Bildungsroman

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     “Klaus was a monster,” his niece said. “I don’t know why everyone is grieving the man.”

     “He was a bookseller. For culture vultures he could do no wrong,” his nephew said. “Anyway, they’re not mourning—just enjoying the schnapps and sausage.”

      Emma didn’t introduce herself to any of Klaus’ relatives. In fact, she thought she shouldn’t have attended Klaus’ funeral and reception at the German-Canadian Friendship Center on Spadina Avenue. She reappeared from a part of Maria’s long-lost youth and history, when, she believed, Klaus abducted her best friend and brainwashed her. Still, Emma enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversations of mourners and well-wishers at the repast, after the corpse of Klaus was interned at Mount Pleasant cemetery. Alongside the gravesites and mausoleum of wealthy and old stock Torontonians and Canadians, a burial plot must have cost a small fortune, Emma thought, although Klaus was a successful businessman, a profitable bookseller, earning his filthiest profits from porn. He thrived on exploiting others in their hours of desperation and need: students selling their books when hungry for a meal, or a night on the town, or needing to purge their personal libraries to pay for new textbooks and tuition.

     “You know his nickname among his employees was Hitler,” commented his nephew.

     They asked Maria how she met her husband. What kind of question was that to ask at his funeral? Maria wondered. She must have looked perturbed or indignant or even distressed; Klaus’ niece apologized profusely. Maria didn’t even consider herself technically or legally Klaus’ wife; they never formally married, and, as Maria aged and matured, she felt estranged from Klaus and increasingly antagonistic towards him. In any event, Maria claimed she couldn’t remember. In the background, funeral music played through the speakers, somber baroque orchestral music, by Bach, with vocals by a choir of high-voiced boys, a touch Klaus, with his kinks and perversions, might have appreciated.

       Earlier, at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Maria glanced furtively and pensively at the ritual proceedings around Klaus’ casket, covered with roses and carnations and soil. Klaus’ niece and nephew gazed at her anxiously, and with a surprising degree of empathy, as Klaus’ body, his remains, in his coffin, was lowered into his grave, bordered by mounds of fresh dirt, shovels, and the modern mechanical tools of gravedigging, including a small backhoe loader. Klaus requested his remains, his body, be cremated upon death, but, as a superstitious agnostic, who couldn’t shake off her Catholic indoctrination and education, in one of the few times in which she failed to comply, she did not follow his last instructions.

   Maria remembered her first encounter with Klaus, after she dared cross him, or his business, in 1983, many years ago. She could still hear that memorable new wave rock classic song from the summer of 1983, “Every Breath You Take,” drifting through the open window of the red Toronto Transit Commission streetcar she rode. In fact, Emma bought a pair of Police concert tickets and insisted Maria join her in attending hyped concert at the Exhibition Stadium on the CNE grounds in Toronto. The song resounded from the car stereo and speakers of a convertible Camaro that followed alongside the streetcar. The Camaro driver, bearded, wearing sunglasses, denim trousers and a leather biker jacket, kept gesturing at Maria to join him in the empty passenger seat. Maria continued to read her book, The Golden Notebook, as she approached the novel’s ending. She recently moved with Emma from their remote town in Northwestern Ontario, in the summer of 1983. Toronto was everything she wanted in a city, civilized, industrialized, urbanized, overbuilt, with countless people, subway trains, streetcars, and buses, plying the streets, cluttered with rail tracks, power lines, utility cables, waste baskets, stops, shelters, shops, stores, restaurants, apartment towers, office buildings, and concrete, steel, and glass structures everywhere. Maria became a straphanger and rode the buses, streetcars, and subways, sometimes for hours, reading and drinking coffee. Maria had argued that morning with Emma, and for the first time she had an urge to hit her. In fact, when Emma pushed her, Maria retaliated, slapping back. Maria survived on a diet of peanut butter on whole wheat bread, toasted, with cinnamon sugar, ice cream, coffee, Emma complained. She ate the same damn food day after day. She was painfully thin; her ribs and bones protruded from her skin and flesh; her thick dark hair became wispy when she was too undernourished. Her problem originated in the fact she suffered an eating disorder, Emma said, and, of course, because she was in denial, refusing to admit she was underweight and anorexic Maria hated that word; that was when she lashed out. Emma believed Maria’s poor diet and thinness affected her behavior and mental condition and made her vulnerable to Klaus, who she came to consider a predator, even after she remained with him for years.

     On that fateful warm September day, the streetcar operator put the streetcar out of service near University and Queen Street. The only passenger, Maria rode the red streetcar from The Beaches to Mimico at the other end, reading The Golden Notebook. The streetcar driver thought she was cute and pretty and appreciated her presence. She wore tight short denim cutoffs and a crop top, summer apparel that revealed the curves of her backside and the cleavage of her breasts. The short shorts and an undersized top Emma lent her from her wardrobe, clothes leftover from a teen phase. Despite Maria’s protests she didn’t feel comfortable wearing the shorts and top, Emma insisted she wear the skimpy apparel, when Maria had never worn anything so revealing before publicly. The streetcar driver, who kept checking her body and curves and flesh in the rear-view mirror, as she sat reading directly behind his seat, felt guilty that he ogled her, a teenager, and that he had given himself an erection. His penis, chafing against his tight underwear and trim trousers, rubbed against the fabric and his hairy inner thigh, as he pumped his right leg. Now he felt that pressure and sensation and the visual stimulation of her was bringing him close to the edge. Then he remembered his pregnant wife at home, grousing from the complications of her first pregnancy, high blood pressure and hemorrhoids. Maria, reading her pocketbook, was the only passenger aboard, so he put the streetcar out of service. Maria was forced to leave the streetcar with nothing to read, which made her feel anxious and empty after finishing The Golden Notebook. She put the paperback, thick, heavy, a delicious pocketbook, into her backpack. Having eaten no food, aside from sipping coffee, for a day, she strolled along Queen Street, bored, feeling hunger and dizzy and lightheaded. The summer heat and the memories of her argument with Emma made her feel tired and miserable.

Maria walked towards Yonge Street, where she intended to have a coffee and a soft ice cream cone for supper, but, of course, first she needed a book to read. As she strolled along bohemian Queen Street between Spadina and University, she came across a used bookstore, Bildungsroman, housed between a pawn shop and a tavern. Piqued, she wandered inside the bookstore, dusty, grimy, with worn wooden floors. Out of her strong sense of curiosity, she started perusing the selection of books, including a back section with used Playboy and Penthouse magazines. She found herself glancing furtively at the covers, as they aroused her, but she preferred the large selection of trade-sized paperback pocketbooks, affordable, in good condition. 

     Klaus, aroused the moment she walked inside the store, felt excited by the crop top and denim cutoffs, Emma insisted she wear, which showed off her butt cheeks. He liked her sweaty face, which he thought pretty, and her thick tousled dark hair. She was thin, but he appreciated her curves. He scrutinized and watched her closely, his gaze following her around the store, though she was momentarily unaware of his presence, despite the creaking of the weathered wooden floor, brown and uneven, worn from decades of footsteps.

     Klaus, a German immigrant, inherited the used bookstore from his mother’s brother. His uncle died from a case of hepatitis acquired while visiting Thailand, Klaus later told her. As a restless youth, Klaus associated with punk rockers and skinheads in his favorite West Berlin neighborhoods and haunts and hangouts. After taunting riot police and waving a Nazi flag, which he later burned, at an anti-nuclear, anti-neutron bomb, and anti-cruise missile rally, where demonstrators turned violent and hurled rocks and obscenities, he found himself detained and arrested. Then, he dropped out of aeronautical engineering at the Technische Universität Berlin, and, around the same time, his uncle died. He agreed with his parents inheriting the secondhand the pocket of his leather jacket. Then he led her out the rear exit and door to the back alley. She got into his BMW, alongside him, sitting on the comfortable padded leather seat of the air-conditioned interior, after he placed the German daily Der Spiegel and a few German language magazines atop the dashboard. As Klaus drove along Dundas Street, Maria panicked as she feared he was sending her to hell, taking her to the 52nd-division headquarters of the Metro Toronto police, but then he circled around, driving back in the opposite direction. The engine roared and the tires on the smooth driving car squealed as he sped back west along Dundas Street. He opened the sunroof and turned up the air conditioning in the BMW until she felt chilly, as he drove her to his house in a neighborhood the street signs and bakeries, cafes, and butcher shops indicated was Little Portugal. She tried repeatedly apologizing for taking the book. He said he accepted her apology but she owed him, still. He took her inside his house, insisted she shower, and reheated food in his large microwave oven. He encouraged her to eat and dumped a buffet of Chinese food, hotpot, braised pork balls in gravy, shrimp with vermicelli and garlic, dumplings, chow mein, and Peking roasted Duck onto a large plate. When Maria poked shyly at the rice, he muttered in German, splashed her dish with soya sauce and insisted she eat, saying they were going nowhere until she finished her meal. So, literally drooling, she forgot her inhibitions and consumed the food, having never eaten this variety before, and she thoroughly enjoyed the Chinese entrees, which surprised her with its succulence and deliciousness. She ate more food in a single meal than she could ever recall in her life, while they discussed her favorite authors and magazines.Afterwards, Klaus served her a glass of wine, port, a gift from his neighbor.

      “The Portuguese—they are very generous,” Klaus said. “I read a letter from the Canadian government for my neighbor. Apparently, he not only can barely speak English but he can hardly read Portuguese. He has only four years of formal education and learned mostly in the farm fields. Back in the old country school was not a priority, he says, and he went to work as a child for his uncles and father. He insisted on giving me this fine port because I read him a letter saying the government owed him a refund on the taxes he paid. You are Portuguese, aren’t you?”

     “Azorean.”

     “A province of Portugal. My neighbor is Azorean, too. I’ve travelled to the mainland as a tourist. You visited?”

     “Yes, I was born in Canada, but I visited my parents’ homeland.” 

     “Yes, as I suspected, beautiful and untouched, the Azores, like you.”

     He glanced into Maria’s eyes and stared, intently expressing a yearning that triggered her startled response.

      “I want to make love to you,” Klaus said.

     Maria grew tense and felt a mixture of resistance and ambivalence,intermingled with a bit of yearning. But she also felt guilty over the book she stole, which he had placed on the dinner table, as a reproach, a reminder, a gift—she didn’t know or understand. Klaus led her on a tour of his house. She marveled at the luxury of the interior of his home, the shiny modern appliances, the hardwood furniture, the leather upholstery, the high-fidelity stereo, stacks of high-end audio equipment, everything crowded into a bungalow, located in a working-class Portuguese-Canadian neighborhood, which she thought peculiar. Then he took her to his bedroom.Afterwards, he seemed satisfied and content that she bled, but she refused to answer his questions about her virginity. Klaus insisted she call Emma and wanted her to say he was her new boyfriend. Initially, Emma was surprised and delighted, thinking she hooked up with a suitable match, a guy born and raised in Toronto, attending university, or a Southern Ontario dude, who, say, worked part-time in a factory and went to community college. Laughing, Emma insisted she knew the crop top and denim cutoffs would do the trick.When Maria returned to their apartment and started to pack her belongings to move in with Klaus, she met Klaus in person and started to become suspicious and concerned at their age difference. After all, she figured, Klaus seemed a few decades older than either of them. Then Maria started working in his bookstore as a clerk, and, after he trained her, a buyer. When Emma heard little or nothing from Maria, her closest friend, even when she visited the bookstore, she became alarmed. She visited the downtown police division headquarters and spoke to a few officers in person, explaining, imploring, hectoring indignantly, but they calmly and indifferently said they could do nothing. After Maria failed to return her telephone calls, and letters, and even refused to acknowledge her visits to the dingy secondhand bookstore, on Queen Street West, during which Maria seemed indifferent to Emma’s presence as she perused and browsed through the bookshelves and stacks in Bildungsroman, Emma gave up. Emma told their hometown friends in long distance calls Klaus had Maria’s mind and psyche under control, and she no longer considered her a friend. Emma allowed time and biology take its toll on her memories of Maria and their close friendship. As the years turned into decades, after Emma graduated from college and university and moved from jobs in social work to public administration, as her skin started to weather and wrinkle and her hairs turned grey, she virtually forgot about Maria—that is, until Emma heard about Klaus’ death while she perused the obituaries in the daily city newspaper. Klaus died after a book scouting and book buying trip to the prairies and Winnipeg; his Mercedes Benz van collided head-on with a tractor-trailer truck, hauling wood chips to a pulp mill, on a narrow two-lane highway outside Kenora. Informed by the notice in the Star, Emma turned up at the St. George's Lutheran Church for the funeral, in Toronto, attended mostly by Klaus’ distant German relatives. Then Emma drove to the cemetery in Mount Pleasant for the internment. Emma hadn’t seen Maria in countless years, but, she believed, she recognized her later at the reception in the German-Canadian friendship center during the reception following Klaus’ burial and funeral.Emma tried to approach her old friend and hometown classmate. When she attempted to apologize, Emma felt she held the upper hand and turned away. She walked towards her car parked in the nearby roadway. Now Maria felt the loss and pain and yearning, and, relieved Klaus was gone, she felt free to reach out to Emma. She searched for Emma online, found her on social media, and then tried to contact her through instant messages, text messages, and video calls. While Emma found e-mail a valuable tool, she largely tried to avoid the Internet, social media, and text and instant messages; before she retired from social work, she witnessed firsthand the damage social media could inflict on relationships and marriages. Besides, she was not tech savvy or computer literate. Still, struggling and fumbling with her thick thumbs, Emma replied to Maria’s texts and messages. Emma felt heartened she had taken the initiative and reached out to her; she felt relieved Maria was finally acting as a free agent. Emma accepted her apologies, but she also told her she didn’t believe any apology was owing. Emma felt the need to apologize herself, but she refrained.Emma invited Maria over to her house near Eglinton Avenue West. When Maria arrived for dinner, Emma hid the takeout Chinese food while she set the table with a pot of coffee, a pint of gourmet ice cream, and toasted whole wheat bread with peanut butter, upon which she sprinkled cinnamon sugar. Maria sobbed when she saw dinner, but the cry was cathartic, Emma thought, especially when she brought out the Chinese food. They had renewed their friendship. 

     Now completely retired from social work, Emma went to toil alongside her soulmate in the bookstore that became Maria’s through inheritance.Emma barely contained her disappointment when she learned that the only remaining profitable part of the Bildungsroman was the sale of porn videos, adult magazines, and erotic novels. Tired of the place, Maria felt inclined to sell the bookstore, but Emma decided she would try to boost her morale and made an offer for a share of the bookstore. Attempting to placate her, Maria allowed her to assume a fifty percent equity stake in Bildungsroman for a nominal amount and Emma became co-owner. Emma’s accountant insisted on conducting due diligence, but Emma ignored her advice as their bookstore became a mission and a cause with her, at a time when Maria yearned to retire and say goodbye to Bildungsroman forever.

     During long walks along the lakeshore and visits to the beaches of Toronto, they caressed, embraced, and kissed. Sensing fate and destiny at work, after a long career in a helping profession, in which she saw the failure of the knowledge and learning she had acquired from the social sciences, Emma believed they had been meant and intended for each other from the beginning, since they moved from their hometown in northwestern Ontario to Toronto, as teenagers. She even started to believe their conjoining had been preordained. Eventually, they sold the bookstore to a young ambitious couple, interested in the environment, sustainability, liberal arts and, of course, books. They also sold their houses: Emma’s newer brick house in York, midtown Toronto, and Maria’s bungalow in Little Portugal. Together, they bought a condo on the lakeshore in Etobicoke. They both agreed marriage was a needless formality.

Author John Tavares was born and raised in Sioux Lookout, Ontario. John Tavares is the son of Portuguese immigrants from Sao Miguel, Azores. Having graduated from arts and science at Humber College and journalism at Centennial College, he more recently earned a Specialized Honors BA in English Literature from York University. His short fiction has been featured in community newspapers and radio and published in a variety of print and online journals and magazines, in the US, Canada, and internationally. Following a longtime fascination with economics, he obtained certification in the Canadian Securities Course. His many passions include journalism, literature, photography, writing, and coffee, and he enjoys hiking and cycling.