The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  Sonia waits for a moment, as if trying to hold on to her patience, to achieve consistency between words and actions. She knows what she should do: she should gather up the younger children and take them off to Venus Variety for ice cream—she should leave Laura sulking at the table over a stupid little pile of peas. She should laugh at her, laugh at herself. But even as she waits, Sonia knows that she will not, cannot do what she should. Her voice goes hard, precise; she hammers out each word: “I’ve had enough of your sulking, Laura. Finish your supper this instant.”

  Laura doesn’t miss a beat. “I’ll be sick if I have to eat those peas. If you make me eat them, I’ll throw up.”

  “You’ll sit at this table—you will all, every last one of you, sit at this table till Laura’s plate is clean.”

  Mother and daughter haven’t taken their eyes off each other as they’ve spoken these words. The room is silent; even Darka stops tapping her fork against the oilcloth. Laura stares at her mother, at the pale blue lakes of her eyes. If Baba Laryssa were here this wouldn’t be happening; Baba would stretch out her hand and say, “Leave her be, leave her be, donyu.” But Baba’s dead, and there’s no one to help her. Bonnie’s too young, and Darka doesn’t care. Besides, Sonia doesn’t give a damn what Darka thinks, a good goddam. Slowly, grimly, Laura lifts a forkful of peas to her mouth and pushes them in.

  “Swallow!”

  She swallows. And then another forkful, and another.

  “What an actress,” Sonia exclaims, brushing imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “Get the Jell-O, Darka, it’s on the counter.”

  But before the glass bowl of ruby-coloured Jell-O lands on the table, Laura lurches forward, Katia and Baby Alix staring at her throat as though it were a boa constrictor working in reverse, greyish-green paste spilling from her mouth onto her clean, clean plate.

  Katia and Tania meet Yuri by the abandoned car, its rusted hood pushed up by the weeds thrusting through it. No one knows whose car it is, or how it got here, in the middle of the woods. Yuri says it was abandoned by a criminal, and when Tania asks what kind of criminal he says, off the top of his head, a baby killer, a kidnapper. Katia rolls her eyes, but Tania shivers, which irritates Katia. All of a sudden she suspects her friend of playing up to her cousin, of going all girly.

  “So what are we going to do?” Yuri asks, standing as straight as he can—that way he’s a quarter of an inch taller than Katia, and level with Tania.

  “Spy,” Katia snaps.

  “Where?”

  “The Durkowskis,” Yuri jumps in.

  Pan Durkowski works as a janitor at the cathedral downtown and at the hall next door; his wife helps him clean the buildings and works part time at the Arka store on Queen West, selling stamps and weighing parcels to be shipped to Ukraine. They spend part of every summer at Kalyna Beach: Mr. Senchenko gives them the use of a cottage, more like a shack, off Tunnel Road. He drives them up to the lake for three weeks and then takes them back to their apartment in the basement of the cathedral hall. People say that Pan Durkowski was an architect in Ukraine before the war, but that he hasn’t got the right qualifications for Canada, qualifications meaning things like diplomas, contacts, language. Besides, he’s old; it would take him too long to retrain.

  “Not the Durkowskis,” Tania complains. “They don’t have any secrets—we’d be wasting our time.”

  “No, no,” Yuri says, putting his arms around the girls, drawing them close, as if into a football huddle. Pan Durkowski, Yuri whispers, fought for the Germans during the war; he was on Hitler’s side.

  Katia’s about to pull herself away, to say, in her most scathing tone, That’s crazy, Yuri—you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s about to start singing a playground song she learned when she was Bonnie’s age: Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, when once again, she notices something funny about her friend. Usually Tania never believes a word Yuri says, but this time, for some reason, she is leaning into Yuri, widening her eyes, practically saying oooooh.

  Katia reaches forward and snaps the elastic on the waistband of Yuri’s trousers. Before he can slap her hand, she runs off, calling back: “I’m going off to spy; you two can stay behind and play kissy-face.”

  Yuri sprints after her; Tania waits for a moment, uncertain whether to punish Katia by turning round and going home. Doesn’t Katia understand that she’s making fun of Yuri—what’s her mother’s word for it?—playing up to him, so that she can knock him down all the harder? It’s not like Katia to be so dumb. And then Tania has a flash of understanding, or suspicion, or both; she scrambles through the lush weeds back to the road, catching up with Katia and her cousin, keeping their silence and watching them both on the sly.

  The children tiptoe along the side of the Durkowskis’ cabin, where the grass is sparse and pine needles fall into rusty pools. Pan Durkowski spends most of his summer holiday mowing what’s left of the lawn, building paths lined with pebbles brought up from the beach, doing calisthenics. He tried to teach them to the boys, but they ended up laughing and running away, so he performs his exercises alone, wearing a white undershirt tucked into his bathing trunks, and a handkerchief knotted over his head. They expect to see him doing exercises in the kitchen now, or else, Yuri hopes, polishing his Luger and looking over his military badges—swastikas, lightning stripes of the SS, all the paraphernalia Yuri has seen in the war movies he watches late at night, when his parents are asleep and he’s sneaked down to the family room, where they keep the TV.

  A little square of light glows from the cabin, soft, buttery light from a high window. Yuri gives Katia a leg up, and she stares through the screen, memorizing all the details that she can. It’s the kitchen, not the bedroom: there’s a ten-pound sack of potatoes on the counter beside a large aluminum pot. In the middle of the table jewelweed and chicory flowers are crammed into a jam jar—the kind of ditch flower that kids Bonnie’s age pick for their mothers. The Durkowskis sit with heads bowed at a scarred, enamel-topped table, peeling potatoes and grating a huge block of Velveeta cheese. They are preparing to make varenyky, that dish for which there’s no English equivalent, not dumpling, not pasty, not boiled dough-ball either. Pan Durkowski is in his undershirt and his grey city trousers; his wife is wearing only her slip and a scarf over her head—pale blue chiffon, pincurls showing underneath like metal snails. The white of the slip cuts into her chest, and pink flesh sags over the nylon, like curtains too big for their window. Katia’s about to whisper something down to Tania about Pani Durkowska’s breasts, but changes her mind.

  “Let’s go,” Tania says to Yuri. “Nothing’s happening here.” She’s angry at Katia, and she’s nervous too. For after the ladies left the veranda that afternoon, after Sonia had gone into and then come out of the log cabin for her heart-to-heart with Sasha, nothing had happened. Tania had expected her mother to lecture her—though Sasha is most often easygoing to a fault, there have been times when she has been known to act no differently than any other of the Mean Mothers. She might have forbidden Tania to go to the store any more, or kept her from seeing Katia—but she hadn’t said or done anything like that at all. Whatever she and Mrs. Martyn were talking about together must be bad enough that they’re waiting for the fathers to deal with it. Right now, the mothers think their daughters are reading in their rooms: Little Women and Five Little Peppers. They think the girls are reading in their rooms in the pyjamas they slipped over their shorts before brushing their teeth and kissing their mothers good night. “Let’s go,” Tania urges.

  But Katia’s still watching through the bowed-out screen of the kitchen window, as if waiting for something to happen—something she can make happen just by watching. What, she doesn’t know. Maybe Pani Durkowska will grab the paring knife from her husband and stab him through the heart the way Katia saw once in a horror film. Or Pan Durkowski just might pull out that Luger Yuri’s always going on about; might put it to his head and squeeze the trigger. It’s not that Katia wants violence: it’s jus
t that the plots available to her are extremely limited, even more so with people as old as these, people who don’t belong to anyone, and who spend their time telling other people what to do with their children.

  But now something does happen, something more startling than anything Katia can invent. Pani Durkowska puts down the potato peeler and moves her hands not to the paring knife, but to the jam jar of flowers. She pulls out a stalk of chicory and holds it against her face, just by her ear. And for a moment, just one fraction of a moment, Katia sees what Pani Durkowska must have looked like when she was young: when she was Darka’s age. The old man puts down his grater, reaches for his wife’s hand, the one holding the flower, and holds it against his cheek. What startles Katia is the gentleness of the gesture, and the way these two worn-down people are joined by something so tender and yet so strong that she is suddenly ashamed. Ashamed not of them, but of herself; to be witnessing what, she later realizes, is a gesture of love.

  “What’s going on?” Yuri hisses. His back aches: Katia is having all the fun while he does all the work. It’s always the way. Yet for some reason he can’t shrug it off as he usually does, but takes it to heart. Katia lording it over him, digging her sandalled feet into him as if he were a horse or a camel.

  “Nothing,” Katia answers, in the clear, bright voice she uses when she’s fibbing. “They’re not doing anything—just peeling potatoes.”

  Abruptly, Yuri leans forward, so that Katia tumbles from his shoulders, giving a shriek as she falls. The girls start running as fast as they can towards the road, but Yuri stops to collect a fistful of gravel from one of the paths Pan Durkowski has built. He sprays the kitchen screen. He’s starting to make a run for it when a hand seizes the back of his collar, the same hand that had been held up to an old woman’s cheek, moments before.

  “Trrrr-ubble makers,” Pan Durkowski cries out in English, the sound of the words bent out of shape by his accent. “Khoodlooms.”

  By now the girls have disappeared: Yuri is alone. But as he’s hauled into the Durkowskis’ cottage, he hears the sound of chanting:

  Old man Nicky

  had a twelve-foot dicky.

  He showed it to the lady next door.

  She thought it was a snake

  so she hit it with a rake

  and now it’s only two foot four.

  The girls should be laughing, they should be holding their stomachs and rolling in the grass, but instead they stand there, listening to the echo of Tania’s song. For Katia hasn’t joined in. Though they’ve sworn a pact to share equally in the thrill of and the punishment for all disobedience, for the first time ever, Katia’s refused to join in. It can’t be explained, Tania thinks, by Yuri getting caught by Pan Durkowski: Yuri asked for it, and besides, he could have run away if he’d really wanted to. He could have shaken free as easily as if it were Baby Alix who’d snatched hold of his collar. Tania chews on her lip, and rubs the toe of her running shoe into the loose, pale dirt beside the road.

  As for Katia, there’s a taste in her mouth of something that shouldn’t be there, like grass or earth. When she does speak, it’s an excuse, not an explanation: she has to get home before her father arrives, her mother’s in such a bitchy mood that she’ll go berserk if she finds that Katia’s sneaked out. Tania nods, and the two walk on in silence.

  When they reach the Martyns’ driveway, Tania spits into her hand, waiting for Katia to follow suit; the girls join hands as if nothing’s gone wrong or awry, then pull away from each other. Tania whispers something about spying on Darka, just the two of them, without any boy along to spoil things. Katia nods, and her friend runs off down the road.

  She stays put, rocking on her heels, her eyes fixed on her father’s car, stranded in the gravel. The engine’s still warm when she finally steps forward and puts out her hands to it. Warm as her father’s face when he bends down to kiss her; as his chest when he holds her in a bear hug. Through the open window, Katia can see her father sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands; her mother stands beside him, her arms loose but her shoulders stiff as fire irons. Somewhere in the kitchen Chucha Marta is rummaging among the pots and pans, putting them away and muttering to herself in the voice that always makes Katia think of someone crushing shiny, crackly beetle shells under a shoe.

  She waits for a moment, though she knows she could easily be found out; her mother might turn, her father look up and see her. It’s Chucha Marta who gives her away: she steps out the kitchen door onto the little porch, starts shouting at Katia for being out of doors when she’s supposed to be in bed, fast asleep, keeping out of trouble.

  But still, Katia stands there, waiting. As if she could will them to turn to each other, not even to kiss, just to turn to each other gently.

  Gently.

  The door swings shut behind him, and the cottage disappears, the cottage and everyone inside it: his bitter wife, his crazy, awful sister, the three sleeping children he doesn’t want to wake and the one who’s been caught sneaking out of her room at night, the one he will be expected to punish in the morning. If he were to turn and look back, he knows he’d see his wife at the picture window, her face a moon swallowed up by clouds. And he is the man in the moon, the man of the house, paterfamilias, but with no more power, really, than a moonbeam. Spank Katia? He didn’t drive all this way to beat his children, Sonia should know that by now. But what Sonia knows—and doesn’t, won’t allow herself to know …

  Max shoves his hands in his pockets and walks down the zigzag path to the beach, the yellow square of light on his back, the impress of his wife’s face getting smaller, weaker with every step. No moon at all, tonight, but not because of clouds—stars salt the blackness overhead, as many stars, he thinks, as there are hairs on his body: a carpet, a pelt like an animal’s. He tightens his lips, thinking of the dog Sonia won’t let Laura have, no matter how hard, how relentlessly she begs. He should just go out and buy Laura the dog, any dog, and have done with it. It would do her good, his poor, clumsy Laura, who should have been a boy; she isn’t quick-witted like Katia, or pretty and pleasing, like Bonnie, but the awkward, stubborn kind who’ll always know too much for her own good.

  Down at the shore it’s so quiet he can hear each wave as it licks, then kicks back against the sand. The dark—it’s the thing he loves most about this place: you can actually see the dark. In the city there are always too many lights, or the hum from power-lines overhead; everyone, everything’s on the move, rushing and racketing about, but here—. He takes a trim silver case from his shirt pocket and pulls out a cigar; holding it under his nose like a pretend moustache, he breathes the scent in so deeply he might be calling up the coconuts and sugar cane from the island where the tobacco grows. For some reason Marta had been going on and on in the car about last year’s Cuban missile crisis. How the Americans had lost their nerve; how they should have stood up to the Russians and that ex-Ukrainian party boss who is no more Ukrainian than the shoe he thumped on the table at the U.N. In spite of himself, Max had let her get to him; he’d actually turned round for a second, asking her whether she’d have preferred Khrushchev—or Kennedy—to have pushed the button. “Button—ha!” she’d exclaimed, using the Ukrainian word, gudzyk, making it sound like something out of a children’s game. And then, to top it off, she’d screeched, “Keep your eyes on the road, do you want to kill us both?”

  Max allows himself the first rich puff of his cigar; expels a fragrant plume of smoke into the air, a plume that gathers, then wavers, slowly pushing itself apart. It’s the only sign of anything that’s stirring here, beside the barely beating waves and the stars overhead, the stars that move so slowly they might as well be nails hammered into a board. The same stars the president in Washington could be staring at this very moment, the rich-boy president with his rugged good looks and his cool millions, his beautiful wife and perfect children: a girl, a boy. A man no older, and perhaps no smarter, all in all, than Max Metelsky, but with his finger on the life-or-dea
th of the very planet.

  He’s glad, suddenly, that his children are in bed, safe and sleeping peacefully. If the bomb were to hit (he always thinks of it as one single, silver missile, some gigantic bullet) they would never know. But this is morbid, outrageous—this kind of thinking is worthy of Marta. He draws intently on his cigar. Three hours of Marta in the car, and then Sonia, shouting loud and clear as always with that stiff silence of hers, and what the hell did he do wrong, just what was she punishing him for this time? For not leaving Marta to asphyxiate herself—the word soothes and supports him, a word Sonia wouldn’t know, never mind use—asphyxiate herself in that oven of a house they should have got rid of long ago?

  But then where would Marta have gone; would Sonia prefer Marta to be living with them—would she prefer to have Marta to put up with, instead of a dog? It’s not as though Sonia didn’t have family of her own to hang around his neck. Of course it was a terrible shame, her mother dying so suddenly, but she should be able to cope with that by now—it’s been four months already. Look at Peter, he isn’t exactly wailing and beating his breast. This show she puts on—not that she’s pretending to grieve, but it’s the performance that gets him: crying all the time, or else silent; wearing sunglasses to hide her wept-out eyes. It’s bad for the children to see their mother affected this way. His mother had never cried once, he had never seen her weep, and God knows, the life she’d had—or Marta, for that matter. She had a tongue all right, but he’d rather that than Sonia’s dagger-silence and red-jelly eyes.

  “Hail Caesar, back from the wars!”

  Stealing up on him, as usual: how is it he never hears Peter coming? He’s wearing shorts and a stained, rumpled shirt and carrying a pair of sneakers in his hands.

  “So. Peter.”

  “Come on, Max, you can do better. Why not ‘Hail, fellow, well met’ or morituri te salutant? And come to think of it, a cigar would go down a treat right now.”