The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

kind, but it was deliberate unlike feminine whistling which is almost always an adjunct to faraway thoughts. She knew by the sound of it that the man was used to living alone, for his whistling voided aloneness. She did not recognize the tune, an American ballad, but she found no self-pity in it. It trilled with a surety that was much more than hope.

      Without wanting to she became quieter, almost tiptoeing from the ancient icebox to the double-burner hot plate on its homemade stand. For the past six weeks while the room next door was unoccupied she had revelled in the freedom to make her little household noises without fear of being overheard. Freedom to her was not an expansion of living, but a retention of its privacy, and this included being able to live without her movements being monitored, even mentally, by others.

      She cut a half-pound veal cutlet into cubes and placed them in a frying pan on the hot plate, browning them in margarine. The sizzle drowned out the sound from next door, yet revealed to its occupant the secret fact that she was cooking. She stopped tiptoeing and chopped some onions and mushrooms into the pan, letting the increased noise hide her other movements from her unwanted neighbour. While the mixture was sautéeing she retreated from the kitchenette and sat down on the old davenport which opened as a bed. She could no longer hear the whistling, and she quickly dismissed it from her mind.

      Tonight she was attending an amateur ballet performance of Petrouchka, presented in a much diminished version by the pupils of the Lotta Iwachniuk School of the Dance. She had looked forward to it all week, as a brief bit of beauty in the long crawling hideousness her life had become. These brief snatches of cultural pleasure were all that kept her sane and hopeful. Several times a year she dipped into her meagre savings and squandered her money recklessly but without regret on the ballet, concerts, and recitals. It also bought her a brief retreat into a past with its promise of what might have been.

      It was this search for beauty that had made her notice the music box first of all. On a Thursday afternoon several weeks before, she had wandered down the aisle of the department store and into the gift department. Among the aesthetically beautiful bric-a-brac she had spied the little musical jewel box sitting on a top shelf behind the counter. It was made of wood, lacquered to a high finish, its sides scored with intricate golden designs. Poised on its top was the tiny figure of a ballerina. It was so beautiful, and so in tune with her tastes and memories, that the sight of it made her pause open-mouthed. She had known then that she must buy it, no matter what it cost, no matter what sacrifices she would have to make.

      A saleslady came between them, and followed Sophia’s stare to the music box. “It’s cute, isn’t it?” she asked.

      “It’s beautiful.”

      The woman lifted it down and laid it on the counter. Sophia examined it, smiling at its workmanship, its true artistry, its perfect proportions. She squeezed the hem of the ballerina’s minute costume between her thumb and forefinger. The saleslady picked it up and turned the clockwork key beneath it, and opened its lid. The tiny ballerina began to pirouette on her toes as a series of gentle little chimes played Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty.

      “It … it’s …” Sophia began.

      “Yes, it’s exquisite,” said the saleslady, supplying the word.

      “How much is it?” Sophia asked, her eye fixed on the weaving figure, her ears tuned rapturously to the fairy music.

      The saleslady didn’t even have to consult the price tag. “It’s a hundred and forty-nine fifty,” she said. “It’s the only one we have. A special purchase which a customer failed to pick up.”

      Sophia raised her eyes, repeating the unattainable price beneath her breath. “Thank you,” she said before tearing herself away.

      From then on she visited the store nearly every week to gaze at the little ballerina. Its price was ridiculous and she knew she could never afford it, but it had become an obsession and she was always afraid she would find it gone. She had never handled it again, or heard its music, but merely to see it, to glance at it in passing was enough.

      At an all-Chopin recital by a world-famous pianist one evening she fell into conversation with a woman in the seat next to hers, and they left the hall together, both surreptitiously wiping the tears of Polish happiness and sorrow from their cheeks. The woman’s name was Lotta Iwachniuk, and she invited Sophia to join her in a cup of coffee.

      From then on they became good friends, going to concerts and the ballet together, entertaining each other, sometimes in Sophia’s shabby “apartment” or in Lotta’s comfortable living quarters behind the School of the Dance.

      During the winter Sophia had often gone to the evening classes at the school, watching with interest and envy the beautiful-bodied young girls practising their steps. Too middle-aged heavy now to don maillots herself, she would operate the record player and let its music and the rhythm of the dancers take her back into her girlhood, and forward into the future that never was.

      She hurried into the kitchenette, her fear for the browning veal making her ignore the noise, and pulled the pan from the hot plate. Then over the meat she poured a mixture of flour, soup stock, sour cream, salt and pepper, mixing it with the meat, onions, and mushrooms. She turned the heat low beneath it, covered it with a plate, and left it to simmer. From the other side of the wallboard she heard the sound of a heavy bag being scraped along the floor, then dropped upon the bed. She poured a glass of tea and carried it back with her into the larger room.

      Lotta was getting married in August. Yes, Lotta who was six or seven years older than she was. To a Yugoslav contractor, a widower whose daughter had been a pupil of hers for the past three years. Sophia walked over to the dressing table mirror and stared at herself critically. What was wrong with her?

      She saw the long straight black hair that was still pulled into a ballerina’s bun; the bright blue eyes now edged with delicate wrinkles; the straight-set mouth that needed to be crushed or laughed into softness, and the stern chin and cheeks still smooth and youthful looking. Once she had been pretty, with a prettiness that would have flowered into beauty in her twenties, if her twentieth birthday had not come in 1939. In a few more years — this she was sure of — she would have been Tamara Karlova, a name known far beyond the city of Lodz, or even the province, or even Poland itself. Tamara Karlova, the nom-de-danse she had chosen when still a little girl at the convent school. The mere repeating of it brought a mist to her eyes, which she blinked away impatiently.

      Once more back in the kitchenette she could hear the whistling again, muted now by a closed closet door. He must have heard her cooking and realized that their noisy intimacy was a two-way street. She was torn between the hope that he would let her hear him at times and the fervent wish that he would keep the door shut as a barrier between them. Later, after she had eaten her dinner and washed the dishes, she dressed carefully for her visit to the amateur ballet presentation. From upstairs came the sound of Paul Laramée playing on the floor with his children. Then she heard the door to the next room open, close, and the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Still whistling, its new tenant ran down the stairs.

      Walking along the upper hall Sophia noticed that the light was still on in the room next door, but the room at the rear and the bathroom were in darkness in subservience to Grace Hill’s hand-printed orders. The whistler, whoever he was, had chosen to ignore the orders of the landlady, unless by some inexplicable chance he had not been given them yet.

      The street was in the midst of the spring calm that came every evening between the rush hour and the switching on of the street lights. The cars on Bloor were no longer travelling in packs, or in convoy, but singly, as if they had lost their way and with it their rush-hour arrogance and haste. A small boy ran up the opposite sidewalk yowling his greeting to the approaching night, his small quick feet jumping the sidewalk cracks and carrying him up and down the steep fronts of the raised lawns. The lights in the upper floors of the houses gave them away to the passers-by as light housekeeping rooms, some hung with lines of wash, some revealing an ironing cord hanging down from a ceiling fixture, others merely stark with the light from unshaded bulbs.

      A short stocky man was walking up the sidewalk towards her, carrying a folded newspaper under his left arm. He