38 BETWEEN ZERO AND ONE W HEN I was young I thought that men had small lives of their own creation. I could not see why, born enfranchised, with- out the obstacles and constraints at- tendant on women, they set such close limits for themselves and why, once the limits had been reached, they seemed "0 taken aback. I could not tell much difference between a man aged thirty-six, about, and one forty or fifty; it was impossible to fix the borderline of this apparent disappoint- ment. There was a space of life I used to call "between Zero and One" and then came a long mystery. I supposed that men came up to their wall, their terminal point, quite a long way after One. At that time I was nineteen and we were losing the war The news broadcast in Canada was flatly opti- mistic, read out in the detached nasal voices de rigueur for the CBC. They were voices that seemed to be saying, "Good or bad, it can't affect us." I worked in a building belongIng to the federal government-it was a heavy Victorian structu re of the sort that exists on every continent, wherever the British thought they'd come to stay. This one had heen made out of the reddish-brown Montreal stone that colors, in memory, the streets of m) childhood and that architects have no use for now. The office was full of old soldiers from one war before: Y pres (pronounced "Wipers") and Vimy Ridge were real, as real as this min- ute, while Singapore, Pearl Harbor, Voronezh were the stuff of fiction. It seemed as if anything that be- fell the young, even dying, was bound to be trivial. "Half of ' em'll never see any fighting," I often heard. "Any- way not like in the trenches." vVe did have one veteran from the current war-Mac Kirk- connell, who'd had a knock on '(It -;', . "-ì_....":. "f,; the head during his training and , , ..- was now good for nothIng ex- cept civilian life. He and two others were the only men under thirty left in the place. The other two were physical crocks, which was why they were not in uniform (a question demented wom- en sometimes asked them in the street). Mr. Tracy had been snow-blinded aft- er looking out of a train window for most of a sunny February day; he had recovered part of his sIght but had to wear mauve glasses even hy electric ]ight. He was nice but strange, infirm. Mr. Curran, reputed to have one kid- ney, one lung, and one testicle, and who was the subject of endless rhymes and ditties on that account, was not so nice: he had not wanted a girl in the office and had argued against my being employed. Now that I was there he simply pretended that he had won. There were about a dozen other men-older, old. I can see every face, hear every syllable, which evoked, for me, a street, a suburb, a kind of school- ing. I could hear just out of some- ,. " s L . one s saYIng to me, ay, Innet, cou ja just gimme a hand here, please? " born here, born in Glasgow; immi- grated early, late; raised in Montreal, no, farther west. I can see the rolled shirtsleeves, the braces, the eyeshades, the hunched shoulders, the elastic arm- bands, the paper cuffs they wore some- times, the chopped-egg sandwiches in waxed paper, the apples, the oatmeal cookies ( "Want any, Linnet? If you don't eat lunch nobod y 'l1 marry you"), the thermos flasks. Most of them lived thinly, paying for a bungalow, a du- plex flat, a son's education: a good Protestant education was not to be had for nothing then. I remelnber a day of dark spnng snowstorms, ourselves reflected on the black windows, the pools of warm light here and there, the green-shaded lamps, the dramatic hiss and gurgle of the radiators that al ways sounded like the background to some emotional outburst, the sud- den slackening at the end. of the after- noon when every molecule of oxygen in the room had turned into poison. As- sistant Chief Engineer Macaulay came ploddIng softly along the win try room and laid something down on my desk. It was î collection of snapshots of a naked wom- an prancing and skipping in what I took to be the back yard of his house out in Car- tierville. In one she was in a baby carriage with her legs spread over the sIdes, pre- tending to drink out of an infant's bottle. The unknown that thi" represented was infinite. I also wondered what Mr. Macaulay wanted-he didn't say. He remarked, shifting from foot to foot, "Now, LInnet, they tell me you like modern art." I thought then, I think now, that the tunnel winters, the sudden darkness that Apnl day, the years he'd had of this long green room, the knowledge that he would die and be buried "Assistant Chief Engineer Grade II" without having overtaken Chief Engineer McCreery had simply snapped the twig, the frail matchstick DECEMDEI\ ,I 9 7 5 in the head that is all we have to keep us sensible. Bertie Knox had a desk facing mine. He told the other men I'd gone red in the face when I saw Macaulay's fat- arsed wife. (He hadn't seen that one; I had turned it over, like a bad card.) The men teased me for blushing, and they said, "\'T ait till you get married, Linnet, you haven't done with shocks." Bertie Knox had been in this very of- fice since the age of twelve. The walls had been a good solid grey then- not this drawing-room green. The men hadn't been pampered and cod- dled, either. There '\VTasn't even a water cooler. You were fined for smoking, fined for lateness, fined for sick leave. He had worked the old ten-hour day and given every cent to hIs mother. Once he pinched a dime of it and his mother went for him. He locked hitn- self in a cupboard. His mother took the door off its hinges and beat him blue with a wooden hanger. During the Depression, married, down to half pay, four kids in the house, he had shovelled snow for twenty cents an hour. "And none the worse for it," he would always wind up. Most of the Inen seemed to have been raised in hardship by stern, desperate parents. What struck me was the good they thought it had done them (I had yet to meet an adult man with a poor opinion of himself) and their desire to impose the same broken fortunes on other people, particularly on the young-though not their own young, of course. There was a touch of sad- ness, a touch of envy to it, too. BertIe Knox had seen M r. Macaulay and Mr. McCreery come in as Engineers Grade II, wet behind the ears, puffed up with their new degrees, "just a cou- ple more college punks." He said that engineering was the world's most de- spised profession, occupied mainly by human apes. Instead of a degree he had a photograph of himself in full kilt, Highland Light Infantry, 191 7: he had gone "home," to a completely un- known Old Country, and joined up there. "Will you just look at that lad? " he would plead. "Do they come like him today? By God, they do not!" Bertie Knox could imitate any tone and accent, Including mine. He could do a CBC announcer droning, "The British have ah taken ah Tobruk," when we knew perfectly well the Germans had. e One good thing about the men was that when anything seemed hopeless they talked nonsense. The native traits of pessimism and constant grumbling returned only when there was nothing to grumble about.) Bertie Knox had a