Nikolski Read Online Free PDF

the Pacific Ocean?”
    Sarah was content to answer, no, she had never really wanted to whiff seagull droppings or rotting seaweed. The reply, a clever blend of contempt and indifference, betrayed a poorly disguised tremor of panic.
    Noah shook his head. In his miniature inner atlas he crossed out Nikolski.
    Time rolled on to
Grampa’s
oceanic rhythm. Nothing seemed to have changed, other than the distribution of rust on the sides of the 1966 Bonneville. Sarah piloted, Noah grew and the trailer appeared to be forever in the grips of a circular curse. It was sighted in July near Lake of the Woods, on the Ontario border; on Christmas Eve it was caught unawares in southernAlberta, in the empty parking lot of a People’s store; in March it showed up at the far northern edge of Lake Winnipegosis, trapped by a blizzard at a truck stop; in May it was criss-crossing southern Saskatchewan. Come July, it could be seen once again at Lake of the Woods, having returned to its point of departure with the migratory punctuality of a sperm whale.
    Noah had made friends with no one—an unpleasant but necessary decision. When their trailer whisked past a schoolyard he contemplated the throng of potential companions. There were hundreds of them on the other side of the chain-link fence, playing basketball, complaining about their teachers, clustering in circles to puff on a cigarette. Some of them gazed yearningly at the road. The old silvery trailer exerted on them a strange magnetic force, like a Mongol horde galloping across the suburbs of a large city. With their fingers threaded through the grid, the captives envied the nomads.
    Noah considered the possibility of throwing himself out the window.
    He did not share in the Glorious North American Motoring Myth. To his mind, the road was nothing but a narrow nowhere, bounded on the starboard and port sides by the real world, a fascinating, inaccessible, unimaginable place. Most of all, the road bore no relation to Adventure, Freedom or the Absence of Algebra Homework.
    Every fall, Sarah bought the appropriate school-books, and he would lock himself in the trailer to study zealously, in the belief that algebra and grammar represented his only hope of one day joining the real world.
    Twelve years had gone by since the postcard from Nikolski. Noah was now eighteen—the time had come to leave the trailer. All he was waiting for to set his escape plan in motion were the results of his Manitoba Department of Education exams. Once he had secured his grade twelve diploma, he would be off to university.
    He was far less concerned with choosing his field of study than with the location of the university itself. It was out of the question for him to take up residence in Winnipeg or Saskatoon; Noah wanted to climb out of the glove compartment and vault over the horizon. But which horizon exactly?
    South? The United States did not interest him.
    North? Not a viable option so long as there were no plans to open a Central University of Baffin Island.
    West? The West was riddled with holes, as trans parent and greasy as the road maps in the glove compartment. West was his father, that far-off and mysterious man who lived with an Aleutian tribe on an island lost in the Bering Sea, who ate raw salmon and heated his yurt with dried sheep turds—not the most edifying father figure to look up to.
    So Noah would go east.
    He wrote on the sly to a Montreal university. The registration papers arrived a week later at Armada General Delivery.
    Noah was afraid to reveal his plan to his mother. He anticipated a tirade against Montreal, the port city, gateway to the St. Lawrence Seaway, frenzied metropolis— neither more nor less than a man-eating leviathan. What took place was nothing like that. Puckering her lips with indifference, Sarah watched him rip open the envelope.
    “An
island,”
was all she bothered to mumble.
    Rather than wasting his energy on futile rebuttals, Noah withdrew to the trailer to study the