Hour of the Crab Read online

  A grandfather helps his grandson escape from prison in a near-future dystopic Spain. A talented calligrapher in medieval Morocco is imprisoned after her otherworldly abilities are discovered. The last speaker of a dying Norse-like language carves the words he remembers into the stones of his house.

  “Panoramic in scope, precise in detail, stirring in content, Hour of the Crab is exhilarating and poised, a mythos of modern times. Here are fire gods, migration, and extraterrestrial messages, strange spirits and apparitions rendered harrowingly real. Deftly speculative, menacingly real, these stories compel you to change your life.”

  — David Huebert, author of Peninsula Sinking

  “The stories in this sure-footed collection take us deeper into the world and invite us to see outside our usual framing of things. In times when our literary options might seem to be diversion or despair, Patricia Robertson offers a third way: to look steadily and respond humanely.”

  — Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives

  “Patricia Robertson’s beautifully written, intelligent stories take us into the clash of cultures — African and European, the elderly and the young — across the defining borders of our time, to show us that our habitual ways of confronting change are no longer working. Her stories re-align what we think we know about the world — they are that good.”

  — Wayne Grady, author of Up from Freedom

  Also by Patricia Robertson

  The Goldfish Dancer

  City of Orphans

  Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Robertson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover image Der Marsch by Jr Korpa, unsplash.com.

  Printed in Canada by Friesens.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Hour of the crab / Patricia Robertson.

  Names: Robertson, Patricia, 1948- author.

  Description: Short stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200210297 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200210300 | ISBN 9781773101606 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773101613 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773101620 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8585.O3218 H68 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  gooselane.com

  We are living in the time that the ancestors dreamed for us. What will we dream for the ancestors yet to come?

  — Sacred Fire Foundation

  No more tame language about wild things.

  — Martin Shaw

  HOUR OF THE CRAB

  Hour of the Crab

  Happiness

  The Gate of Charity

  The Oud-Maker’s Son

  SIGNS AND PORTENTS

  Speaking in Tongues

  Bring Down Your Angels and Set Me Free

  Fire Breathing

  HOLDING PATTERNS

  The Calligrapher’s Daughter

  The Master of Salt

  The Old Speech

  HOUR

  OF

  THE

  CRAB

  HOUR OF THE CRAB

  Kate, walking along the beach, found the body. She was kicking pebbles into the little frothy waves and pretending. Each stone bore away a burden. Unswept winter grit on our front steps. Stupid argument with Vikram over chair specs for that client. Missing Diane’s wedding and my mother saying, You never think of— The last pebble thunked against something sodden. There in the shallows, a few strides ahead, some tangle of something — washed in by the tide, probably. Sunlight glittered, darkening her vision. A larger wave flung the tangle closer, wrapped round a dead fish.

  Not a fish.

  A human foot, bloated, grey-white. Jeans plastered to thin legs. Now an arm, swollen, wound in seaweed.

  She stopped on a caught breath, watching without hope for tiny movement. Only the waves moved, rocking, rocking. Hand over her mouth she bent forward. The body was slack, without tension, T-shirt holed and rotting. Narrow shoulders, flat chest — not a child but not quite an adult, either. The frilled edges of a cut on the left calf gaped.

  Along the avenida the first of the cafés were clattering their metal fronts open. Shakily she looked up and down the beach. No one except, far off, near the rocks, holding a scoop net, an elderly fisherman who would not know English. The head lolled toward her — a face that was not a face, lips eaten away, teeth and nose coated with foam. She knelt, eyes averted, peeled the pockets apart. No ID, no cellphone, nothing. The zip of the jeans, salt-crusted, gave suddenly on a fat bleached penis. Male, she could report. If that was what she was going to do.

  He must have been in the water for days. On the more intact foot was a tattoo of some sort, a stick figure — was that it? — with a triangle on either side. She puzzled over it. Smuggling? Drugs? Or nothing, just some design he’d liked. But if she went to the police… She’d heard the stories; she wasn’t naive. A tiny crab scuttered from the right ear, disappeared into sand.

  She’d go back to the pension instead, wake Gavin, keep her mouth shut. Let someone else find him. It wouldn’t take long. Gavin, his medical residency a year behind him, now working nights in Emergency, deserved a break. She couldn’t do a thing for the drowned boy, but she could protect her husband. Hadn’t that been the reason for coming here — to leave the weight of duty and a just-ended Canadian winter behind?

  When she reached the shop where she and Gavin had bought ice creams the evening before, something stopped and turned her. He was someone’s son. Someone’s brother, or lover. Somewhere people were worrying about him. Though when she walked back, the row of cars in front of the Comisaría with their sword and axe symbol made her hesitate.

  –Yes, yes, we find on beach all the time, the duty officer in his rumpled shirt said, his hands splayed out. She’d finally managed to get herself inside, where he interrupted her flailing Spanish. –We pick up and make report. The body, it goes to el depósito de cadáveres.

  All the time? They found bodies on the beach all the time?

  –He is migrant. Illegal migrant. The officer was exasperated, half-contemptuous. –They come in boats, too many people, from over there — the hand flung out again — from África, from Marruecos, Túnez. Then engine breaks, they have no food, no water. Then a storm comes. He pushed angrily at a stack of papers.

  Not drugs, then, but desperation or determination or reckless desire. We pick up and make report. His statement wasn’t callous but exact. It wasn’t the officer’s fault the boy had come, or anyone’s. In an hour or two there’d be no evidence the body had ever been there. Other people would spread out beach towels, lay their own living bodies down on the sparkling sand.

  –You went for a walk? This early? Gavin was already in the bar next door to their pension, coffee and some thin biscuit on the table in front of him. Several male heads swung in Kate’s direction, eyes travelling over her, talk bubbling back up as she sat down.

  –I thought a walk would wake me up. She felt the prick of tears. There’d been her father’s cancer, just last year, all over in seven weeks, then Gavin’s brother, suicidal when t
hey’d axed his support job at the group home. She was sick of death, desire for death. –It’s beautiful, early on. So quiet. No tourists at all. The barman lifted his eyebrows at her, mimed the raising of a cup.

  –What do you think we are? Teasing, eyes softening in his sleep-creased face, hair on one side still flattened.

  –Not like those — oh, you know. The Marthas and Henrys. Their own term for the fat ones impaled with gadgetry, the overloud voices. A pretense, really; a private snobbery.

  –You look — I don’t know. Subdued.

  That was the trouble with marriage; once you peeled apart from each other, you were seen through. But then she’d been told all her life she had an honest face.

  –What about a swim? Near that thatched bar? He meant where they’d been the day before, soon after they arrived. Not a hundred metres from where she’d found the boy.

  –You go if you want. She shut her eyes and drank the last of her espresso quickly. –I’ll finish unpacking. Get my things hung up.

  –Come on, Kate. Out with it. Did I do something? He slumped back in his chair, deflated. –I thanked you, didn’t I? For getting us here?

  She was hanging up the new sundress in the darkened room, the shutters pulled to, when the boy surfaced. He sat up suddenly and smiled at her, his white teeth alarming. –I am sorry, I fall asleep. It was long, to swim here. He looked past her at something, perhaps the ocean; was that what he saw?

  –After boat sinks. I have to try, no? His small dry laugh sounded as if he were choking. He stood, his body narrow and bony under the wet shirt, the ratty jeans. –You are from America? His face, with its fine flared nose and a dimple that came and went, was intact, smooth, beautiful.

  She glanced away for a moment, breaking eye contact, reassuring herself with the solidity of shutters, night table, bed. The hanger with the sundress bit into her fingers.

  –Or England, maybe. Me, I go to Germany, a brother of a friend will help. He laughed his small dry laugh again. –You come to play, I come to find life.

  A living, was that what he meant? To make a living?

  –No. A life. He jerked his head in what might have been the direction of Africa. –Over there is nothing. Nothing, walking to meet you.

  She could never do what Gavin did. Saving lives was one thing, but not watching people die. As a child her sister had buried mice and sparrows in the back yard; Kate, repulsed, stayed in the house, cutting little suits out of upholstery fabric for her dolls. Now she designed furniture made from recycled materials for an energetic local business called BioHome. Her mission in life — ridiculous, really, but the idea of it sustained her — was to invent the perfect chair. Make people feel cradled, held, utterly safe. She saw her chairs stationed in every boardroom on the planet, bringing peace, happiness, goodwill.

  She’d done a past-life regression once, visiting a psychic in Toronto with her old university roommate. Apparently she’d been an eighteenth-century Spanish nun, a member of the Discalced Carmelite order, no less, founded by St. Teresa of Ávila.

  –A nun! Gavin said. –So that’s why the saviour complex. He said it lightly, tossed off; he might be accused of the same thing, for that matter. –Let’s see, your father was Jewish, your mother’s lapsed Greek Orthodox —

  –In the eighteenth century, Gavin. That’s a long time ago. To be carrying a complex, I mean.

  –Why is no one ever reincarnated from a cleaning woman? Or a — I don’t know, a coal miner. Or a mugger.

  Both of them had had progressive childhoods. Gavin’s grandfather had been a union organizer in Winnipeg, a member of the Communist Party, and in the forties had learned Russian as preparation for moving the family to Moscow. The Stalin show trials had eventually dissuaded him, though Gavin, as a small boy, had called him Tovarish — Comrade — Gramps. Kate bore the marks of a different set of convictions. She’d been named Katharina after her Orthodox grandmother, Anna after her Jewish one — all those a’s! — and became Kate-Anna, then simply Kate. Her mother’s mother, the Katharina, had made a pilgrimage in her seventies to the monastery whose saint’s name she shared. It lay at the foot of an Egyptian mountain where, so it was said, Moses had received the Ten Commandments. Kate’s grandmother had seen with her own eyes, in a hollow in the granite, the imprint of a sandalled foot.

  In the afternoon, over a late Spanish lunch, she leafed through the local English-language newspaper. Properties for sale (beach-front flats, expat businesses), the arrest of a fish-and-chip shop owner for speeding, water restrictions because of the drought. Nothing about drowned migrants — oh yes. One small paragraph, near the back. A boatload of refugees, the third this week. The engine had broken down in rough seas, they’d drifted for days. Thirty-nine out of eighty-three had been rescued. The dead included seven children under four, their bodies thrown overboard by their parents. –Where are my babies? one mother kept asking the Red Cross workers.

  Had he been on that boat? Somewhere in the continent beyond, people waited for news. Waited to hear if he’d arrived safely, if he’d met up with others, if he’d found work. When she looked up the boy was sitting there, leaning forward on his elbows, watching her as if she were deciding his fate. Stop it, she wanted to tell him. Stop following me. It’s your own fault. You chose to come.

  –D’you suppose they were Senegalese?

  She was sitting with Gavin at the outdoor table where she’d eaten. He was looking past her at the ocean dazzle, still in his sand-caked swim trunks, she still holding the newspaper she’d read aloud from when he came back from the beach.

  –They could have been from anywhere in Africa, couldn’t they? Running from civil war or something.

  The waiter brought a plate of fried fish and set it down in front of him.

  –Sub-Saharan migrants, it says here. That man in the market back home, what’s his name, Abdourahim. He says he couldn’t find a wife in his village. The rich men take three or four.

  She was tearing the story out, the paper soggy from her sweat-damp hands. –He offered me a necklace. Asked would I marry him. I think he’s Senegalese.

  –I’ve no idea, I’ve never talked to him. Gavin’s tone was of someone speaking, with infinite patience, to a child. –Look, Kate, don’t you think you’re being rather morbid? It’s horrible, but there’s nothing we can do, is there?

  Morbid. Morbidity. One of Gavin’s medical terms. Death expressed as the frequency of disease in a population, as a set of statistics. Except that, set against individual lives, the statistics broke down. You couldn’t measure human life that way. The boy himself would have been outraged at such abstraction, or perhaps merely indifferent.

  –I wasn’t going to tell you. She looked down again at the soggy newspaper. –But I found this — dead person. On the beach.

  Another boy — young man — appeared later that afternoon. She was window-shopping beside a drugstore while Gavin waited to see the pharmacist; he’d forgotten to bring his inhaler. This time the ragged T-shirt, peculiarly, bore the Toronto Blue Jays logo. Je m’appelle Joseph, he told her. He was from Chad, from the capital, N’Djamena, where he’d had his own small tailor shop until what he called les difficultés broke out. The second time rebel groups destroyed his shop, he decided to flee. A cousin in Marseilles had sent him the money. He was twenty-two years old. He’d left behind a wife, Maryam, and two small children.

  –Il fallait que je vienne, he said, spreading his hands wide — it was necessary that I come. He did not smile. He drifted past her into sunlight as Gavin came out of the drugstore, explaining — so like him! — how he and the pharmacist had fumbled through the dictionary together to find the new word: inhalador. He rolled the r, pleased with himself.

  –They didn’t say anything else? The police? Gavin had asked her earlier.

  –They find them all the time. They weren’t interested.

  He swallowed a bit of fish and looked up at her, squinting in the blond light. –I’m sorry, Katie. Really. Sorry you had to go
through all this.

  But what had she gone through, really, compared to the boy? Tears pricked again; her throat flooded with heat. –They must take them somewhere. The ones who survive, I mean. Maybe someone else on the boat knew him.

  –But even if. His fork paused for a moment. –I mean, what’s the point?

  None, except that she was being followed, hounded even, in a way she didn’t understand and couldn’t have explained to Gavin. –I bet they’ll know at the pension. It’s a small town. There must be a camp or something.

  –And then what? The line of his cheek was concave with disapproval. –You want to spend the holiday at some detention centre? Anyway, it’ll be heavily guarded. They won’t let you in.

  Where was the Gavin she knew from home? He always listens, your husband. Really listens, not like the other doctors. She stood up, a sleepy leg tingling into life.

  –You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want.

  –It’s a vacation, Kate. You kept telling me that, over and over. Remember?

  The camp, it turned out, was miles away — the woman at the pension gestured vaguely up the coast — and out of bounds, just as Gavin had said. But there was a place, the Centro de Refugiados, that helped them, though what sort of assistance they gave, the woman couldn’t say. She regarded Kate with disapproval, as if Kate herself had brought the migrants. The woman who ran the Centro was Catalan, from Barcelona, did Kate know? Did she know about the Catalans and their separatist sympathies? No, of course not. Only in Spain did such nonsense occur. Only in Spain were they allowed — but the telephone rang and the woman swung away, glaring.

  The Centro was a thirty-minute walk through untouristy back streets. By the time Kate rang the bell on Calle de la Gloria, the damp flannel of late-morning heat clung to her back and armpits. After a long wait, footsteps, then the grille in the door sliding open. Kate attempted an explanation.