In the Skin of a Lion

The narrative jumps to 1930, at the construction site of Commissioner Harris’s latest industrial water project in Toronto—the tunnel under Lake Ontario (also referred to as “the waterworks”). Patrick lives alone and is a laborer on this site. He has followed in the footsteps of his father, preferring more dangerous work, and his responsibilities on this project include dynamiting. Like Nicholas (who in Chapter 2 is compensated more highly for his comfort with dangerous work on the viaduct), Patrick “is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world” (107). Commissioner Harris exploits the laborers in inhumane working conditions to fulfill his fantasy of an ornate “palace for water” (109).

Patrick lives among immigrant communities he can never fully belong to because of linguistic and cultural barriers, but he delights in his outsider status, feeling “deliriously anonymous” (112). He is welcomed among a group of Macedonian immigrants and finds himself at the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, where Nicholas and the nun sat more than a decade earlier.