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Mathilde

Part 18 of my story! Read the index and content warnings here. *lampshades the square cube law in this chapter and moves on* Anyways today we're wrestling with The Canadian Identity and how our tinies fit into that. Warning to readers: colonialism and the Canadian residential school system gets alluded to later in this chapter.

Harry Avery was not supposed to be working so soon after suffering the fracture. He was also not supposed to be thinking about Joe Piccoli after finally seeing the man in a half-decent outfit, but as he opened up a new case record for the only patient he would be seeing that day, he did both. After all, it was not only Harry’s commitment to the good of mankind that spurred him to see this particular patient in spite of his injuries, but also his soft spot for Joe.

“She’s crying, Harry. She says there’s something really wrong with her and she wants a quick consultation. Nobody else will see her. Just ten minutes. It won’t take that long, right?” Joe had said.

A crying woman was bad enough, but when paired with Joe, a tender-hearted soul artfully disguised as the opposite, Harry couldn’t say no. What sort of monster would he be if he did?

When his latest patient sat down before him, Harry immediately regretted this decision. Madame Bélanger, a wife and mother roughly thirty years of age, did not speak a lick of English, and the six-year-old accompanying her who had gone straight for the toys in the parlour knew even less.

“I am… I am…” That was about as far as Mme. Bélanger got before she helplessly searched for a phrase in English; then she began to pantomime going to sleep. “Très fatigué. Comprenez-vous? Fatigué.”

"... sleeping?" Harry guessed, which the woman could neither confirm nor deny.

This consultation was going to take much longer than ten minutes, Harry accepted. The most the doctor could gather was that his patient was very tired, but it told him precious little else. She certainly appeared sick; she looked frail as a dying bird and had all the facial hallmarks of someone who had lost a lot of weight in very little time, but from what exactly the doctor could not tell. He mirrored her helpless expression as he nodded along and took what notes he could while the jack-in-the-box little Mathilde was playing with squeaked out in the parlour. His once-decent handwriting was now befitting of a doctor as he scribbled single-handedly in his notepad.

Ontario was an Englishman’s world, and Harry had not learned a single word of French during his school days out on the prairie either, having attended, as one Manitoban education minister so put it, a Canadian school with Canadian teachers setting forth Canadian ideals and teaching the language of the country. Even his tour in Belgium had offered him precious little conversational French - at most he had learned the odd street name here, the odd greeting there, all of which he could just as easily have confused with Flemish before he had promptly forgotten everything. Yet as this woman sat before him, looking as though she might start crying again, he couldn’t help but wish he knew the bare minimum. Harry's duty in life was to help people, but he had little hope of doing so in this case.

He handed his notebook over to the woman, hoping that she might write something that would jump out at him whenever he could arm himself with a bilingual dictionary. As little Mathilde chased the clockwork horse down the hallway, Harry couldn’t help but wonder how Joe had managed to schedule the appointment at all.

“Qu’est-ce que c'est!? Maman! Maman! Qu’est-ce que c’est!? Un homme minuscule! Un homme minuscule!” The little girl shouted from the parlour.

She seemed to be enjoying those toys, Harry thought. Mme. Bélanger looked up from her writing only briefly.

“Mathiiiilde!” The tired woman wailed. “Viens ici!”

She looked as though she hadn’t slept in days, but for all Harry knew, it could be Mathilde keeping her awake.

“Je veux jouer, monsieur! Laissez-moi jouer avec vous!” Said Mathilde, presumably in reply to her mother.

The little girl, as all children do at some point in time, refused to listen. The crash from down the hallway came as no surprise to either adult in the examination room, but it did cause a wave of dread to hit Harry like water from a cold hose when he realized the noise came from the area Joe was supposed to be working in. He dashed into the hallway and froze at the sight of the fallen candlestick phone. As the stricken doctor drew nearer to where Mathilde had wandered all the way to the end of the hallway, to his mixed trepidation and relief, he could just make out the voice of his poor assistant.

“Va t’en! Je dois travailler! Va t’en!” Joe shouted in passable French: go away, I have to work.

“Qu'est ce que vous faites?” The little girl responded: what are you doing?

She ventured ever closer to where Joe had fallen onto the floor and Harry ran to stop her as she reached out to grab him.

“TA-

BAR-

-NAK!” Joe barked.

Harry didn’t need to know a single word of French to understand that what Joe had just said was a swear word. Mathilde's curious hand slowed and drew back as she noticed the doctor looming behind her. She may as well have been sticking her hand in a cookie jar with the expression on her face, and as she froze Harry seized the opportunity to position himself between her and Joe like a wall. Then, the excitement was good as over when a voice thundered from down the hall.

“MATHIIIIIILDE!” Two streaks of tears ran down the exhausted mother's face as she boomed so loudly the walls shook. “ICI.”

She pointed to the spot directly beside her, and the child, looking like she had just witnessed the wrath of god itself, ran to her mother’s side without hesitation. Meanwhile, a million questions swarmed like bees between Harry's ears.

Chief among those questions was,

“Joe! Are you okay!?”

He gently picked Joe up and whispered it to the tiny as the mother gave her child a stern lecture about proper conduct at the doctor’s office that transcended language barriers. He could tell by the way Joe was rubbing his neck and shoulders that the fall had thrown something out of alignment.

“Oh, I’ll live. What was that thing you said about the toys keeping kids away, doc?” Joe said, cracking his neck back into place.

Harry looked back to the Bélangers, then to Joe in amazement.

“I didn’t know you spoke French.” He said.

“The hell is French?” Asked Joe. “You mean Belle? Langue Belle? I learned it at Usine.”

Harry’s buzzing brain went haywire for a moment at the fact that Joe, apparently, spoke French but did not understand it as such. It explained how he was able to schedule Mme. Bélanger’s appointment. Perhaps now, Harry reasoned, he could be of further assistance. He slipped his friend into his front pocket.

“Could you help me with something?”

Soon Joe was Harry’s unofficial translator, and as the tiny interpreted the patient’s notes it painted an intriguing picture, one of fatigue, weight loss, increased thirst, blurred vision. Now Harry knew exactly what he was dealing with: it was not the side effects of an unruly child, but a woman at death’s door thanks to acute-onset diabetes mellitus. Luckily for her, though the condition had been a death sentence a mere four years ago, it was now manageable through the recent implementation of insulin therapy by some nearby colleagues. A simple urine test would confirm his suspicions, and with any luck, this mother could receive proper treatment and lead a long and fulfilling life. The trick now was explaining it to her in words she could understand.

After much whispering, Harry repeated the phrase Joe, just out of earshot of Mme. Bélanger, shouted up at him from his front pocket.

“Vous devez pisser dans une tasse et puis je peux vous donne l’insuline.” Harry relayed to her, with all the grace of a foul-mouthed toddler: you have to piss in a cup and then I can give you insulin.

At first the woman looked utterly affronted. Then, to Harry’s surprise, a smile spread across her face and she doubled over in laughter.

“D’accord, docteur. Je pisserai.” Said the grateful woman as her tears of sadness turned to tears of joy: okay, doctor, I'll piss.

With the Bélangers seen off, Harry righted the fallen phone at the table and took the sore tiny along with him on his journey upstairs.

“You were right. That one was serious, but that’s the last appointment I’m taking this week. Tell everyone else I’m unavailable.” Harry said, watching as Joe sat down on the base of the lamp by the nightstand and massaged his shoulders. "...are you all right? Do you need me to..."

Gently he reached out to Joe, whose eyes widened at the sight of the hand. With all the hauteur of a spoiled prince the tiny sized his fingers up and then nodded in approval.

"You make this any worse and I'm taking you to court." Joe said.

"Nonsense, it looks like it's just a little bit out of alignment..."

Harry gradually pressed a thumb to Joe's chest, then placed his index finger on Joe's upper back and carefully stroked him down the spine to straighten his posture.

"Easy! Easy!" Joe said.

"I'm not pressing too-" Harry began.

"EASY!" Joe cut him off.

There was a crack so loud even Harry could hear it, and Joe heaved.

"...hard am I?"

Harry swiftly withdrew his hand and watched Joe's reaction in suspense. At first he couldn't tell if the way Joe flopped over onto his back was a good thing or a bad thing until Joe finally spoke up.

"...Harry, you need to do that more often." He breathed.

Harry couldn't help but chuckle at the sight of him. The wild life had certainly taken its toll on Joe. As he sat there, those questions from earlier still swirled in his mind, and now seemed like a favourable time to ask them.

“So how do you know French? Are you… from… Quebec?” Harry asked with no small amount of awkwardness.

Only once those words were spoken out loud did it strike Harry as wrong somehow to be asking Joe such a thing. It was invasive, certainly, with how secretive the little man was, but some element of the question seemed so unduly othering that, when Joe’s eyebrows rose and he let out a laugh, Harry immediately regretted raising it.

“I dunno. Is Quebec in Italy?” Was Joe’s batshit response.

Harry was at a loss for words as he tried with all his might to explain the concept of Quebec to his downstairs neighbour Joe Piccoli.

“No it’s… it’s an area north of here, a part of Canada where people speak the same language Madame Bélanger speaks.” Harry said.

Joe looked just as lost as Harry was.

“Maybe if that’s where Usine is. I dunno Harry, I—I dunno places the way you know 'em—” Joe got up, paced around, and tossed his head back as he tried to explain himself “—I don’t even know where I was born.” He admitted.

Harry’s eyes followed Joe’s movements in utter bafflement.

“Well then what do you know?” He asked.

Joe stopped dead in his tracks and shoved his hands into his pockets. He looked up at Harry hesitantly, as if he were about to impart a deeply-held secret.

“I'll tell you the whole story. It’s kind of funny, actually.”

There it was again, that phrase Harry had come to dread. Joe started pacing again and fidgeted as he told his tale.

“My mom and dad got on a boat with my brother before I was even born, right? Whole bunch of other miniatures on board. When they got off the boat this earless son-of-a-bitch is herding women and kids one way, and men another way. After that I don’t have a dad anymore. I don’t even know if he’s alive, Harry – I’d bet my last scrap he got snatched! Bet the only reason my mom and brother didn’t get taken along with him is ‘cause the snatchers had no use for a pregnant mom with a kid.”

Joe did not come to tears, so much as tears came to Joe. Harry could see that he was holding them back now, and once again he had to fight against his urge to touch the tiny, though he feared throwing that sore back of his out of alignment again. The toe of Joe’s boot hammered against the nighstand's surface as he composed himself and continued.

“…but my mom never stopped looking. She was obsessed. I remember—when I was really little, we lived in this huge city. Way bigger than this one. Bigger than the one Usine was in, even. And every year, we’d move in to some new building full of miniatures, because that was mom’s thing. I could name five different ones that I remember, all of them just as busy as this Toronto-Star-place is to you giants." He explained, mistaking the name of the daily newspaper for the city's name. "She was convinced there were snatchers after us. That they’d take us too. Which… we’re tinies, Harry. There’s always something out to get us.”

Harry leaned in as he listened from where he sat on the side of the bed, utterly amazed at Joe’s story so far. A city that big could only conceivably exist south of the border. Joe certainly didn't sound terribly different from a cruder version of the occasional Yankee businessgiant who wandered his way into Bay Street - but if that was the case, he wondered, how did Joe end up in Canada of all places?

“Eventually, she gets it in her head we’re in serious danger, and we need to travel north 'cause rumour had it there's no snatchers up north. I’m about eight at the time. So she loads us onto one steam engine and then another, and the next thing we know we’re in this place called Usine. Pretty lively borrowing town, plenty of people, but none of us spoke the language. So I learnt some of their language and they learnt some of our languages and we fit in just fine after that for about three years. Longest we’d ever stayed anywhere. Then we moved to this other place 'cause mom thought Usine was a bad influence on us – Nouveaulieu. I was about eleven or twelve then. That's when my ma' and brother disappeared on me, or…”

Joe's voice cracked and the tears welled up in his eyes again.

“Or what?” The question escaped Harry before he could stop himself.

Joe let out a bitter laugh as he suppressed his feelings and kept talking.

“…or they left without me.”

“Left without you!?”

Harry was so outraged he could barely think. What would compel anyone to abandon a twelve-year-old, especially at Joe’s scale?

Joe just kept on smiling through the pain.

“Yeah... it happens if you're uh... a certain kind of person." Joe didn't seem to want to dwell on the topic any further, and he abruptly changed the subject. "Anyways, after that I hopped a train over to this place, and that’s how I know 'French.' ...but I'm better at Muddle.”

"Muddle?" It was a term Harry could hardly guess the meaning of.

"You know..." Joe put two fingers up to the sides of his head, mimicking the ears of a cat. "J'ai heard un cat. The chat is très big. Anyone at Usine could figure that one out."

Harry stared at Joe in absolute wonder as he processed everything his friend had said to him up to that point.

“So you traveled all that way? And your parents crossed an entire ocean?” He said.

It hadn't occurred to him until this point that miniatures could travel that far. He tried to imagine what Joe had looked like as a child as he studied him; the tiny looked youthful enough as an adult now that the gauntness in his cheeks had filled in. He pictured a face even younger, a lad half Joe’s current size if that; a shrewd newsboy type like the ones that swarmed Yonge and King. The man before him now was no bigger than Harry's thumb, and the world was dangerous enough to him as it currently was. How harrowing it must have been for Joe at age eight, or even at age twelve, to get on a train and travel thousands of miles away. In that moment, Harry had nothing but respect for Joe. How brave it was of him to travel all that way. Even journeying to the hospital across town was something Harry doubted he would have the emotional capacity to do at Joe’s size, yet the tiny had done it without a second thought for no other reason than to brighten Harry's day.

Harry, who was a hundred times bigger than Joe, looked up to the tiny as he gazed down at him in awe, but all Joe had to say in response was,

“…well, yeah. Of course we go places, Harry, I mean-a ton of you giants got to this place after getting on a damn boat, didn’t you? At least, that's what a guy at Calloway's told me. It's the same for us too.”

“Fair point.” Replied the doctor, whose own father had arrived in Canada from Merry Old England after getting on a damn boat. "...where do you miniatures usually go when you travel? Do you have a destination in mind?"

"Nah. We go to heaven, usually." Joe said, and when Harry flinched at his dark reply, he added, "...you were supposed to laugh at that."

"I know I was." Harry said. "So is it common practice if it's that dangerous?"

"It's as dangerous as everything else we do. Not all of us do it. Some of us... there's tiny families that have lived in the same old houses for hundreds of years. I've heard stories about 'em. My family just didn't end up like that."

The thought of family, and of Harry's own father, raised even more questions. Did miniatures have documentation? Visas? Birth records? That was not what Harry was really wondering in asking himself these lesser questions, of course. There was another, much more contentious question Harry couldn't keep himself from bringing up.

“So... are you a Canadian, or...? Do miniatures... have Canada?” Was Harry's best attempt at asking a question he didn't actually know how to ask.

It was another stupid question to Joe, no doubt. He could tell by the way the tiny leaned up against the lamp with his hands behind his head.

“Y’know what, Harry? If I'm a Canadian, I don’t know that I wanna be one.” He said. “Canada... I don’t give a shit about it, not until people start treating each other better. That guy at Calloway's told me the only reason Canada was invented is 'cause the guys on the boats killed a bunch of people who were here first and started taking their kids away. That ain't right, Harry.”

Harry had a minor identity crisis as Joe slid down the side of the lamp and sat at its base. For all intents and purposes he should have been affronted by what Joe was saying, but the more he thought about it, he realized to his dismay that he didn’t know if a Canadian was something he wanted to be either. It was a downright sacrilegious idea to explore, the notion that a war hero like him could even contemplate feeling such a way. Yet learning the art of war was precisely what drove him to question himself in this moment: what god, he had wondered, what nation, what leader, could march a bright-eyed boy like Georgie off as though he were a lamb to the slaughter? Why did the citizens of this proud colony, enamoured with wartime fantasies as they were, thank him so profusely for his supposed bravery when, if they knew that the most he had accomplished during the war consisted of bleeding and crying in equal measure, they would disown him in a heartbeat for not living up to their ideal? Why wouldn't Canada kill people, then? Why wouldn't it steal children? Why not?

It was as if knowing Joe, being given a glimpse of this inverted Canada that the miniatures were familiar with, a Canada full of death and negligence and danger, had opened up a whole new way of thinking about the world. It shone a light on something he had always sensed underneath society’s surface but had never been able to fully articulate to himself. That line from On the Life and Death of the Miniature about miniatures knowing no king, border or nation was starting to ring true, and with that thought, another quote from the book came to mind:

“The miniature defies all laws known to mankind. His mere existence spits in the face of Galileo Galilei. His eyes should be blind, and yet he sees. His voice should be mute, and yet he speaks. He ought to be short-lived and ephemeral and yet miniatures in good care live long as the humans do. In spite of his small size, relative to his body his strength is herculean. The contradictory being of the miniature is incomprehensible in the face of modern science.”

Incomprehensible. That was one word to describe the existence of Joe Piccoli, who spoke French but did not call it French, who thought Quebec was part of Italy, who did not even have a concrete birthplace to his name. In the absence of comprehensibility, Harry decided, friend was the only label of Joe's that really mattered to him.

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