Lessons

The actor Marc Bendavid’s debut novel begins with a series of deaths. The first is of a nameless “you,” who has opted for euthanasia. It is a rational, bureaucratic choice, administered by a medical professional in a procedure so precise that the narrator (also named Marc Bendavid) knows exactly which drugs are being injected into the patient’s arm, despite being on the other side of the continent when it happens. The other deaths took place twenty-five years earlier: the victims were Marc’s five chickens, which his family bought the summer before he entered middle school. The murders were horrifying and mysterious, the work of an unknown predator who picked the birds off one by one. These two scenes of loss are the chronological bookends of The Sapling. They also, in a subtler way, lay out its thematic territory: the disjunction between what can be named, categorized, and rationally explained and what remains ineffable because it is, like the hens’ fate, inexplicable.

When young Marc was sent to a special school for the arts north of Toronto, he came into the orbit of Klara Bloem, a teacher, artist, and immigrant from South Africa. Over the next two years, they developed an intense friendship that fundamentally altered the course of the boy’s life.

Older Marc recalls that Klara seemed different from the other teachers, whose personalities, eccentricities, and private lives were endlessly discussed by the students. “You were cool,” he writes. “There were no rumours about you.” At that tender age Marc had no interest in “Art — with a capital A,” which seemed boring and inert compared with the wonders of nature. But Klara opened his eyes to the way painting and photography can change our perception of the world. One page amid these reflections contains only this: “You are, at the time we meet, forty-three years old. I am eleven.”

Even an unimaginative reader is going to have premonitions about where this is heading. Klara is the “you” to whom the book is addressed, and whose death is mourned on the first page. Those portentous lines loom like icebergs in a sea of white space, and one can’t help but brace for a monstrous collision. But The Sapling is not a story about the cruelty of adults. It is something much harder to pin down.

The relationship that bloomed between Klara and Marc was, as some of the other characters observe, clearly inappropriate: they spent hours speaking on the phone, they wrote letters to each other, they wandered the woods and fields alone together, taking photographs. Klara even helped Marc paint his bedroom. She became his best friend, and he appeared to be hers. She told him about the brutality of apartheid, and her reasons for leaving her country. He told her (with surprising frankness) about his first fumbling experiences of queer sexuality. She, a painter, introduced him to a more bohemian and creative lifestyle. Marc’s parents got divorced, and he began to intuit that Klara’s husband, who was also an artist from South Africa, did not treat her as well as he should have.

Their dynamic began to change when, without explanation, Klara asked Marc to return her letters — which he remembers as “the only moment of confusion, of real pain, in the entirety of our friendship.” Years later, after her death, Marc still struggles to understand why. “How could you, who knew me so well, not grasp the violence of this act?”

Yet throughout adolescence and into Marc’s early adulthood, we watch their attenuated “love” continue. Marc went on to high school, and then university in Montreal. He eventually became friends with Klara’s daughter, Eva, who is three years his junior. He called Klara a couple of times a year, but he had become an adult and an artist in his own right: he was acting in plays and trying to break into Hollywood. He came back to Toronto only from time to time to shoot television shows. Klara got sick with breast cancer but recovered. Then she got sick again and did not. Her death was what pushed Marc to start writing, just as Klara had urged him to do so many years earlier.

There is a sense in which The Sapling is a mystery without a crime: nothing that Klara did was wrong, exactly, though Marc would spend the next quarter century haunted by the ambiguity of what they shared. Why did it have such a profound effect on him? What did it mean for her? Marc’s obsessive narration is an attempt to understand how this one relationship so dramatically changed his life, to delineate the curious disjuncture between the facts of the matter and its emotional impact. It is necessitated by Klara’s odd refusal to acknowledge that there was anything strange about their bond. He only has his memories, patchy in the way memories usually are: he recalls that they talked and how he felt, but the words themselves are lost.

Bendavid’s prose is lyrical, ideally suited to meditations on the opacity of the past. At its best, it unfurls in loose, evocative metaphors:

At times, however, the rhetorical questions pile up. Bendavid’s tendency to examine every detail allows his prose to float away from the materiality of events and dissolve in a vapour of repetitive abstractions. It’s a problem that grows particularly acute toward the end, where the language gets bogged down with lines like this: “I am awake, stuck in the reality where you are gone. Every breath I take anchors me more deeply in the fact of your absence.”

The Sapling is, according to the marketing copy, an autobiographical novel. It’s not my place to speculate, but if the request for forgiveness we get in the epilogue is how the author openly wrestles with writing about deep personal loss, then fair enough. But what makes this book fresh and compelling for so much of its length is his willingness to play with facts and assumptions, to let us dwell on the unexplained image until we can see ourselves in it, too. By the final pages, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I’d accidentally stumbled into a stranger’s funeral or — worse still — their therapy session.