Free Requiem by Frances Itani

a lumpy mattress in a long-ago student apartment on rue Bishop in Montreal. In a concert hall in Berlin. In a bedsit in London, teetering on a lopsided stool that had a splintered leg.
    Beethoven once wrote to his friend Wegeler that it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives. But if given a second life, or a third, would his ears be able to hear? He was closed to the outer sound of his own music, but his inner life, his adversity, must have pushed his genius.
Listen
, Okuma-san told me.
Listen to the tapping on wood. Listen to it rhythmically. It is the music of Beethoven. His greatest works were written after he was totally deaf
.
    Light is dropping from the sky. The sun has overtaken the car and I’m driving directly into afternoon glare. I’ve been on the road for two days and I’m still in Ontario, forced to acknowledge the immensity of one province. If I were in northern Europe, I’d have passed through half a dozen countries by late afternoon. But here I am, and I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen a motel sign. Still, the drive over the Canadian Shield is one of my favourites, and used to be one of Lena’s, too. We never hurried when approaching the north shore of Lake Superior, travelling west towards the Lakehead. Lena loved hiking in the provincial parks and scrambling over bald pates of granite. To her, physical landscape was one more dimension of history. She had a deep desire to understand the makeup of the earth beneath her feet. Every time we travelled—before and after Greg was born—cobbles, pebbles, smooth stones, stones that sparkled and were studded with quartz, mica, feldspar, rattled around the floor of the car. The more sparkle, the more striations, the more pleased Lena would be.
    “This is igneous,” she explained to Greg when he was a tiny boy and stood beside her in his green overalls. “This is sedimentary—do you see the difference? And this one is metamorphic.”
    Three tiny samples in a plastic case fitted his palm perfectly. He snapped the lid shut and opened it again.
Snap. Click
.
    We both enjoyed teaching Greg, and he was quick to learn. It was Lena who suggested his name the day after he was born. She was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, her legs dangling, and she was leafing through name books while our new son hiccuped in a bassinet that had been wheeled to the room. “Vigilant,” she said. “That’s what Gregory means. I would like a child of ours to be vigilant.”
    The stones that she, and then the two of them, brought home and washed and dried and arranged on a shelf were called their
wondrous stones
. Greg moved on to volcanoes and dinosaurs before he got to whales, dolphins and other sea mammals—and remained there—but Lena continued to collect rocks and fossils, many of which are still in the spare room. Those were
her
smalls. Still undisturbed, because I’ve been in the room only a few times since November. It doubled as Lena’s home office—and is one more area waiting to be sorted out. Maybe, maybe I’ll do this when I get home.
    The sun has lowered itself close to the curve of Earth, and less than an hour’s light remains in the sky. I didn’t hear Basil stand up behind me but a glance in the mirror shows that he’s watching me, his long purple tongue hanging out.
    “Okay, okay,” I tell him. “I don’t want to sleep in the car any more than you do.”
    At which he begins to turn circles in the back. A sure sign of dismay.
    Last night, our first night out, we stayed in a derelict, half-empty motel that permitted dogs. I was too tired to drive any farther, and Basil slept by the door facing out, as if expecting an intruder, and then he ground his teeth for hours.
    Just as I’m wondering if I should have paid more attention to the map, I see a sign at the side of the highway: OVERNIGHT CABINS. I swerve, too rapidly, and Basil lurches in the back and barks his complaint. I find myself on a lumpy gravel road and make my