The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  Sonia arrives so soundlessly that Peter doesn’t hear her—is caught exposed, lying under the birch tree, the very picture of idleness. His sister imagines their mother folding her arms and saying something cutting: What a fine kozak you’d make. Forget the fighting, you’d just swig horilka under some damned tree till you passed out.

  “Brateh miy,” Sonia calls out, sitting down beside him, hugging her knees with her arms.

  He smiles at her, though he’d give anything to be left alone, thinking of Nadia. “Sonechko,” he says. “Shcho novoho?”

  There’s nothing new in Sonia’s life, unless it’s this new worry that’s been heaped on her plate. After the scene on the boat last weekend, Sasha had gone after her, again: Talk to him—make him promise to behave. Sonia feels a prickle of irritation with Sasha: why doesn’t she go after Nadia? Nadia was the one who’d made this particular scene—unless people are accusing Peter of having pushed Nadia into the water! What business is it of anyone’s, the mess Peter’s making of his life? Leave him at least the dignity of going under in his own way; don’t lecture him as if he were a child. If she is going to talk with Peter, let it be about something that matters more than the smug, small circle of Kalyna Beach. So Sonia asks her brother about work—whether his boss has eased up on the lectures, the demands for overtime to make up for the undertime Peter gives to his job.

  It’s a mistake, of course. For Peter replies with some fairy tale about how the boss is really a Russian spy, paid by the KGB to make life miserable for honest, hard-working Ukrainian immigrants. In spite of herself, Sonia’s drawn in by the details Peter spins so effortlessly: how the boss, Mr. Anthony Horton, is really one Anton Hortinsky, b. Minsk, Order of Lenin, shoeshine boy to Stalin himself before he graduated to spy school in Moscow. From which he’d managed to pass, a mere hundred-rouble note away from abject failure. The only job they could find to match his capacities, Peter is saying, was infiltrating a certain tool-and-die outfit in Willowdale, captained, of all patriotic heroes, by one Peter Paul Metelsky.

  Peter is grinning at her now, for all the world like the ten-year-old he once was, shaking plums down from the neighbour’s tree, filling his pockets with the ripe, red-juiced fruit as the neighbour shook his fist and yelled that Peter’s mother would hear about it! Sharing the plums with her behind a row of tall gravestones in the cemetery, where the tiger lilies grew thick and tall; feeding her plums till she nearly burst from the sweetness. And then, once they’d stolen home at dusk, how Peter had taken the punishment their mother had prepared at the neighbour’s urging, stealing smiles at Sonia while the switch came down and she’d huddled in the corner, knowing herself as guilty as he.

  “Peter,” she says, stretching out her hand to his mouth, stopping the words, the foolish, entertaining, cover of words. Her voice is careful, a whisper: “Peter, don’t put on a show, not now. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  He stares at her for a moment, then takes her hand, kisses and releases it. He looks away, not up at the sky, but at the grass on which they’re sitting, the grass and the earth showing dry as powder between the blades. When he speaks, the words come quickly, as though he were afraid of running out of time to give her what she’s asked him for.

  “What’s wrong, Sonia? I am. And that’s the truth of it. No, listen, Sestrychko. All my life, all my woefully misspent life, I’ve believed I could be somebody different than I was. Someone better, finer, the person everyone expected me to be. I thought I’d found a way to make the jump between who I was and what I could be when I went off to war. But I came back no different—worse, if anything. There was one more chance, which I lost even before I knew it was there. I would have lost my belief in that better self, or what remained of it, except that I kept on wanting what I didn’t—couldn’t—have. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Sonia shakes her head. Peter smiles at her, a wry, twisting smile.

  “It doesn’t matter. You know, Sonia, if I were to break my neck in some accident on the highway, they wouldn’t be any the worse for it, Zirka and the boys. There’s my paltry insurance policy, but that doesn’t begin to come into it. Jack is Zirka’s insurance policy: there’d be much, much more for her and the boys if I were out of the way. Can’t you just hear the talk in the community? What a guy, that Jack Senchenko, looking after his sister and her orphaned boys.”

  “Don’t, Peter, you mustn’t even think that way,” Sonia urges, but Peter keeps on.

  “As far as Zirka and Jack are concerned, I’d be better off out of the picture. But the boys?” Peter’s stomach tightens, as if his gut were a string being tugged to breaking point.

  Sonia rushes to reassure him. “Yuri and Andriy adore you, you know that.”

  “Two months of weekends spent building forts in the sand, swimming, wrestling. That’s all I can give them—because once we’re back in the city, well, you know how it is. Work, and pretending to work. But here—Sonia, I’m not a father to them, just some crazy older brother to horse around with. When I step into the Almighty Father shoes they laugh at me—they’re no fools, they can see those shoes don’t fit, that they’re a country mile from fitting.

  “I’ll tell you something, Sonechko. Every time I climb into that rusty old Chev to drive up here or back to the city, I’m wondering if this time it will be my car, bashed in and smoking at the guardrail, me being pried loose from the driver’s seat. It doesn’t even need to be my fault, or anyone else’s—it might just be that little bunch of veins at the top of my head letting go: the ones that killed Tato, when he was not all that much older than I am now. The poor bastard never had much luck, did he, apart from marrying our mother.”

  “Peter,” Sonia cries, “Petro.”

  The pain in her voice is absurdly poignant, like a blunt-edged knife; he is starting to reproach himself for having spoken so freely to her, having loaded his fears on her, vulnerable as she still is, when his sister goes on to speak with a fierceness that shocks him.

  “Take your happiness, Peter. Don’t just keep reaching out for it—take it.”

  His voice is angry now. “And what if I do just that—what if I grab hold and discover that it isn’t anything like I thought it was, all this time? And what if the person I catch hold of only wants me the way you want to hold on to a railing when you’re running down a steep flight of stairs?”

  “Don’t give up on your life,” Sonia pleads, her voice echoing against the leaves and the grass and the walls of the cottage, as if she doesn’t care any more who might hear her.

  And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she’s gone.

  That evening the Metelskys sit down to a meal of salmon mousse and fresh corn and dilled potatoes, though as far as Peter’s concerned, Zirka sighs, it might as well be Shake ‘n Bake chicken and canned beets. Afterwards, Peter plays a game of checkers with Andriy and chess with Yuri, allowing Andriy but not Yuri to defeat him. Once the boys have been packed off to bed, he flips through a junky novel while Zirka washes her hair at the kitchen sink, and puts her rollers in, the sponge kind on which she always sleeps. But after his wife’s turned off the bedroom light, and the boys are blanketed in dreams, Peter calls out, to the walls with their scabbed paint and kitten calendars, that he’s going for a nighttime walk, as he always does, along the beach.

  Like everyone else, Jack Senchenko has built his cottage overlooking the lake, but on a point of land far higher than the bluff on which the other cottages are built, and at an appreciable distance from them. To get to the Senchenkos’ on foot means a fifteen-minute walk along the shore, and then a hike up a steep trail through dunes and pine and undergrowth to the cottage and its twin flagpoles, flying the Red Ensign and the blue and yellow banner of Ukraine.

  Light is spilling from the large, screened-in porch. Peter makes his way slowly towards it. Looking past the moths clustered on the screen, he can see her in profile. She is alone, sitting at a small table; she is bent over a sheet of paper on which she is writing something. The dark wing
s of her glasses should make him feel, what? Pity for her short-sightedness, her solitariness? Pity instead of anger at the way she keeps her self to herself, the completeness of her presence at the table, the perfect geometry between her eye and the page and her hand. This desire of his, as sharp now as the first time he saw her—what proof does he have that she feels anything for him but pity, or contempt, or mere exasperation.

  A slap on the face, a leap into the lake, a leap to which he should have responded then and there by carrying her off, forever. From a husband so crude he leaves the price tags on the paintings he’s plastered across his Hamilton mansion, and buys a new, more expensive car every year: one in the garage, another parked in the driveway, just for show. From the boxed-in loneliness, the remote suffocation of Kalyna Beach. What must she have thought when he hoisted her into the boat, handing her back to Jack once more? What if she thought nothing at all—what if he mistook an accident for an incident? Yet isn’t Sonia right? Isn’t it time he risked finding out, once and for all?

  Her feet are bare. The whiteness of her feet against the deep black of her trousers startles him. Seeing her like this, he is back in the cool deep waters of the bay, holding her up in his arms, his heart flapping like a flag in a gale. He’s afraid that if he knocks at the screen door she’ll take him for an intruder, a prowler, and let out a scream, wake Jack, who is surely asleep in some far-off wing of this huge and horrible house, prison or castle or monster chalet. He is here to see Jack on a business matter, something urgent; she won’t think any the worse of him for coming by. Or better yet, he’s here on a whim, having had one too many whisky and sodas: Peter the mimic, the clown, the spoiled actor. Star of church-basement stage and home-movie screen.

  He forces himself to do nothing, say nothing but her name, “Nadia,” which, as he reminds himself, means hope.

  “Peter?” She hasn’t yet turned to look at him.

  From the sound of her voice, she isn’t startled, or displeased, yet there’s an intensity he can hardly believe has to do with his presence. She shakes her head over the piece of paper. He sees now that there’s an old shirt lying crumpled on the table beside her—she must be mending it.

  “Quiet, Peter,” she says at last, though he hasn’t shouted. “Be quiet and I’ll unlatch the door.” Nadia gets up from her chair, moving soundlessly towards him; he can sense the scent of her face, her hair, through the mesh of the screen.

  “Hurry up, you’ll let the mosquitos in.” Softly, she closes the door, and they stand together just inside the threshold.

  “Jack’s not here,” she says. “He’s delayed in the city on business. He’ll be back for the party tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, right, then. I’ll try to bend his ear tomorrow—at the party.”

  “Is it something important?” Meaning, are you in trouble again?

  He shakes his head. And then, summoning all his courage, with as much difficulty as if he were only just learning to speak, he asks if that’s coffee he smells.

  “It will keep you up. Besides, it’s bitter, it’s been on for hours.”

  “I like it bitter.”

  She looks at him, then back at the table where she’d been sitting; she waits for a perceptible moment, and then she goes off to the kitchen. He stands there, unable to take a seat, and powerless to walk over to the table, to see what she has been writing. Take your happiness, Peter—don’t just keep reaching out for it—take it. Though he’s had the whole walk over to decide, he can’t begin to think of what he’ll say to her when she returns. The whole walk, and a whole life leading up to this walk, tonight. Hands in his pockets, he stares down at his feet in their shabby canvas shoes, as if they will help him. Her skin, under the white blouse, the black trousers—it must be bruised from that jump off the boat, and the way Jack hauled her up the ladder. How could she have summoned up the courage to jump, and how could he have gone along with the rest of them, pretending she’d fallen, lost her balance, when it was plain for anyone to see that she’d decided to jump? To stop Jack from killing some innocent swimmer, or to remove herself, at once and for always, from the need to care?

  Nadia is standing at the door, carrying a tray and watching him—how long has she been standing there?

  “You don’t take sugar, do you? Or cream?” she asks, in that English voice that always makes him think of a tumbler of cool water. But she’s brought them anyway, the sugar and cream, along with the percolator and a cup and saucer on a tray. As polite, as considerate as if he were a stranger who’d dropped by seeking directions, or one of her husband’s business associates, which in a way he is: Jack Senchenko’s tame black sheep. Looking at her now, he can’t imagine she is that woman on the speedboat; the girl he once saw shivering on Queen Street, danced with on New Year’s Eve, stood next to, so close he could feel the heat burning from her body, in a basement theatre.

  He swallows hard, then walks towards her, taking the cup she offers him. “To Kalyna Beach,” he proposes, lifting his cup.

  Warily, she watches him take a sip of his coffee. Then there’s silence: plain, simple, awkward.

  “Have you ever tasted kalyna?” is the only thing he can think to say.

  Nadia shakes her head.

  “My mother used to brew up the berries in the old country—she’d make cough syrup out of it. Poor Sonia, the face she’d pull, drinking that stuff down. A cross between cranberries and rotting turnip, I always thought.”

  Watching her face reflected in the shiny metal of the percolator—black hair and white, white skin—he registers the fact that Nadia spends most of her time at Kalyna Beach indoors, much to Zirka’s disapproval. Why she comes up for the summer I can’t understand. What does she do with herself all day long, with her boy away working, and her husband stuck in the city, and just that housekeeper to look after him? Nadia doesn’t sunbathe, she doesn’t swim, she doesn’t come down to the beach at all.

  “Sonia can’t swim either,” Peter blurts out. And then, blundering on, “She’s deathly afraid of the water.”

  Nadia shows no surprise at the turn the conversation’s taken. She puts the tray down on a low table between them. “I wondered about that” is all she says. She sits down in a chaise longue, and he pulls up a folding chair, facing her.

  “When she was a kid—this is before we came to Canada—some boys chased her down to the river. They threw her in, thinking she could swim.”

  “And she couldn’t?”

  “Someone happened to be passing by and pulled her out.”

  “Have you always made a habit of rescuing people?”

  It’s the archness, the coolness in her voice that goads Peter into leaning forward in his chair. He notices how her hands are clenched so tight that the knuckles stick out, bone-white. “In the boat, last week—why did you jump?”

  She says nothing, balancing on the chaise longue as if it too were a boat capable of capsizing.

  “You were crazy to jump,” he goes on, his voice both stern and tender. “You could have got hurt.”

  Now she leans back in her chair, her fingers still knitted together, but loosely. “It was like something out of a book.”

  “What?”

  “People do risky, dangerous things all the time in books. It’s only in real life we never seem to get the chance. Why do you think that is?”

  “Nadia—”

  She pulls herself forward, sits with her elbows balanced on her knees, her face leaning into his. “Peter, I need you to tell me something. What do you think of me? I don’t mean do you think I’m bad or good, or ugly or attractive, but what were you thinking when you saw me sitting there, at the table, just before you called out to me?”

  What does she want to hear? What can he say that will be the right words, the only answer, like in those fairy tales where the prince must choose just one casket, or one gift to win his heart’s desire? But he knows better; he knows nothing. He is lost for words, lost altogether. He can hear a branch tapping against the screen, i
n cruel imitation of the clock that is carving away his chances, second by second. So that it’s Nadia who breaks a silence that seems to have lasted for hours: in her voice is something heartsick, the pressure of anguish.

  “Oh, Petro, Petro, what a coward you are.”

  Suddenly he is looming over her, shoving the little glass table so that their coffee cups rattle. His anger is a key shoved into a lock, turned violently. “Since I’m the coward, then you go instead of me, Nadia. Tell me what you think of me, Peter Metelsky, neighbourhood dilettante, genial failure—”

  Her voice now is merely sad. “Why are you always answering your own questions?”

  She takes off her glasses to look up at him, as if she can see better half-blind. He can feel her eyes as if they’re fingertips tracing all the lines of his face, the tiredness that can’t be undone by sleep, any more than the grey hair at his temples. Tracing what’s inside his head, too, the chart with numbers crossed off, his father dead at fifty-five, twelve more years, only twelve to go. In the nakedness of her eyes he sees, all of a sudden, that she, too, is counting. The days you can’t pretend aren’t passing you by, moment by moment, flakes of pure fire that leap up only to fall back into ash.