What Had Become of Us by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

 
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    Pieter Van Dongen and I were in another forest completely, and not surprisingly, my life had changed irrevocably and in subtle ways that I did not necessarily wish to examine. The acknowledging of change in any way brought with it a tenderness, a weepiness, a general atmosphere of misery that I would sooner deny. The forest in which we stood had been ravaged by a hurricane. Very few trees had survived the winds. It was a year to the day since Erwin’s death.
    What are we supposed to do here? I asked.
    Cleaning up, Pieter said.
    I had come to Belgium in order to leave Canada. It was as simple and as complicated as that could be. I wanted to leave home, family — a family I suspected of subversive politeness and congeniality, which was okay if you liked that sort of thing, but I had decided that on the whole I didn’t — and seek the sort of autonomy that I expected might be found in the arms of a foreigner, on foreign terrain, in the imagined, nuanced otherness of a stranger’s bed, in heavily accented intercourse. I had dreams — vivid sleeping dreams — that assured me this was possible, and so I sought, in my naivety, a non-Canadian boyfriend, a saviour from a far-off land, someone cultivated, if possible, but certainly non-English speaking. I had no desire for argument.
    I met Pieter in a dingy university bar in the oldest section of Ghent. It was full of miserable intellectuals for the most part, people who snorted instead of laughed, as if they were entirely above humour. He was different, of course, else I’d never have bothered with him. He was all gangly and confident. He had a small logging operation. It was hard to imagine anyone logging in Belgium, and so I found him generally amusing, archaic; I suppose I fell in love with him almost immediately. He spoke a disjointed, dysfunctional English, which made everything he said sound charming and vaguely stupefied.
    You like me. I like you. We are aliking each other, he said. Is this good?
    Do you hire women on your logging crews? I asked this demurely and out of pure tactic. We were standing beside each other at the bar, drinking blanchkes with little peels of lemon sinking down into them. It was obvious I was having him on; I was a terrible flirt. Of course, I was over there with only one goal in mind. I could be very stubborn, a real stickler for goals and such. He was adorable, all standing-up hair and questioning eyes, clean-shaven. He stared at me, not understanding the question.
    I repeated, Do you ever have women working for you?
    Oh, no, never, he said.
    Really? I’m very strong.
    Yes, oh, I would hire you, Adriana. This is special.
    That was how it started. An enormous amount of time had passed since. Pieter’s English had come to be letter perfect; I had come to see that the goal of autonomy was a shifting bastard of a thing. That ideal of self, a container of you-ness or me-ness, was a facile improbability, as all ideals are. I was not unhappy; I was hurtling toward happiness at all times. I had attained some sort of freedom — the sort given by your loved ones even as they cleave to you. Maybe that’s all a person could expect.
    I wished I had slept with Erwin before he died, before Pieter felled the spindly little scrap of a tree that would decapitate him and end his days on earth. They were brothers, you know. I wish I had the pleasure and misery of certain memories of Erwin’s hand along the inside of my thigh, the surfacing of orgasm like a shattering of any possibility. I could languish in the grudge that the widow bears the dead and the almost-faux secret the adulteress coddles from her husband (for he must know, he must). My miscreant behaviour would not have been against Pieter. I would have slept with Erwin in spite of my love for Pieter, in spite of myself and all common sense, in spite of Erwin, who no doubt would have had his own good reasons for not crossing the line, yet could not,