Where the Silver River Ends

Joan’s hand hovered in the air, poised in front of the whiteboard. She turned to face the serious-looking Hungarian businessmen and women, stolid government clerks, a sole retired professor. The last was the only one who smiled at her. Even though he looked nothing like her father, there was something—the tweed jacket, maybe? Joan began to tremble. What was she doing here, so far from home? And now—she was about to leave again.

Joan turned back to the board to hide her face from her students, who rustled behind her, copying words into their notebooks. “If I had____________I would____________.”

If I had known I was leaving, she thought, I would have said goodbye. To whom? To these people? She barely knew them. If I’d said goodbye, I would have trembled like an aspen. If I’d trembled like an aspen, you would have known all it took was a puff of wind to shake me. If you’d known, you might have turned into a puff of wind, a puff of smoke, and followed me like the scent of wine and cigarettes.

The students were silent, waiting. Joan fingered the marker. There was ink on her hands. A couple men glowered at her. She heard them thinking, as they rearranged themselves in their seats, that their employers had sent them here to practise English with this Canadian, this amateur, and here she stood, awkward as a newborn fawn. The women, their hair frosted and deadened under the overhead fluorescents, rolled their eyes.

Joan put the marker on the ledge. Her voice shaky, she turned to the professor, who was smiling. Expectantly, she thought.

“If I—for example, if I had a million dollars,” she said, “I would…?” She nodded to him. He looked amused. “It’s from a song,” Joan said. “A Canadian song.”

There was shuffling and muted comments. The professor spoke, in a clear, sonorous voice. “If I had a million dollars, I would give a quarter to the church, a quarter to the university, and with the rest I would buy a little boat to sail to the Mediterranean,” he said. Joan gazed at him, taken aback by his self-assurance. Someone snorted. The professor looked unperturbed. “Miss Simpson, if I may ask. If you had a million dollars, what would you do?”

Joan had thought about that question the night before, and she had no idea. The class was humming now. She heard the words Mercedes-Benz and Monte Carlo, and giddy laughter from the women. The talk of money had roused the class. The professor still gazed at her, waiting for her answer.

I would go to China, Joan thought. The idea surprised her. I would go to the village where my grandparents lived, open the gate to their house, and knock on their door. Other people lived there now. I would give them a bag of oranges and they would invite me in and offer me tea. I would tell them why I was there. Why would I be there? Joan didn’t know. Just to look, maybe…to see the place where the river of her family began. Then she would leave and find a hotel room where she could sleep for a long time, she thought. Eat Chinese takeout, if there was such a thing in China. And watch television, in a language she didn’t understand.

“I would go to China,” Joan said. “Where my mother’s family came from.”

The professor nodded, pleased. A woman with long nails that clicked around the glass of tea she always brought to class from the café next door piped up.

“Shanghai?” she asked.

Joan shook her head. “No.” But she didn’t even know the name of her grandfather’s village. Her cheeks burned. She would have to ask her mother. Would she know? These days her mother too had long nails, blond streaks in her hair. She looked like a different person, ever since she and Joan’s father, a Yorkshireman who had transplanted himself to Nova Scotia thirty-five years ago for the love of the delicate Chinese Canadian girl Joan’s mother had been, had divorced.

When she looked at the professor, Joan felt her father’s sharp blue eyes on her. They hadn’t always been so critical, but had been made so by the disappointments of life: the bewildering unhappiness of his wife, and his only daughter, Joan’s, incomprehensible lack of progress. What would he think of her leaving this job, as she had all her others? Would it be more painful to him to know she had quit work again than to hear what Tibor had done to her that morning? Her father’s face creased with both irritation and concern. Joan brushed the thought away. She did not need her parents at this moment. She needed time to gather her thoughts. Joan’s class ignored her and, chatting loudly in Hungarian, was on the verge of chaos. What would Madame B. think? Joan clapped her hands loudly, and they looked at her with vague interest. She mustered her courage.

“Your assignment is to interview a classmate. To ask them what they would do if they had a million dollars, and to write their answers using this phrase.” Some of the students turned to one another, confused. The professor stood up and explained in Hungarian what Joan had asked of them. They began to pair off, turning their desks toward one another.