Free Passages: Welcome Home to Canada by Michael Ignatieff Page B

for the first time through somebody else’s desire. I am wearing a pair of beige pants pleated in front, a brown belt and a red jersey shirt, tucked inside. Yes, there I stand, so terrified at what the future holds for me, yet my body, my very being, is transformed by the possibility of someone else’s love. I see myself as I walk along King Street, across University Avenue, past the Roy Thomson Hall, towards my destiny.
    Alas for my poor post-adolescent self, newly arrived in this country, I was going to attend a Wednesday matinee. The only people there were seniors, busloads of them brought in from I don’t know where for an afternoon on the town. I sat through the play in a haze of disappointment as the audience around me tittered and twittered and belched and fell asleep and ate candy. On the way back to Richmond Hill, I got lost, took the subway inthe wrong direction, to the end of the line at Wilson station. Then I had to take it all the way back around the loop. I sat there looking at the image of myself flashing by in the window, lit from the fluorescent tube above, my features flattened out, my skin a washed out grey.
    I feel a great tenderness for this younger self. He is so painfully thin, the way his neck rises out of his shirt like a lily stalk, his hair so out of style, his very best clothes so shabby in comparison with those of the people around him. Yet at the same time I want to place my hand firmly on his arm. I want to say that this thing he seeks will be an entry not just into himself but also into this country. I want to tell him that the friends he will make through coming out will be the ones who will last; they will be the ones from whom he will learn the norms, the standards, the culture and the history of this country. With them he will attend protest marches, organize to demand the same rights as other Canadians, start to have an investment in this new land. They will be the first people he will tell about Sri Lanka, and thereby he will begin the long process of healing those wounds.
    A slight breeze has picked up in the garden now, the leaves of the elm tree shift and sigh, the cat chasesafter a butterfly, something my mother said returns to me. Before I put down the telephone, her last words were, “Never forget that Canada gave us the enormous privilege of being able to sleep through the night.” As I look around at the life I have built in this country, I touch my forehead briefly in salutation.
    May that always be so.

Anna
Porter
A CANADIAN EDUCATION
    T HERE ARE SO MANY other lives I might have lived. Sometimes I feel that I have merely borrowed this one. One day I may have to return it.
    There is the life I left behind in Hungary. It’s not a terrible life, though there are aspects of it I am glad I have avoided. My aunt Edie, for example, spent ten years in jail because she was judged guilty of taking part in the ’56 Revolution. Edie had helped the British embassy staff escape to London after their ill-advised assistance to students. She may also have taken part in the attack on the national radio station.
    She’s had a hard life, my aunt. Her sons were raised in state-run institutions while she tried to appeal her fate. Her younger son, who is my age, spends most of his time training peregrine falcons. I think he must have watched the birds from his grated window at the orphanage. He is stillunsure whether to forgive his mother for missing his childhood.
    My mother believed I would have been in that jail too, had we stayed in Budapest after the revolution was lost. A childhood acquaintance was kept there until he was eighteen. Then he was executed.
    During my childhood I imagined I was a great Hungarian patriot. The stories I knew were all Hungarian stories. The thought that I would one day live somewhere else, speak another language, would never have occurred to me. I was, most of the time, in the company of my grandfather, a fantastic man who told riveting tales about our history,