The Honey Farm Page 2

  The streets behind the station—on a map, the lines are so fine they crosshatch, like shading—form a neighbourhood the locals call the Marmite. Mar-MEET. The French were among the first people to arrive, and for them, une marmite is a pot in which you cook any old thing. A village stew made up of all the leftovers. A kind of stone soup.

  The Marmite now houses the Arabs, the Poles, the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Somalis, the French, the Irish, the Cubans, the Bengalis, the Tamils and other Sri Lankans, the Balinese. The whole world.

  If they’d come off a boat from the Atlantic they would have hopped on the train out east, heading west, and stopped here: Toronto! Tdot! The Six! And if they came from down south they’d have stopped in what was effectively the first city across the border. No need to reach beyond the necessary. Besides, everyone knows it’s too cold farther north.

  For all the development happening, condos and complexes and tramways and all that, they don’t touch the little shantytown casting its low shadows behind Union Station. And everyone stays, no matter how much disrepair the houses fall under or how much cleaner and cheaper it might be to live elsewhere, the suburbs maybe. They stay where they landed, out of convenience and fear. They’d already come so far, Ibrahim the Elder said, there was no reason to risk it all. Risk what? Ibrahim the Younger never asked.

  Nights, Ibrahim goes round the city—all over it, from the theatre district to the old textile factories, from Chinatown to Little Italy—to collect all that cardboard, but the best stuff is right by the train station. All the shipping crates for furniture, pianos, farm supplies, car parts, wheelchairs, bicycles, textbooks, hospital equipment, grain. He stops here last, on his way home, arriving moments before dawn, before the first trains come in from out West.

  He uses it for canvases.

  His paintings are big, abstract, bright. If you know where to look you’ll see all the weighted Moroccan symbolism he disguises in them. The lion, the pentagram, the hand of Fatima. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see any of it outright. Most people can’t.

  He has yet to sell any, but he also has yet to try.

  IBRAHIM FIRST SEES mention of the honey farm on the public announcement board in the departures hall of the train station. It is morning and he is on his way home to sleep. (He works nights and early mornings, sleeping all afternoon.) He has sheets of cardboard strapped to his back with a carefully devised system of bungee cords, and he’s carrying a box of hardly broken bottles in both hands. He has nothing particular in mind for the bottles but will find a use for them. To store his brushes, maybe.

  A pigeon—no, a whole family of them—has strayed into the station, and they are now busy creating a nest for themselves above the coffee shop that hasn’t yet opened its wrinkled silver lids. Ibrahim watches the one that seems to be the mother fold slender bits of food into the mouths of her young.

  The postings on the board are all pretty standard—yoga classes, guitar lessons, lost dogs, and basement sublets—and then he sees this one, ripped from the classified section of a newspaper and tacked onto the cork:

  THE HONEY FARM.

  A free retreat for artists, writers, thinkers! Can’t work in the city?

  Come to the Artists’ Colony for a month or two (or longer!)

  and also learn how to keep bees!

  Start early May.

  Contact Cynthia.

  He scribbles the email address onto one of the sheets of cardboard on his back and then begins the walk home, across the sleeping steel tracks already starting to vibrate with the national repercussions of movement. The sky is veiled with thin clouds—cirrocumulus, combed so high as to be in practically another stratosphere, a whole different universe—starting to pink with the first inkling of morning.

  His pack is heavy and he feels full of this contented feeling. A feeling of largesse. He is excited to start work, proper work, with paint on his hands and jeans, in his hair and pores. His mind is already preparing for his next piece, and the world begins to parcel off into colour swatches, alternating and contrasting blocks of neon and matte metal that make up his palette. The world becomes as he would paint it: simplified, brightened, stratified into a kind of unity.

  Get him going and Ibrahim will talk your ear off about how things get spoken into creation—his faith system is a personalized mashup of ancient Egyptian and Islam—and how he believes this is also true for his paintings. Nothing exists for him until he paints it.

  Near the lakeshore, on the leafy boulevards that encircle the water, the houses are made of brick and spread apart, each with its own fenced-in garden. He and his brothers worked as landscapers around here for pocket money when they were younger. As he gets farther away from the water, the yards shrink until the houses are attached—townhouses connected two by two—and the trees turn to stout bushes, always only almost in flower. In the Marmite, bricks are used on only some of the houses, and only ever as a façade. The sides of the buildings are all clamped with aluminum clapboard, and residents take turns scrubbing off the graffiti that springs up like mould.

  Walking up his street, he passes his father’s house and brings the newspaper to the front door. It’s been getting farther and farther from the mailbox, and now Mikey, the paperboy, stupid little lazy-ass kid, thinks the bottom step of the porch suffices.

  Now Ibrahim turns the block, and as he rounds the corner, the sun breaches the horizon. He feels, with the tiniest bit of sadness, that he is no longer the only person in the world.

  Once home, he disregards the first floor and goes straight up to his attic studio. This is where he works, usually until about noon (his midnight). Though his paints and brushes and thinners and sponges are nearly impossible to find in all the mess, it is here that he stretches the boards flat and tapes them into one patchworked canvas.

  Once he’s located them, Ibrahim lines up the paints he’s drawn to that morning and splotches red and blue and yellow, gold and pink and neon-orange, and black and white and silver onto a palette of waxed card, and then, finally, he starts to paint.

  As he paints, shapes emerge from colours: the line of a horizon volleys, peaks, and turns, the stroke unfolds and meanders as a river does and then continues, bending into the first letters of the Arabic alphabet: alif, beh. One slight stroke for a dot beneath the cupped line of beh.

  Alif, beh; aleph, bet; alpha, beta. The first letters—the first words.

  Ibrahim is getting into the rhythm of it now; he starts to feel alive in the painting, as if its motion and his motion are one, as if he is the colours and they are coming out of his fingers. This is why he paints. To see things differently, but to be different too.

  After a while he pulls back from the canvas to see the bigger picture. He is happy with it; he feels it in his chest. He puts the brush down, pulls out the spare one from behind his ear, pushes back his straggly hair—his longish curls tend to puff out with the morning humidity—and motions to crack his knuckles. His knuckles don’t crack but his father’s do, and Ibrahim inherited the gesture. Both Ibrahims make to crack their knuckles either when there is a situation that needs to be controlled or when they are satisfied with a job well done. This is the latter. It’s time for coffee.

  He boils the kettle, presses the grounds, then sits in the window cupping his mug, milkless, looking out over the tree- and rooftops.

  Spring on a honey farm, he thinks. That could be nice.

  IV

  SILVIA IS ASTONISHED when she gets the email saying her application has been accepted, especially since it has been only two days since she sent it off. The acceptance includes an attachment with instructions on how to get to the farm, and that’s it. No notes on scheduling or what to pack. She doesn’t bother Googling what the farm looks like, or even to check the weather—it is happening, she is doing it. The rest doesn’t matter. With uncharacteristic recklessness, she signs off the future, at least this part of it, to “inevitable.”

  She makes the announcement that night at dinner—baked sa
lmon and new potatoes—after her father has said grace. She decided not to present it as a question.

  “It’s called the Honey Farm,” she says, taking a sip of her iced tea. “It’s an artists’ residency in Ontario. I’ll help with making the honey and stuff too.”

  “Ontario?” Her father looks at her mother.

  “I’m going to leave in seven days,” says Silvia. “I booked my train.”

  “But what about camp?” her mother asks. She, who doesn’t have paid employment. Silvia’s father’s dentistry business has always been enough to support the family, but her mother keeps herself occupied with volunteer work at the church, the Women’s Club, the Children’s Hospital, the board of Silvia’s old elementary school, the Refugee Welcome Committee, the church lunch club, and, of course, occasional recruitment services for Daybreak Bible Camp.

  “I never said I was free,” Silvia says.

  “But honey”—her mother turns to Silvia and puts her fork down—“even if we did let you go, what would you . . . I mean—you said it’s for artists, so I—”

  “I want to write.” Then, more assertively: “I was accepted as a writer.”

  “Oh,” her mother says. Her parents are stunned into a moment of silence before her mother says, “Is it free?” at the same time her father says, “Don’t think that we’re going to pay for it.”

  LATER SILVIA OVERHEARS her parents talking in the living room as she’s looking for her rain gear in the cupboard under the stairs. They’re drinking chamomile tea and trying to whisper, but her father, being half deaf, finds this difficult.

  “I didn’t know Silvia was a writer,” he says, holding his favourite mug—a stripey one that Silvia painted for him at Glaze Craze—in both hands. His hands are enormous but graceful: elegant, with long and slender fingers that Silvia inherited.

  “I don’t know what she is anymore,” her mother replies.

  There’s silence for a breath, then her father asks, “Will we let her go?”

  “Well, I don’t see how we can very well stop her.”

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS are taken up with packing her school things into boxes to put in the basement, packing her summer clothes—and some sweaters and jackets in case it gets cold—into the most enormous suitcase she can find, and transferring her toiletries into miniature plastic bottles from the drugstore. She stacks the books she definitely wants to take in a pile next to the books she maybe wants to take, but the piles gradually become a single pile of definites as she decides that she absolutely can’t live without Austen, or Updike, or Pullman.

  She tries on outfits to see if she can find the right self to present on the first day and all the days after that. Jean shorts, striped T-shirt? Hair tucked behind her ears or clipped back with a barrette? Does she want to be the kind of girl who wears an emerald-green cotton Lacoste tennis dress?

  Though she’s been finished with classes for what feels like an age, it’s only late April, and public schools are in the full swing of their final term. In the afternoons, as Silvia lies in bed in a paralysis of what to become, time extending before her like an eternal diving board, she hears the cries of children playing during recess in the schoolyard on her block; they seem to have no problem at all with the fluidity of being and becoming.

  ON SATURDAY—nine days after Silvia found the ad—Silvia’s mother calls up the stairs as she’s drafting her autoreply email, which she plans to leave on for the duration of the summer.

  Silvia shouts back down.

  When there’s no answer, she knows she simply has to go downstairs; her mother will not engage in call-and-response.

  It’s dusky early evening, and Silvia sighs her way to the family room. When she’s at the threshold she sees Bruce, their minister, who baptized her, sitting on the pink sofa with his hands in his lap. He stands as she enters.

  “Hello, Silvia.” He smiles and extends both of his hands to enclose her own.

  “Oh—hi. I’m sorry, I didn’t—” She shoots a glance at her mother, who shrugs, smiling. “It’s so lovely to see you.” She takes a seat next to her mother on the opposite pink sofa.

  In Silvia’s mind, her minister has always been more of an awkward but benevolent uncle than the image of a sombre, robed priest she sees in movies. He has the right shape and colouring to be a shopping mall Santa. He is kind. He is good. She knows he loves her exactly the same way he loves everyone. But being around him now makes her feel squirmy, melancholy, exposed.

  “Your mother tells me you’re going on a bit of an adventure,” Bruce says, his tone, as ever, as though he’s speaking to a toddler.

  “Yes,” Silvia says, holding her voice close. “I’m sorry about camp.”

  Bruce looks between her and her mother. “That’s not a problem, Silvia. We’ll miss you, but I’m sure we’ll manage.”

  Silvia can see from the corner of her eye that her mother is nodding at Bruce and gesturing towards her daughter as she stands up. “I’m just going to pop out and put the kettle on. Tea? Coffee?”

  “Decaf would be lovely, thank you,” Bruce says, coming over to take Silvia’s mother’s place on the couch as she disappears, as had clearly been the plan all along.

  “I wanted to check in with you, Silvia,” Bruce says, suddenly serious, “see how you’re doing.”

  “How I’m doing?”

  “You’re in a major transition period right now. A time of uncertainty, a time when you might perhaps feel overwhelmed at the number of choices you have to make.”

  Silvia, still listening, looks slightly behind Bruce’s head, finding the gilt mirror in the bookcase. She meets her own eyes.

  “I want you to know that God is with you for all of this. And so is your family. And so am I, of course. God is with you wherever you go.”

  She feels as though she’s at the bottom of a swimming pool, the weight of water compressing her.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to talk about, Silvia?”

  She blinks, and realises she’s been staring at her reflection this whole time, unrecognizing. “No, I’m good. But thank you.”

  “You feel prepared for this journey before you?”

  She does not even know what preparation would look like, but she nods. “I’m excited,” she says, as hopeful and dismissive as possible.

  Bruce looks at his watch. “I’ve enjoyed watching you grow into a wonderful, composed young woman, Silvia, and blossom in the love of our Lord. I’m going to give you my direct phone line should you need anything while you’re away. I’ve also looked up some churches in the region your parents said you’ll be staying in. My colleagues there will look forward to meeting you.”

  “Thank you,” Silvia says, that guilty feeling pulsing underneath her heart. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “THAT WAS NICE of Bruce to drop by, wasn’t it?” Her mother catches Silvia on her way up the stairs. She’d never even put on the kettle.

  “Very nice.”

  She falls asleep early that night and has incredibly cinematic, terrifying dreams she forgets as soon as her eyes are open. She tries to brush away the foggy feeling, but it lingers all day.

  LATER THAT MORNING her father drives her down to the train station at 6:15 a.m., too early for Trident coffees.

  “Do you have everything?” he asks, handing Silvia her second suitcase. The morning is mist-thick; at his insistence, she is forty minutes early.

  “I think so.”

  “When do you get back?”

  “I told you, I haven’t booked my return yet.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ll let you know, Dad.”

  “Right.”

  She can practically see something growing in his throat.

  “I’ve been away before, Dad.” But this will be the farthest she’s ever been from home, and she hadn’t considered what that might be like for them. “So you have the address, right?”

  Her father pats his breast pocket and looks at his feet.

  “I’ll
let you know when I get there,” she says. “And I’ll write to you. Once a week at least, I promise.”

  He finally looks up at her. “Be back by the end of summer,” he says, his shaky voice betraying his stern command.

  “It only lasts for the summer anyway.” She’s soft, but unwilling to concede. She hugs him, takes the bags, and walks towards the train platform. “Love you.”

  FREEDOM IS BEING without an anchor, and she feels like she’s floating. Doubt has a way of ripping a hole through which, eventually, the whole sky can fall.

  SILVIA SETTLES INTO her single front-facing seat for the twenty-five-hour train journey and leans her head against the cool, wide window. She wonders what the other people will be there for. If they’ll be real artists.

  As the train hugs the side of a body of water, then cuts through another, everywhere a different body that she can’t identify, she starts to lose her sense of place. She doesn’t know if they’re in New Brunswick or northern Quebec, or maybe still in Nova Scotia. She doesn’t even know what time it is. There’s a strange feeling of being in the land but outside it. Moving through it, over it, in every place and no place at the same time. She’s getting farther and farther away from what she recognizes, all she’s ever known, and the names for things are starting to dissolve. She didn’t bring a map, she can’t follow along to acknowledge the borders or name the rivers and lakes; ties are stretching to the point of breaking and the train is in motion, there’s no stopping it or going back now.

  V

  IT’S ONLY APRIL, but by nine o’clock in Toronto the day is as hot as summer. Ibrahim’s throat is scratchy—his allergies always start at the beginning of spring.