Free Pilgrim by Timothy Findley Page A

would remove the spoon from his hand and put a fork in its place. Sausage, cabbage and potatoes followed—eaten blankly between mouthfuls of pale beer and sops of bread.
    Meanwhile, the child Johannes sat in his high-chair, moving his fingers over a plate of mash made up of whatever his father was given to eat each evening—whether sausage, cabbage and potato, or potato, sausage and cabbage. It was their only diet—though,to her credit, Elvire tried to vary the modes of cooking—sometimes broiling, sometimes baking, sometimes braising the food.
    What Johannes saw of his father was two black eyes, two dark nostrils and the gaping pit of a mouth in the oval of a flour-white face, beneath a fall of hair that was dark where his father’s cap had been and white where it had not. Shoulders drooping, elbows on the table, minimal, almost mechanical movements—a man-sized wind-up father-doll sitting amongst his brood—a doll whose springs were winding down even as its children watched—until, each evening, it stopped and simply sat there while the dishes, knives, forks and spoons were removed from around it. Then it rose and went away to its bed. No one spoke. Not ever. It was a house of endless fatigue and silence.
    In those days, Frau Eda did not come home until Johannes himself had long been in his own bed. He only ever saw his mother in the mornings—once again from the vantage point of his high-chair—while she drank her last cup of coffee, rolled down her sleeves, pulled on her coat and went beyond his view into the world of someone else’s house, where she spent the day in someone else’s kitchen.
    When Johannes was six, his father’s sleeve got caught in one of the mill-wheels and, there being no one by to save him, he was drawn in amongst the cogs and crushed to death. At the time, the boy was told none of this, only that his father had gone away and would not return.
    Later, at school, he was told the truth by an olderboy whose father had also worked at the flour mill. For a very long while, young Kessler said nothing to his mother or to his sisters about what he knew. When he was eleven—or perhaps when he was twelve—he began to ask questions it had never occurred to him to ask before. Where, when he left, did Father go? And: why did he go away alone when he could have taken us with him? And: why has he never written? Why has he never come back?
    The answers to these questions were always the same. He went away to join his mother and father…to stay with his brothers in Argentina…he had no money to take us with him…there is no post from South America…
    One lie compounded the last and the one that followed. His mother had already grieved and put her grief behind her. A lie was easiest—and even telling it, she could partially believe it herself. She could daydream her husband’s life in Argentina. She could call the brothers back into her mind and in their company recreate the sunny days when she and her husband had been young and there was no foreboding. To call him dead at this late date was to take a step towards her own death she was not prepared to take, and even when young Johannes was as old as sixteen, she had still not declared herself a widow.
    As for Elvire, she had been glad of her father’s death. The burden of his life had overwhelmed and exhausted her. When he died, she had been only fourteen and had borne his needs since she was nine—all his meals, laundry, bathwater and errands and his lackof any acknowledgement of what she did. Not that she had hated him. That, she knew, would be unjust, given that she was aware of the circumstances of his poverty—how little work there was in the world they inhabited and how little return there was when the work was done. Still, she was glad of his absence. She need only thereafter see to her brother’s survival and her own, their mother then being an almost invisible presence, so little was ever seen of her.
    Frau Eda had a cage of finches