through the old lace curtains.
 
        The tiny clock ticked, and tocked, relentless, 
uncomprehending, the minute hand swept across an expressionless face, 
tick-tock, tick-tock; the refrigerator rattled and hummed, shaking 
deliberately every now and then, sounding like a tiny band of 
minstrels.
 
        Yet, of all this the tenant was unaware.  He could not hear 
those tiny sounds, only silence and loneliness fell upon his ears. 
His eyes did not wander, did not shine, did not contemplate those long 
shadows of dusk.  They were unfeeling, uncaring, and unknowing.
 
        Sometime later, long after they carried my fallen grandfather 
from his lonely apartment, I remembered praying, begging, that death 
was gentle, that death was a tenderhearted doorman who shook the 
burden from lifeless shoulders and ushered one into eternity.  
 
        That death did not carry a scythe.  
 
 
                                    II.
 
 
        Snow hung from the wizened face of the Valliere Funeral Home 
like tired whiskers.  Snowflakes, falling to the earth like wearied 
robins, saw it was a soft December night, fluttered once about the 
building and found their nest in the smutty mire of gutter-snow.
        
        My uncle and I stood just inside the parlor staring more at 
our reflections in the frosty window, than the pedestrians who 
shuffled by indifferently.  My thoughts turned towards the few that 
had come to spend one more afternoon with my grandfather.
 
        "Who is Hans Sommers?", I asked.
 
        My uncle smiled.

        Even in his old age, Hans was enormous, a battleship of a man, 
with arms like steam-shovels and a neck with the girth of an oak. 
Coming in from the Montreal winter, he shook the snow from his 
shoulders and stamped the slush from his boots.  I had always fancied 
myself a writer, and in turn a keen observer, but when I learned of 
Hans' profession, I lost all faith in my deductive reasoning.  Hans 
stood six-foot-four, carried shoulders as wide as church doors, and 
wore hands like vise grips to match, but, how he betrayed this keen 
writer's eye.  He was not a farmhand, nor a brick mason - in fact his 
job entailed no manual labor.  He was a baker.
 
        "A baker?", I could not believe it.
 
        "Sure, he used to own La Petite Boulangerie.  Right behind the 
flat on Jean Mance."
 
        An absurd picture, this man standing over countless tiny 
pastries, decorating them gingerly - a rhinoceros in a crystal shop 
appeared as reasonable, knocking over fine crystalline with each 
breath.  Oh, but how he fooled me with his voice.  Deep and resona
ting, it tolled like a bell - gigantic and impossibly melodic.
        
        "Hans' voice," my grandmother would tell me later over tea, 
"was impossibly beautiful.  He would, while baking and decorating 
pastries for the following day, sing well into the night.  Perhaps 
till three or four in the morning.  And even though he sang loudly and 
heartily, no one complained.  His handsome voice was welcome relief of 
the traffic on St. Bernard Street.  I would lie awake and listen, 
letting him sing me to sleep."
        
        She paused.
 
        "And the smells that came from there, they were so..."  But 
she could not find the words to describe them.  Why?  Perhaps because 
every memory depreciates when resigned to description.  In fact, 
memories roost as birds in the heart, memories as delicate as 
sparrows.  In her silence I wondered if this was the bane of all 
writers and storytellers - the need to relay some incredibly unique 
feeling to the reader without the means to do so, the need to cast the 
sparrows from their perch.  I suppose the best writers, the very best, 
have the balls to urge the bird into flight.
 
        "I thought I would come to say goodbye," Hans had said, 
earlier that day, breath thick with whiskey, wringing his tweed cap in 
his tremendous hands, "Andre, you were a good neighbor, but alas..."
        
        Indeed, memories roost as birds in one's heart.  Outside, it 
is concrete cold - like an obscene phone call from the Arctic. 
Awakened, a spooked host of sparrows takes to the night only to freeze 
and fall to the earth like concrete angels.

