Every afternoon for the past week, Yuri Metelsky has been a model child, helping Mrs. Baziuk by watching Billy for her. It’s a way of making amends for having been part of that gang of boys who’d nearly burned down the whole beach at the start of the summer, Lesia tells herself. Not that she wasn’t suspicious at first, but the Metelsky boy’s eagerness and sense of responsibility had quickly converted her. On Yuri’s urging, Mrs. Baziuk has aired out the small, dark bunkhouse that has been waiting for guests to sleep over in it for years now, ever since Mr. Baziuk ran not into the deer he was stalking, but into a bullet meant for that deer. She’s set up a card table for Billy and Yuri to play on, a simple game, war, in which the deck is divided in two, and each player slaps down a card, the one with the higher number winning the trick. It is a mindless game of indescribable tedium, and the delight of children ages three to six, as well as twenty-five-year-old, heavily sedated men.
Every afternoon for the past week, Yuri has taken Billy by the hand and led him from the front porch of his mother’s cottage, across the grass and over to the spruced-up bunkhouse. Many times, that first afternoon, Lesia checked up on Yuri and her son, sneaking down to the bunkhouse, peering in at the edge of the window, making sure that everything was “just as it should be.” On Tuesday afternoon, she made two duty calls; on Wednesday, one; and by the time Friday rolled around, she was confident enough to leave the boys to themselves. She was actually singing as she prepared Frank Kozak’s favourite meal. He’d be in a foul temper after the long drive up; she would let him have a good, large rye and ginger, followed by cottage cheese topped with sour cream and chopped chives—and then shortcake for dessert, made from peaches brought in from Mr. Maximoynko’s fruit store on Augusta to grace the shelves of Venus Variety.
On this particular Friday afternoon, Yuri and Billy are down in the bunkhouse. They are labouring on yet another endless game of war in the light provided by a single small window, when there’s a rustling in the grass, and a triple knock at the door. Suddenly, Yuri sweeps up the cards, much to his companion’s displeasure.
“It’s okay, Billy,” he whispers, as if Mrs. Baziuk were in the next room and not a hundred yards away. “Remember that treat I promised you, if you were good?” Billy nods, quiet and expectant.
He isn’t, Yuri decides, that creepy looking after all: his eyes are green as leaves and his thick brown hair, combed strictly to the side by his mother, has got rumpled during the stress of the game. Billy’s dressed in a neat, white, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants: if it weren’t for the way he has of breathing through his mouth, and the foolish look in his eyes—foolish because it so openly conveys his hungriness and eagerness—you couldn’t really tell, Yuri decides, that Billy Baziuk is a moron. Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? Because he wanted to see how time flies.
Now the door pushes open, and to Billy and even Yuri’s amazement, in comes an apparition as marvellous, as unfamiliar in Billy’s experience as a winged dog or a talking tree. It is a girl, a girl as tall as Darka, and with Darka’s prodigious bosom and flaxen hair. In the half-light her huge, bright eyes and her scarlet mouth, her crimson cheeks and darkened brows seem to gleam and beckon. Yet this girl is shy, staring down at her feet in their flip-flops, twisting a fistful of skirt in her hand.
It is all going so well, Katia thinks, peering in at the window, while the boys behind her jostle for a view; it is successful beyond their wildest dreams. Except for the fact that Yuri’s forgotten his lines. What is it that’s supposed to happen next? she wonders—had that ever been explained? She’s about to go inside, poke Yuri on the shoulder, when Pavlo takes charge. He steps into the bunkhouse and gives Billy a little shove.
“Go on, Billy, say hello to the girl. She’s come all this way to see you. She’s in love with you, Billy—don’t you want to kiss her? Haven’t you ever kissed a girl, Billy, a grown-up guy like you?”
Now Katia has joined Pavlo in the bunkhouse, and the rest of the Cossack Brotherhood is crowding round the door. Yuri’s been pushed back to a corner. Katia registers the tenseness of his presence, his silence as she watches Pavlo keep giving little shoves to the small of Billy’s back, guiding him towards the person they all think of, now, as The Girl. Until suddenly Billy grabs the girl’s shoulders and shakes her till her face tilts up to his; until Billy is kissing her, his tongue inside her mouth. Billy is kissing The Girl, and you could hear a pine cone drop, when out of nowhere comes a roar—no other word for it—a roar from Yuri.
Charging from his corner he tears his brother out of Billy’s arms, while Billy starts shouting and kicking. Now Katia and Pavlo are tugging Andriy out of the bunkhouse; they’re tearing along the forested path from the bluff to the beach. Halfway down they pause to tug off the boy’s skirt and blouse and brassiere, to scoop up the socks. Pavlo runs off with the clothes, while Katia uses spit and dock leaves to clean the makeup from what has become, once more, Andriy’s face. Meanwhile, Mrs. Baziuk has flown from her kitchen to the bunkhouse, where Billy’s yelling as if someone’s taken a cleaver to him. Blood is trickling from his mouth, where Yuri has punched him; Yuri is lying on the floor, where Billy has thrown him.
Yuri’s hand is bloodied and his voice hoarse: “You leave him alone, all of you bastards, just leave him alone.”
Mrs. Baziuk doesn’t understand why Yuri, who has just attacked her Billy, is now defending him. There are no assailants lurking nearby, no other culprits: it’s clear as glass what’s happened here. Zirka has to agree, though Peter, when he visits Lesia Baziuk later that night, isn’t so sure. He apologizes to her on Yuri’s behalf, assuring her that it was nothing premeditated, but just what-boys-can-get-up-to. Lesia Baziuk makes no comment, stands with her arms folded, her teeth clenched behind her open lips. Yuri’s a good boy, at heart, Peter pleads. A good boy who needs—”a good licking,” Lesia supplies. “Spoil the rod and spare the child.” Peter shoots back, so quickly that she doesn’t catch him out. He walks purposefully back to his cottage, relaxing his stride when he’s certain he’s out of Lesia’s view. If she weren’t such a fool she’d have realized that there’d been more going on in that bunkhouse than Yuri suddenly turning on a totally helpless Billy. What, he doesn’t know. Yuri has refused to say anything in his own defence to either of his parents, and Andriy hasn’t been able to throw any light on the mystery, either.
It’s Katia who fills him in, Katia who’s been waiting in her pyjamas on the front steps of the Martyns’ cottage, listening to the crickets, and waiting for her uncle to make his way back from Mrs. Baziuk’s. Even before she sees him, she hears his whistling; she runs up to him and takes him aside, into the trees beyond the edge of Tunnel Road. It’s not Yuri’s fault, she insists: Billy had got upset when he kept losing at cards. He’d taken a swing at Yuri, and Pavlo Vesiuk, who’d come in to watch, had egged them on, the both of them. When her uncle asks her how she knows all this, she confesses that she’s as much to blame as anyone: she’d been spying on the boys, peering in at the bunkhouse window. She’d heard and seen everything; she should have tried to stop them, and she never should have run away.
He listens to her carefully, and when she’s done, he puts his hands in his pockets.
“Uncle Peter?” she asks, in a voice she hardly recognizes as her own, a frightened voice. “What are you going to do?”
He reaches out his hand and, making a fist, touches her ever so gently on the chin. “I think enough’s been done already, don’t you, Katia?”
Katia nods, then turns and sprints to the cottage. When she reaches the porch, she looks back over her shoulder, not really expecting to see him. But there he is, waiting at the end of their drive, waiting to make sure she gets safely back inside. She waves to him, and he lifts both hands in reply, the way the priest does when he’s giving the blessing. And suddenly Katia is filled with compunction. Was she wrong not to have mentioned Andriy—has she lied to her uncle? Or has she only kept him from knowing what could only hurt him, and hurt
Yuri even more? She doesn’t know, and so she turns her face away, and slips into the cottage, listening for her parents’ voices in the living room, and sliding into bed under Alix’s black, wide-open eyes.
Lying flat on his back—not down at the beach but up by the cottage, alone, under a fine old birch tree—Peter Metelsky stares at the blue overhead, both limitless and encompassing. When he tries to imagine the world he knew inside his mother’s womb, it is exactly this blank and endless blue he conjures up; and when he thinks, as he does more and more these days, of what will meet his eyes the very last moment he has eyes to see, he envisions it not as black and lustreless, like a wiped chalkboard, but as this hard and glinting blue.
Peter has been lying here all afternoon, keeping company with Yuri, who is grounded for the rest of the weekend and spending his time indoors. When Zirka had gone down to the beach, Peter called the boy outside, and they sat together in a companionable kind of silence. Watching his son’s bare chest move up and down, the delicate ribs and collarbone, Peter had been filled with tenderness; he’d started to ask Yuri about what Katia had told him, but the boy had shaken his head, refusing to talk about Billy Baziuk, saying he’d feel better going back inside. So Peter is alone on the lawn, leaning his head back onto the triangle of his arms, an easy cradle that allows him to pursue his thoughts, which compose their own triangle, focusing as they do on a slap to the face, a jump from a boat, and the possibility of jailbreak.
He’d been a fool, of course, to have approached her at the Plotskys’ party all those weeks ago, but he saw her so seldom, how could he have ignored this chance? The very fact that she was there at all, that Jack had persuaded her to accompany him, that was miracle enough. But there’d been more to come. When he’d gone over to the corner where she was standing, alone as always, and asked if he could get her something to drink, she hadn’t refused him, as she’d always done before, on any of the myriad occasions when he’d offered her some small service—the only kind within his power to perform. She’d looked at him with an expression on her face that had stunned him, so naked had she seemed in her unhappiness. But like the idiot he was—a thousand times worse than Jack—he’d been afraid to answer that look she’d given him, to answer it in kind. And so he’d fallen back on his party trick, playing the buffoon, dropping to one knee, addressing her as the Empress of the Nile, in case, just in case, he’d mistaken her expression, got it all wrong, as usual. Afraid he didn’t have it in him to ever get it right. No wonder she had slapped him: Nadia who, for eighteen years, had been like ice whenever he’d so much as looked her way; who was given to no public gesture more compromising than taking off her glasses.
His heart’s desire was nothing so grandiose as to possess Nadia, but just to provoke from her some sign that his existence mattered to her—mattered enough to anger, if not to please her. She’d given him that sign, and, like the coward he was, he turned it into a joke, something for which Jack could pat him on the back, and Zirka reproach him for making a fool of himself, once again. She waited till they got home, till they were in their bedroom, undressing, before she lit into him. He hadn’t listened to the words, the tone of her voice had been enough, and the sight of her, poor Zirka, the puffy flesh that reminded him of tomato soup boiling over; the strips of skin untouched by the sun, so that, naked, she looked as though she were trussed up in lard. He lay on his side of the bed, his face turned to the wall, wondering if he’d only imagined that look of sheer unhappiness on Nadia’s face, while Zirka accused him of every marital crime in the book. To quiet her—he could hear the boys mumbling in their sleep—he had to promise he would keep away from her brother’s wife. And he had kept away, to his shame; but also, if he were being honest with himself, to his secret joy. For as long as he kept away from Nadia, he could believe that she cared for him, cared enough to be furious with him—to touch him, even with the sharp flat of her hand.
Oh, yes, he’d kept his promise to Zirka—until Jack made him break it. Jack with the flashy new toy he’d so badly wanted to show off, and his need of an audience. Nadia hadn’t even said hello to him as he climbed in beside her at the back of the boat. Nadia had been ice and stone, plunging him into an agony of unknowing: had he been utterly mistaken at the party, had her gesture been a mark of contempt for him, and nothing else? But then she stood up and begged Jack to slow down, and then calmly—as calmly as you could move in a speeding boat—jumped overboard. He knew that kind of senseless risk, also called courage. He knew it from the five years of his life gone down that blood-clogged drain glorified by the name of war.
Wasn’t it that which had made such a mess of his life? So many meaningless deaths; his own survival so random, unmerited by anything other than sheer good luck. When he’d returned home to the shining future he’d been promised—an immigrant and the son of immigrants, off to university on a soldier’s scholarship!—he hadn’t known what to do with it. The easy lie of it, the happily-ever-after he had only to sign on to possess. What could he do but play the fool, lazy, careless Petro Metelsky. The trouble being, the trouble having always been, that he could never act in his own best interests, that he knew he didn’t deserve any better than he got.
Look at him now: eighteen years in a trap sprung by his own foolishness and, yes, weakness. Marrying Zirka—marrying her not, as everyone supposed, because of her brother’s deep pockets, but because it was the only way he could stay in touch, however rare, with Nadia, catch a few crumbs from her table. Nadia, the only woman who’d ever refused him. How he’d fallen for her—off a cliff, down a mountain, all at once, and forever. And how different his life—he himself—could have been, if only she’d accepted him. Closing his eyes against the green-fringed sky overhead, Peter allows himself the bittersweet pleasure of remembering the opening night of Kateryna.
He’d thought it the absurd magic of stagecraft, how, in the thick of wheezing machinery and cardboard sets of thatched cottages choked by sunflowers, he had known, not only that he was in love, but that he had to marry Nadia Moroz. Without exchanging more than a few words with him, and spending more than one dance in his arms, she had cut a hole in his heart that nothing has ever filled, certainly not Zirka, and not even his children, dear as they are to him. Standing next to Nadia in the dark closeness of the wings, that night of the first and only performance of Kateryna, he’d felt the warmth of her thin body through the curtains serving for her cloak, and all the layers of starched cotton underneath. Her dark hair was so glossy he could have seen his face reflected in it if he’d had the courage to look. It had all been exactly like the folksongs he’d always whistled in public and laughed at in private: lovers meeting in cherry orchards or on a riverbank; stars, a slender moon bathing the sky.
Petro Metelsky, so good with words, such a smooth, sweet talker, panicking in the wings as the children finish their dance with flags and wheat sheafs made of stiff, yellow-painted cardboard. Just as they’re given their cue to proceed onstage, maiden and evil Muscovite, he lurches into a declaration she must, he now believes, have taken for a joke. With no time for “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” or even “I love you,” he blurts out, “Marry me!” as he gropes for her hand to lead her onstage—she is blind without her glasses. A little pause, and then her words clear, colourless as window glass: “Jack proposed to me last night. I said yes.”
This is the last of what he remembers of the evening: Nadia’s words, and then a huge blank in which he somehow goes through the motions of his role, not a step wrong, not a line forgotten. Prolonged applause from the invisible faces in the black sea in front of them, applause he hears as laughter at his own expense. For even if he’d beaten Jack to the mark, how could she ever have accepted him? What could Peter Metelsky have offered her but the sum of his disillusionment and the uncertainty of his future? Of course she’d take Jack, with his easy laugh, his get-up-and-go, his eye, as he was always boasting, for quality. He’d found it in spades in Nadia Moroz: educated, elegant
and lovely in a way that left even the prettiest girls—Sonia included—at the starting gate. When Jack had reclaimed Nadia from his arms, that night of the Malanka, Peter had stood on the sidelines, watching how her height and grace transformed Jack from a squat Saskatchewan farm boy into a perfect gentleman.
Which was exactly what he had tried to be, standing by as best man while Jack and Nadia went through the wedding ceremony and Zirka—the only bridesmaid—caught the bouquet with a delighted squeal. It hadn’t been difficult for Jack to manoeuvre him into doing “the right thing” by Zirka, whom he’d taken out perhaps a total of half a dozen times, always in company. Didn’t Petro see how humiliating it was for Zirka to be left on the shelf? Hell, he’d lend him the money for a ring as big as an apple, if only he’d step up to the plate—take the plunge, face it like a man! Newlywed Jack, slapping him on the back, rolling his small eyes, as if life with Nadia were some bitter dose he had to swallow every morning, every night.
All the times he’d tried to end the travesty of his marriage to Zirka; all the times he’d been prevented. Not by cowardice, believe it or not—not by cowardice but by something he wanted to call decency. Hiding his relief when, month after month, no sign of any baby had appeared; unable to take his leave of a woman railing at what she kept calling her fault, her failure. And then, after the trips to the specialist (paid for by Jack), after the operation, and the birth of the two boys, how could he have given the lie to his marriage? And for what? No sign of anything but indifference, cold and blind indifference from Nadia, whom he almost never saw once Jack moved her to the house he’d built on Hamilton Mountain, on Millionaires’ Row. Indifference that crazily made him love her even more, scheming to find ways to catch a glimpse of her, sit next to her at the family dinners that became rarer and rarer, exchange a sentence with her on the cathedral steps each Sunday morning. Walking, every night that he’s up at the cottage:walking along the shore to the point where the bluffs are highest, just to look at the lights in the windows of her cottage: warm, golden light, the colour of perfect happiness, of your heart’s desire.
The Ladies' Lending Library Page 22
