Danceland Diary

dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Description

Luka Dekker and her sister Connie are the inheritors of a secretive and disturbing family history going back three generations to the disappearance of their great-grandfather. Their troubled mother, Lark, also mysteriously disappeared; and their beloved grandmother, who raised the two girls, had a life haunted by a traumatic event that is only revealed after her death. The story unfolds against a backdrop of the drug-fueled Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the horrific pig farm murders, the seductive beauty of rural Saskatchewan, and the glittering lights of a famous prairie dance hall. Luka’s quest for her mother, and for peace and love, is a disquieting, moving, and thoroughly engaging examination of intergenerational trauma and forgiveness. 

Sujets

• Psychological
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Radiant Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781989274842
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright @ 2022 dee Hobsbawn-Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher or by licensed agreement with Access: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (contact accesscopyright.ca ).
Editor: Susan Musgrave
Cover art: David Thauberger
Book and cover design: Tania Wolk, Third Wolf Studio
Printed and bound in Canada at Friesens, Altona, MB
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative Saskatchewan, the Canada Council for the Arts and SK Arts.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Danceland diary : a novel / by Dee Hobsbawn-Smith.
Names: Hobsbawn-Smith, Dee, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220397554 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220397783
ISBN 9781989274828 (softcover) | ISBN 9781989274842 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8615.O23 D36 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Box 33128 Cathedral PO
Regina, SK S4T 7X2
[e-mail]
www.radiantpress.ca




“Without the past I can’t learn to live in the unfolding present. This bit of history called the new millennium wants to forget, but forgetting means having to repeat everything that came before. While the past can be a burden, it is also a gift out of time. The clear moments of memory must be understood. It is only then they can be let go.”
Patrick Lane, There is a Season (McClelland & Stewart, 2004, p. 117)


For Floreen and Lila.


One
anky’s farmyard is somnolent, the trees and buildings drowsing in the wavering late-August evening heat. No birdsong. No one about. My son, Jordan, is as cautious as my Siamese cat Ming as we climb out of the Beetle and enter the house. My grandmother, Anky meets us in the kitchen. She’s limping and carries a cane – that’s new, but not surprising. But her greeting is warm as she waves us into the parlour without ceremony or hug. Jordan hides behind me on the worn grey plaid couch, clutching a cushion decorated with lions and giraffes. Ming is on my lap, hiding behind my elbow.
Jordan is first to emerge. “Mama told me about you,” he says as he stares at Anky. When Ming hears his voice, she leaps free and prowls the room, paying close attention to the riverstone fireplace dominating the north wall. From there, she saunters past two spindle-back chairs and peers out the shuttered French doors and windows, southward onto the deck and patio. Then she leaps onto a delicate roll-top desk with its top down and eyes the top tier of the book-lined built-in shelves along the other walls. It’s my favourite room of the whole house, cozy and welcoming, and still familiar, although an old Hutterite schlofbonk has migrated from Anky’s bedroom and now occupies the northeast corner, its hinged wooden seat stacked high with papers and books.
Anky pops a wide smile and says to Jordan, in her gruff mix of English and Hutterisch, “Ich bin Ankela, your Great-Grandmother. You will call me Anky.”
Hutterisch is the dialect of our tribe, the gypsy Hutterites. It’s an oral language, nothing written, and I’m told it’s similar in sound and colour to Yiddish and Plautdietsch, or Low German, the languages of the Jews and Mennonites, wanderers like our ancestors. I know maybe a dozen words of Hutterisch, some endearments and others curses, all learned from Anky. Something is redeemed each time I say them, just as something profound happens to my heart when my kid and my grandmother gaze into each other’s face. “Us” suddenly feels real, the two of us transformed into three. It isn’t the first time they’ve met – I brought Jordan with me when my sister Con married Neal – but he’d been a babe then, unaware, so this is their first real encounter.
Anky – Charlotte – has been my guardian since Mother rolled out of my life twenty-two years ago. Anky filed a missing persons report at the time, and she’s spent much of the past two decades analyzing police records from across the country, setting aside her natural reserve to talk with cops from Sault St. Marie to Saint John’s to Victoria.
We drink lemonade. When we finish, Anky says abruptly, “Do you need supper? No? Go take a look around, Luka. I need to sleep. We will talk tomorrow.” Jordan sticks close to my side as I leave the house, ignoring our luggage for now.
Mother’s spirit precedes me, gardening trowel in hand, her footing solid despite crazy-high stiletto heels, tight short skirt, ruffled blouse. She wore the damnedest things to work in the garden, what Anky calls city clothes. Anky, now, she lives in loose floral cotton dresses, most times with an old-style button-up bib apron. But Mother – crazy for clothes, she was. She ran up Dad’s credit cards on dresses and shoes that she swore she needed, then she and Dad fought every month when the bills arrived.
Mother ditched us on a mid-April afternoon, 1988, not long after Dad died; I was eight, Connie ten, the air raw with stubborn winter despite crocuses peeping through the yellowed grasses in the fields and roadside verges. She collected Con and me as usual from the school bus at the corner of the grid road without saying a word, her face, usually so animated, as still as a snowed-in field. Down the long driveway, Anky’s small house invisible behind the caraganas, past the just-waking strawberry fields and raspberry canes, around the corner and into the yard where Dad’s truck and horse trailer still sat near the main house. Then she slammed the car to a halt.
“You girls climb on out.” Her voice was flat, the tone we’d learned not to contradict. We got out, obedient daughters. She leaned from the car window. “Tell your Anky I’m going to the west coast. Be good.” We started screaming as she wheeled the bashed-up Civic in a tight circle, gunned the engine and drove away.
Anky turned seventy that year, still straight-limbed, still whip-strong enough to keep her market garden – and her granddaughters – in tidy order. How have I spent my time since then? Looking for Mother. I followed her to Vancouver. It’s true that while there I earned my hort and botany degrees, but initially, I went looking for her. I gave up searching just after I learned I was pregnant, when I decided I couldn’t bear to think of her any more. Then I had Jordan. He’s a nervy boy, and needs me. Jordan is as vital a presence as Mother ever was, and curious, like her.
the main house where Anky raised Connie and me hasn’t changed. I remember Anky replacing all the windows and the French doors not long after she and Oltvetter Paul moved in with Con and me after Mother left. The exterior’s been painted recently, a deep blue-grey, a welcoming shade, the perfect offset for those clematis and hollyhocks that still backdrop my roses and delphiniums beside the doorway.
Around the corner to the south of the main house stands a tiny wooden A-frame tucked into a meadow and surrounded by caragana shrubs, wild and jungle-deep, backed by elms and blue spruces, their tips brushing the sky. The glass in both windows has miraculously remained intact, but it’s gone that wavery, milky shade, like eyes going blind; the house reveals nothing when the rusty hasp on the door refuses to yield.
Anky lived in this doll’s house as a young widow during the Second World War, then she married Oltvetter Paul, and they inhabited it again, later, during the decade when Mother and Dad and Con and I occupied the main house. It’s stood empty since Mother left. I loved visiting Anky there for tea and kuchen. A memory percolates up, of Mother sitting on the porch, rocking furiously, both hands clenched around an empty garden basket, her face a blank field. When was that? I can’t recall, and the image fades, a disturbing sepia ghost.
Close by is an aging greenhouse, its glass walls still intact, interior tables empty except for Anky’s gardening. Next to the greenhouse raised beds cluster, all at Anky’s hip level, each bed lush with Swiss chard, carrot fronds, beans climbing past their poles, the leathery leaves of beets, tomatoes restrained by cages.
Tour concluded, Jordan and I return to the main house and unpack. I settle him in, then turn into my own room. As a teen, I plastered its walls with full-colour magazine photos of Freddie Mercury, tropical plants, and Olympic volleyball players, but now all the walls are bare. The familiar bed is freshly made. I crawl under the sheet. My body recalls the reverberations of the Beetle’s engine during our long drive east, through the Fraser valley, climbing into the mountains east of Hope, through the closing teeth of Three Valley Gap, the climb to Roger’s Pass, over the Golden Gorge. Skirting Calgary’s expansive suburbs, sliding in and out of the great coulee of Drumheller. Then cruising the long stretch past Delia and Youngstown on the windward side of the Hand Hills, across the provincial border at Alsask, angling north through the flatland surrounding Kindersley and Rosetown. I fall asleep eventually.
when i wake, I lie motionless for a few moments, listening to the chickadees’ perennially cheery morning song. Tiptoe down the hall with my yoga mat under one arm. Jordan is still asleep, one arm dangling off his bed, the other snug around Ming. He looks so like Mother. My heart breaks and mends again, as it does every time I stop and really look at him. Anky isn’t up yet. The deck’s wooden floor is cool under my feet as I unroll my mat and lie down. Yoga outdoors has its own pleasure – horizon, mat, a limitless sky, the singing of birds. The deck’s double-wide steps face south. As a kid they made me think of a dock at the edge of a lake, but instead of a lake they overlook the hay field, and a closer field where Anky’s market garden used to soak up the sun. The hay field is clean-cut,