previously published in Medium

Vancouver Expo, 1986. I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent for my small studio apartment, and was still owing for half of the month before. The building manager lived upstairs in the building — as was the way then — and was not much older than I. He advocated for me. He seemed to believe I was good for the rent; the owner did not. The manager was told to give me notice to move as quickly as possible.

Uno

To soften the blow, he invited me to his apartment: “Friends are having a little game of Uno,” he said, his face open and kindly. “Join us.” Uno, the kid card game. I’d never learned to play big-people cards; how did he know?

I met a table full of friendly people, played the game, and returned to my — could I still call it “my”? — apartment with a pocket full of coins and those one and two dollar bills we used to have. Altogether enough to buy food for a week if I stretched it.

A couch

A friend offered the couch at the apartment she shared with a room-mate. They’d been thinking to leave. Maybe I could keep it, she suggested. Their rent was absurdly low: two hundred and fifty per month, for upper-floor, two large bedrooms, yard access, in a more-than-comfortable neighbourhood. The problem, she said, was the landlord. He tended to hover and ask too many questions. He’d never “done anything,” she added quickly. But you never knew; she wanted to warn me.

I moved in to sleep on the couch, and they moved out shortly afterward, leaving the place to me. I locked my doors, but exchanged hellos with both the landlord, ageing, tall, and too stooped and fragile to be threatening,, to my mind, and his wife, a woman whose dresses hung loosely. She’d not had a new one for a long time, I guessed.

I was a neophyte hairdresser, in early days of building clientele, spending too many hours at the shop waiting to fill appointments hours, then cutting and styling while contorting to be therapist, stand-up comedian, or wedding-planner as needed — things people ask of a hairdresser. Income trickled in, I paid my rent, and managed to save.

The landlord

The landlord and wife lived on the middle-floor, and a young couple with equally low rent were in the basement suite. The landlord said, with heavy Eastern European accent, that he believed young people should not be burdened with debt; they needed to put together a home, a career, maybe a business. I used my savings to return to school, ten years after dropping out of high school, determined not to be a hairdresser forever. I wanted to write.

I was studying for an exam in European history, and I’d registered in first year Latin. My landlord asked about my studies, invited me into his reading space, the little room his front door opened into, with two chairs, a reading lamp, bookshelves. Had my former room-mates seen this space?

He moved as an old man who had lived with bone cancer for a time longer than anyone would have expected. He shared that with me. And he went to pluck a couple ancient volumes from his shelf, spines coming to pieces, showing threads of fabric covers, faded teal and gold. Latin I and Latin II, they were titled. He handed them to me. “Here, take these. They’ll be useful.” Those old pages were filled with photos and drawings and ancient words, and the way they were set up, as high school texts, was easy to follow. Decades later, my youngest son used them to learn Latin in his time as a homeschooler.

But that day, my landlord also invited me to sit in the second chair. “What are you studying?” he asked, curious, eyes pale blue and keen. We talked about what started World War II, about what were those years, what was it to come to Canada after it was over. How he loved university campuses, the hum of learning. In his country he was an electrical engineer; in Canada he was a University of British Columbia janitor, who walked halls listening to lecturers drone.

His wife’s story

Just weeks after his sharing his WWII years, when he was out in the yard on a ladder, clipping dead blossoms off the fifty-year-old rhododendrons in the yard, his wife told me how he’d been a POW. How she could not find him. How she managed to get her hands on some American cigarettes, and she would stand on the platform of the train station, waving the cigarettes and a large photo of him, and asking soldiers in the train cars if anyone had seen him, exchanging cigarettes for information.

She also told me about the infant son they’d lost in that time, when there was no penicillin left at home. All it would have taken to save their child was a little of the new miracle medicine, but it was on the front-lines. The baby died while his father was away. While she was alone.

Saving and shoveling

I lived in that house for almost five years, making an effort to save the money not spent in rent, and pulling together a deposit for a townhouse. The young couple moved out of the basement after buying a fixer-upper down the street. I visited them for tea and a show around; we talked about how we’d not be able to do what we were doing without the living philosophy and practice of our landlord, who believed young people should not be quashed by high rent. Not only had they bought a house, but they had a small and growing business manufacturing collapsible kayaks. I was thrilled to be going to school; we had much to look forward to and to celebrate.

Both landlord and wife spent time in hospital now and then. By then my fiancé had moved in and we made soup or picked their berries for them, shoveled walks when it snowed. We painted the interior. There were months when the landlord would waive the rent because we did such things. But at that point, we made soup and shoveled because we considered them friends, and the house to be our home.

The landlord’s bone cancer was finally worsening. He’d been on experimental medication for more than a decade. He attributed living for the past decade to these drugs; I saw this as part of his thinking to give to others, to do what he could.

Blackberry trellis

One of their happiest days was the day they pulled two lawn chairs onto their back deck to watch our exchange of marriage vows under the pear tree in their backyard. Guests sat under the canopy of blackberry vines on a trellis, an invention of the landlord’s; I’d never seen support like that for the spiky tendrils, fruit hanging over guests with wafts of end-of-summer ripening, and just a hint of fall red to the leaves.

A year later the landlord was too ill to leave the hospital, and it was time for grandchildren to take over both the basement and our suite. They’d been promised housing for when they attended the university where he’d worked. I was grateful for my time in the house, and prepared to move.

A lifetime of atonement

We’d packed and were ready to leave the next morning. I went to the backyard, having a memory-filled roam and moment. One of the grandchildren’s partners was busy watering. We talked. I shared how grateful I was, how kind were his grandparents-in-law, what they meant to us. He listened. He asked if I knew what had brought about the thinking to help others. I offered thoughts: war years, tough times. Yes, and yes, he said. Then he added that the landlord had been in the SS. Followed by a lifetime of feeling a need to atone.

I tried to absorb that, and struggled. I thought of our times sharing history lessons, the old man and me. I thought of their lost child, and of his time as a POW, with his wife desperate and seeking him. I thought about their moving to a new continent, giving up vocations, language, family, friends. And possibly whatever ideas he’d held close about what it meant to be an adult, a man, a father. How he’d come to be a landlord, a neighbour, and grown as a human.

What was asked?

What was asked of him in service and what might he have done? I would have liked to ask him about the other years, too, between life as a young military man, and life as an old man in his backyard garden. I thought of the questions and stories we’d shared; all I knew was what he did do, the evidence of his choices in the short years I knew him. I remember how he would stand out in his raspberry canes in the evening, how he was thankful for small things. They did not go unnoticed.

His choices meant that I have been able to be the writer I dreamed back then, returning to school, reading the books he loaned me. My income has been small for the most part, with my decision to live as an artist, but I’ve managed to own a home: those five years of saving when I was still young and going to school without accumulating debt, set my life in a certain direction.

Thorns and offerings

When I finally grew vegetable and fruit in my yard, a front yard garden after digging up the lawn, I found blackberry vines and transplanted them. My mother said I was crazy, that they would grow out of control. But I remembered the landlord’s ways, and built a trellis as he had, a loose fence-like piece, with a fan-shaped piece that would spread out from its top, rising so that one could walk under it to pick the berries, supported by posts; altogether it allowed the vines their full growth cycle each year.

Just as he’d done, I cut those barbed vines right back to the ground in the middle of the fall. Cut to the point of looking dead and gone… until the next spring, when it would start all over. When I pluck sun-ripened and -warmed berries, and when I cut those thorns each fall, I thought of the landlord.

I think of him even now: while he was an early lesson in choices, in what is thrust upon us, in how we fight or don’t, how we see ourselves and others, they’re not easy lessons. I still don’t have answers. That’s as it should be. I wonder at myself even thinking answers might be possible.

I learned from him — maybe mostly about quick judgement and slow reparation. And how history tells us so little, but we study it nonetheless, and we study those around us, too, and plumb our souls. Would we? we ask.

I’ve moved away now. But sometimes when I was tending that front yard garden in the evening a neighbour would walk by, and I’d offer some berries, a tomato still warm from afternoon sun. Some offering. Hoping they’d take it, enjoy it.