Sleight of Hand

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For a few days in June, when the gloom lifted briefly, it was pos­si­ble to stroll through Vancouver in sun­light, which is what cities are meant for: to steal away and plunge into them, into the pedes­trian flow, to daw­dle along, to offer one­self to the pass­ing scene. On Robson Street in front of the art gallery, where the side­walk widens into a plaza, the pass­ing scene on Friday after­noon included shop­pers, office work­ers, tourists in over­sized run­ning shoes, jog­gers, cyclists, moth­ers with baby car­riages, pen­sion­ers, police offi­cers, skate­board­ers, pan­han­dlers, drug deal­ers, lawyers, judges, court clerks, cura­tors and labour­ers, pos­si­bly even bankers, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, cler­gy­men in street clothes, at least one edi­tor — all stream­ing along in bright sun­light, save for a hand­ful who had been drawn toward a con­fi­dent young man in shorts and T-shirt and a black porkpie hat who was plunk­ing brass cups down onto a tiny fold-up table and lift­ing them up to reveal small rub­ber balls where there had been none moments before. “Now watch closely, every­one,” he said. “My grand­fa­ther taught me this in Hong Kong in the old days—when we used to scam the tourists,” and the balls under the cups con­tin­ued to dis­ap­pear and reap­pear as if by magic. The per­for­mance seemed nearly to be done, and then the young man began to explain in rapid-fire pat­ter how the trick worked. “You see, peo­ple — it’s all an illu­sion!” he cried out, and he turned up another cup and out popped a big navel orange, and then another and another, and soon there were half a dozen oranges rolling around on the table, in which no trap doors were evi­dent any­where. In a clos­ing flour­ish he raised the porkpie hat, which had been sit­ting on the table, to reveal in the clear light of day an enor­mous green can­taloupe as big as his head.

A few metres away, under a stand of Japanese maple trees ris­ing from holes cut into the side­walk, a colony of brood­ing chess play­ers hud­dled over chess­boards set out on low benches: men wear­ing cardi­gan sweaters and wind­breakers, padded vests, peaked caps, the occa­sional fedora or beret. Other sim­i­lar men stood nearby, closely observ­ing the play. All of them (young and old) bore them­selves like grand­fa­thers: at once ­afi­ciona­dos and men of the world. Many were smok­ing intensely, and pat­ted their pock­ets with­out look­ing away from the game when they needed a light. There was a hush in the blue smoky air here in this manly redoubt only a metre from the most crowded stretch of side­walk in the city. As I lin­gered among the afi­ciona­dos awash in sec­ond­hand cig­a­rette smoke, wait­ing out one endgame and then another, I tried and failed to recall the gam­bits that I had known in the grade 9 chess club. Each player had his own way of grasp­ing the pieces on the board, some with thumb and fore­fin­ger, a quick lift­ing; oth­ers tak­ing hold of a pawn, bishop, knight, cas­tle, queen by a kind of sleight of hand — a brief van­ish­ing and then the piece reap­pears tucked in the palm of the hand, in sig­na­ture ges­tures that bestow real­ity on things and acts. Later I remem­bered a middle-aged woman in a shabby hooded sweater who appeared briefly beneath the maple trees, hold­ing out a hand for coins. She spoke or whis­pered to each group in turn, but no one seemed (in my mem­ory) to hear her. Had she even been there?

Even­tu­ally I with­drew from the sun-dappled shade, the cig­a­rette smoke, the anachro­nis­tic world of men and chess, into a more deeply shaded enclave far­ther along the side of the art gallery nearly devoid of pedes­tri­ans, where between pon­der­ous lin­den trees sits a mon­u­men­tal foun­tain ded­i­cated to the mem­ory of Edward vii, the British king who died in 1908. A few years ago, on another bright day in June when I first stepped into this enclo­sure, which resem­bles a Greek tem­ple in the open air, a man car­ry­ing a bicy­cle mounted the stairs behind me. He wore bright yel­low cycling gear and cleated shoes that clat­tered on the con­crete. He leaned the bicy­cle against a pil­lar and stepped up to the basin of the foun­tain, which held a pool of water filled with life forms swim­ming in slime, put his hands together as if in prayer, and lifted his gaze to the bronze pro­file of Edward vii set into the main plinth about a foot above eye level. After a moment he turned to me and said in a dis­arm­ingly straight­for­ward way, as if we were already in con­ver­sa­tion: “This spot is very peace­ful, is it not?” He resem­bled a brightly coloured grasshop­per in his pod-shaped hel­met with the black mark­ings, and his spindly legs wrapped in black mesh. “How are you inter­ested in Edward the Seventh?” I said. “No one remem­bers King Edward any more.” “Oh it’s not Edward the king that inter­ests me,” he said, and he went on to explain that he had been pass­ing by and think­ing of a friend who would be depart­ing that night on a dan­ger­ous jour­ney. “My friend’s name is Edward,” he said. “The same as the name on this mon­u­ment inscribed in let­ters large enough, as you can see, to be read from the street — and so I stopped here to offer a prayer for the well-being of my friend.” He said that he had parted from his friend less than an hour ago, at a meet­ing of peo­ple from many coun­tries engaged, as he put it, in the spir­i­tual prac­tice of Falun Gong. Edward was a school­teacher, and he was set­ting out to teach school in the jun­gles of South America. I asked if his friend was a teacher of Falun Gong. “No, no,” he said. “Edward and I are only prac­ti­tion­ers. I myself am of Japanese descent. I was born in Steveston on the Fraser River and now live in Mission, which as you might know is eighty kilo­me­tres up the val­ley.” He said that his fam­ily had lost their home when they were interned as enemy aliens dur­ing the war, which sur­prised me — he seemed too young to have been alive in the war — but then it occurred to me that by his fam­ily he meant the fam­ily of his par­ents. Neither of us men­tioned the con­tin­u­ing effort of the mayor of Vancouver to remove the Falun Gong demon­stra­tors from the side­walk in front of the Chinese Consulate on Granville Street, where for sev­eral years they have been protest­ing the per­se­cu­tion of Falun Gong prac­ti­tion­ers by the Chinese gov­ern­ment. He said that he had met his friend Edward at the gath­er­ing of Falun Gong that he had just left, and so they had known each other for less than twenty-four hours. “If it weren’t for this mon­u­ment to Edward vii,” he said, “I prob­a­bly would not have been moved to offer a prayer for my new friend, and as I think about it now, as we are speak­ing, I may have over­es­ti­mated the dan­gers await­ing him in the jun­gles of South America. But then had I not had such a fear,” he went on to say, “we would not be hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion,” and with those words he offered me his hand. He was wear­ing half-gloves and I could feel the smooth flesh of his fin­gers where they emerged from the mesh at the knuckle. He turned away from the pool of light in which we were stand­ing, and clat­tered down the steps in his cleated shoes and mounted his bicy­cle, and then he was off, one pre­sumes, on the long road home to Mission. 

When Edward vii was the king of England (I learned only recently), he was vis­ited in the sum­mer of 1906 by a Squamish chief who had been orga­niz­ing resis­tance to the usurpa­tion of First Nations from their lands in British Columbia. As a token of his rank and a sign of respect for the King, the chief had been given the pow­er­ful name of Capilano before he crossed Burrard Inlet in a canoe and, in a pro­ces­sion led by a brass band, walked to the cpr sta­tion at the bot­tom of Granville Street, where he boarded the train to Montreal. Chief Capilano was accom­pa­nied on his jour­ney across the coun­try and then across the Atlantic Ocean by David Basil of the Shuswap and Chillihitza of the Okanagan. When the del­e­ga­tion arrived in London (to the dis­tress of the Canadian gov­ern­ment), they were given a tour of Westminster Abbey, where they saw the tomb of Edward the Confessor, who founded the Abbey in 1066, and the tomb of his name­sake Edward i, who in his turn was the name­sake of Edward vii, who, when he received them, expressed sym­pa­thy for the First Nations who had lost their home­lands with­out treaty as laid out in detail in the peti­tion they car­ried with them, and the King sug­gested that some­thing would be done, even­tu­ally. The del­e­ga­tion returned to Canada bear­ing signed pho­tographs of Edward vii, whose ances­tors had passed down their power to him over more than a thou­sand years. The promise that the del­e­gates received, and word of which bore home (where they were threat­ened with charges of sedi­tion and dis­turb­ing the peace), is the promise of all the Edwards, which a hun­dred years later are yet to be redeemed. I had been wrong when I said to the cycling man that no one remem­bers Edward any more.