Little Fortress

Chapter 5-1

Canada, 1921

In the last days before we reached America, the air was biting with cold. Some nights, after the ladies were asleep, I would put on a coat, hat, scarf and gloves over my evening attire and go out on the deck. The ship’s staff told me not to, warned the cold was too much, it was dangerous. I ignored them, minced along the deck. A sharp chill wrapped around the ship, twisted around my ankles, legs, waist. The cold was pocketed in clouds of air I would walk into, a casing covering me until I blundered through to the other side. Eventually, we were so high in the Atlantic that I would watch icebergs calf and moan, float by as if apparitions. The slow movement of the liner against the steady drift of the bergs made it seem everything – water, land, sky, stars – was moving around and against each other, like parts in a clock. I would never last long, the cold slicing into me as mountains of ice lumbered by in dark water.

We’d left England shrouded in fog that obscured the coastline, and Italy’s coast burned gold in my mind, blurred with sunlight. On the morning we approached the Atlantic coast of Canada, the light was so clear in the cold air that everything seemed sharply focused – each shadow etched on the rocky coast, every tree against every other tree. That was all I could see – rock and tree, light and shadow stark against each other. The ship steered out of the Atlantic into the Saint Lawrence, the rock gave way and then, aside from an occasional lighthouse and small croppings of tiny wooden houses perched on uncertain shores, there were only trees.

We didn’t know for how long we’d be exiled in this country. I travelled as staff of the family – Duke Leone Caetani di Sermoneta, Ofelia and their four-year-old daughter, Sveva. It was she, not her mother, who watched with me as we passed into our new country. “Where are the people, Miss Jüül?” she asked.

“I’m sure they’re in the cities, Sveva. We’ll meet them soon.”

“Will we like them will they like us what will it all be like?” She spoke in one continual stream, a hybrid between Italian, French and English. I’d become accustomed to the mixed singsong of her speech.

“I’m sure it will all be wonderful,” I told her, though, of course, I was not sure at all.

Did I long for my own home? I thought often of my own family, people I had once known so well that I could recognize the cadence of footsteps, a cleared throat. Now they’d become more of a concept to me, like figures in a photograph, locked in time, fading. I had left them behind so long ago. Since then, I’d become separated from other people who felt more real to me, my desire for them keening just below the surface of my skin. One person in particular, though I would not name him. I had little idea of what my role would be in this new world, but I had grown accustomed to uncertainty, the spaces between, the ways I could slip into them.

“Oh, this is just awful,” Ofelia leaned into me and whispered. We had disembarked in Montreal and were checking into a hotel.

“The hotel?”

“No, everything – this cold air, their accents, even the calls of the birds. It’s all so strange, so shrill somehow.” She spoke to me in Italian. Ofelia did not like the sound of the English language. She had told me this every time we’d visited London, alternating her own speech between Italian and French. Around us in the lobby, we heard more French than English, but both languages seemed flatter, more nasal, coarser. Later, in the hotel restaurant, I overheard a Danish waiter serve a businessman from Copenhagen. It gave me some comfort, hearing my own language so far from home. I could hear in them my brothers, though I knew that I didn’t, not really. Our northern dialect was a blunter, lower Danish.

We were in Montreal for three days to get our official papers sorted before we boarded a train. I didn’t sleep much, watched the country outside the window instead. Rock on rock, dense forest, huge stretches of lakes and long tracts that seemed locked in winter, the only variations in the way the cold covered the land – frosted over rock, stunting trees, textured in ice on lakes, flattened by wind or squalls of snow twisting upward before falling like curtains. Then, one day, the skies were saturated with blue pressing down on the pale prairie. Occasionally, a town or village with dirt streets, wooden sidewalks, tiny wooden churches, wooden houses with smoke rising out of thin stone chimneys and settling on the landscape. The cities – Winnipeg, Regina – were unlike those we were used to. There were paved roads and streetcars and buildings made of brick and stone, but on the outskirts of these, more wooden houses, more smoke. Once, I saw what looked like Native Indians – men, women and children – outside a train station, dressed like Europeans but without shoes, pulling wagons and wagons of what appeared to be hay.

While I watched, Ofelia slept, or tried to sleep. I don’t know how much she saw from her berth. And I don’t know for what I hoped more – for her to see as little as possible, to minimize the shock, or for her to witness some of where we now were so that she could begin to familiarize herself with this place. I had spent my childhood on a farm in northern Denmark, so while Canada looked more vast, rougher, I could comprehend parts of it. For her, it would be completely foreign.

The duke sat down across from me. “The Wild West, would you say?” He raised his eyebrow, looked amused. “Well, it will be an adventure.” He turned his face to the window for a moment, his expression more serious. “I’m not sure how Ofelia will adapt.”

“No, neither am I.”

He opened his cigarette case, slid one out, tapped the tip on his palm. “You’ll try to help her adjust?”

“I will do my best.” I always did.

“I’m thankful for that, you do know.”

I nodded.

“It will be an adjustment for all of us, but you and she will have each other.”

Sveva came running down the aisle. “Daddy!” She’d been napping alongside Ofelia. I looked down the train to see if her mother was behind her.

“Wurr-Burr!” He put his unlit cigarette back in his case and picked up Sveva as he stood. “Isn’t it a grand adventure, my girl?”

“Yes!” She squirmed to get out of his hold and stood in front of me, took both of my hands and leaned across my lap, grin stretched as she strained her neck to bring her face close to mine. “A grand adventure, yes, Miss Jüül?”

“Of course it is, sweetheart.” I rarely called her endearments. I was not Sveva’s nanny, though I would often be mistaken as such. I adored her, but she was her parents’ little girl, and I their employee. If nothing else, I had learned to know my place.

“Do you think Mau-Mau is going to like it?” She pushed off from my lap and rebounded against the bench opposite me. “She’s been sleeping the whole time!” Sveva held her arms wide. “The whole time!”

The duke reached for his daughter, one palm on her head, the other on her shoulder to calm her. He laughed. “Slow down, little one. Come.” He guided her into the aisle. “Let’s go see how your mother is doing, shall we?”

She turned to me with her chin raised, a closed-lip smile broad across her face. Sveva looked proud in a way that only a four-year-old can, delighted with herself and her place in the world, secure with her father’s hand around hers.

As we moved west, the snow disappeared from the prairie and I saw instead fields of brown, flattened by weather, pocked with patches of new green. It seemed we had already moved through a continent of climate. We reached the Rocky Mountains, hulks of stone pushing up the sky high above us. We’d been on the train four days. “In that time, we could have crossed the farthest reaches of Russia,” said Ofelia. She was out of the sleeping cabin for the first time since we’d boarded, wearing a watered silk dress, black pearls set against the collar, gloves on as though we were about to disembark to a formal dinner.

“Inspiring, isn’t it?” said the duke. “This much land, this much potential.” He lifted his chest as though he, or those like him, were in some way responsible for the size of this country. Ofelia looked toward me and rolled her eyes, her fingers tracing each pearl around her neck as she looked out the window.

We stayed for a month at the Banff Springs Hotel, where we watched from the windows as bears tracked dark shapes across the exposed slopes of mountains. One of the animals shambled into the village and was shot and removed quickly by men in hotel uniforms. It was the Wild West, complete with real redskins. We saw them in a performance put on by the hotel – The Noble Savage. Indian men with feathered headdresses rode bareback on horses that reared on their hind legs and thrashed their necks as though they might break. Those wild-eyed beasts were as much a part of the show as were the buckskinned, painted men who beat drums and mumbled guttural ditties. I watched the sinewed horses, felt the drums pounding up through my legs. I had become separated from the family during the performance. I saw them across the circle that the guests had formed. The duke had one arm around Ofelia’s waist and she leaned into him. In his other arm, he held Sveva. They were closer together as a family than I’d ever seen them in Europe.

When the performance was over, Ofelia clapped politely, but the duke raised his long arms, applauded loudly, said, “Bravo, bravo!” I watched as Ofelia stepped away from him and reached for Sveva, who was beaming at her father, jumping from foot to foot, joining him in saying, “Bravo, bravo!” No one else did, the other patrons’ applause more subdued. I backed away from the crowd and made my way back to our rooms.

That night in the dining room, I heard the duke talking to other guests. “I commend them. A country really must celebrate its natives. I think of parts of India – Benares, Kashmir – as well as Egypt, Turkey, Syria. Those places where the ancient and the modern meet and are celebrated, I find them to be the most fascinating, enlivening places in the world.”

As he talked, Ofelia leaned toward me. “It’s grown tiresome, all this talk about the fascinating New World. Can we not be enlivened at home, in Italy, where we belong?”

It wasn’t my place to say, either way.

After a month, we came down from the mountains, the train travelling along rivers, a thick white muscle of water below us, sending spray up to mist the windows. The water slowed to languid creeks and eventually the land smoothed into green valleys and what looked like the hills of Italy. We were told that the lakes here were aquamarine jewels between golden slopes, but what we saw as the train pulled into Vernon was one small, swampy lake rimmed with cattails and some sort of camp on the outskirts of town, high wooden fences and smoke rising from the other side.