by Anne Degrace
Since we arrived in New Denver in August, things had been quiet, but memories lingered: dynamited power poles near Nelson, houses in Krestova, Perry Siding, Shoreacres, and Glade destroyed by fire, and a CP Rail substation bombed. It was baffling to consider the motive behind the burning of Sons of Freedom Doukhobor homes by the Freedomites themselves, despite Joyce’s attempts to explain to the extent that she, herself understood. Her son-in-law was an “Independent Doukhobor,” she explained.
“The Sons of Freedom have a more zealous interpretation of their religion,” she had said on one of our Monday morning visits at the store, which had become regular events. “They don’t think it’s good to have too much stuff, and so setting things on fire is a way to clean out, I guess.”
“Seems a little extreme,” I offered.
“That’s not the half of it. It’s been quieter since most of the parents are in Oakalla prison. A few years back it was really bad. There was something in the newspaper every week, it seemed like. And then there were the nude marches.” She shook her head, and I found myself shaking my own head. It was hard to fathom. “Walter doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s hard on the other Doukhobors.”
I had seen the newspaper photographs of men and women, undressed in front of the Nelson courthouse. “Why do you think they go nude?”
“Walter says it’s because it’s the way God made them. And it makes a statement, I guess.” She leaned across the counter. “I think it’s to get attention. As if the bombs didn’t. Still, those kids. I feel sorry for those kids. Snatched before dawn by the RCMP. Walter’s cousin’s kid was eventually taken that way, but it was weeks before they caught him. He’d run and hide in the woods. Walter says that some kids hide in the hay barns, and then the RCMP go through with pitchforks.”
“That’s awful!”
“They know the mothers will stop them when they get close,” Joyce said. “But it is awful.”
“It must be the best thing for the children, though,” I said. “They can’t stay with their parents, doing what they’re doing. And they won’t send them to school. That’s against the law.”
“I know,” Joyce said. She pulled a licorice whip out of the box on the counter and dangled it at Audrey, whose face lit up. “I know. Walter says we can’t understand if we’re not Doukhobor. I just feel sorry for those kids, that’s all.”
AS I WORKED beside Vera I wondered if she, too, had hid in the woods, or in the back of a cupboard. It was early December by this time, and so in my mind’s eye she was shivering, cold, in some hiding place listening to the boots of police officers as they searched for her, although I had no idea how it was she had come to be here, or at what time of year. What would that have been like for her? I wasn’t sure how to ask. Instead, I made small talk.
“I guess you’re looking forward to seeing your parents tomorrow?” I said.
She didn’t look up. “I don’t think my mother will come.” Her English was very good, I noticed, but then, she’d been here, she had told me earlier, since she was six.
“Why not?” Nothing, I thought, would keep me from seeing Audrey.
“We live in Gilpin. It takes a long time to get here. Visiting hour used to be in the afternoon, but Mr. Neilson changed it to morning. So my mother would have to leave in the dark and drive a long way to be here for just one hour to see me through the fence.”
I swallowed. “But they can come in. They get passes.”
Vera looked up, then shrugged and went back to her work. “They don’t like it that they have to get a pass from the government to come to see me. Because the government is bad. The government wants us to be like everyone else, so we’re not Doukhobor anymore. So, they won’t take the pass. Besides, once they came and some of us had got in trouble, so they cancelled visiting hours. It was just a note on the fence to tell them.”
“What were you being punished for?”
“Some kids went to the store and stole some food.” She put down the potato she had finished and picked up another. “We get tired of potatoes.”
At that moment the peeler slipped and Vera went to catch it before it fell. She yelped, and the peeler clattered to the floor. We both watched for the moment before the blood reached the surface of the slice across her palm. The cut didn’t look bad, but I was afraid of infection. “Let’s take you to Matron,” I said.
“No!” Vera put her hand behind her back. When I reached for it, to take another look, she shook her head and ran from the kitchen.
I TOLD NATSUMI about it when I picked up Audrey that evening. She poured tea and we sat at her kitchen table. Audrey was seldom in a hurry to leave Natsumi’s house, and Natsumi seemed happy for my company, too.
“The first winter we were here, I don’t think we would have survived if it wasn’t for the Doukhobors,” she told me. “Maybe they were not the same ones as the people who are always in the news right now. I don’t know. They came with carts full of vegetables. Apples, cabbage. They were good people. It didn’t matter to them that Canada was at war with Japan.”
And that was it. It was as if a dam had opened and Natsumi let the words pour through. She described her husband’s dental office above a store on Hastings Street; Natsumi scheduled appointments and kept the books. Her sons were happy, obedient boys. Her husband, who had emigrated from Japan, was so proud to be Canadian. Then, she told me, when the war came they were told to get ready to leave, and that they could have one suitcase each. Her husband made the best of it; it would not be for long. He carefully closed up the office so it would be easy to reopen when they got back.
“Of course, right away everything was taken out and sold,” Natsumi said. “They did not mean to give anything back. My husband, Tadao, was very bitter.”
“What about your boys?”
“They were old enough to know what had been taken from them,” she said. “We have a phrase: shikata ga nai. It means ‘it can’t be helped.’ The older people, especially, would say this. They had been through so much: this was just one more thing. And Canada was our country: so we were angry, and we were worried. We were worried that Japan would win, and we were worried that Japan would lose. But the older kids didn’t care so much about Japan. They were just angry. Once my father, who was with us, said to my older boy Tom, when Tom was frustrated — I remember he was chipping ice off the water that was frozen in our bucket — shikata ga nai, and Tom said —” she looked at Audrey, who by now was almost asleep on my lap, my chin resting on her fine hair, “— ‘to heck with your shikata ga nai.’ Well, he said worse than that. Oh, he got in trouble for speaking back to his grandfather! But you know, it was hard, but we weren’t angry at the people of New Denver. They could have felt overrun with all of us: they were only a few hundred when we came, and we were more than a thousand. Many people were kind to us. That’s one of the reasons I have stayed here.”
I shifted Audrey a little; she’d become a dead weight. Natsumi looked at her and smiled. “They are lovely when they are asleep, aren’t they?” I nodded, thinking I should go, too comfortable and warm to move. Our house would be cold, and the walk between our homes across the crusty snow colder. Besides, Natsumi seemed content to continue her story.
“After the war, we were given a choice: move to the prairies or to Ontario, or go home. By home, they meant Japan, but to many of us it meant nothing, because we’d never been there. My father was very frail by then, and had developed a bad cough. Tadao seemed to have developed one, too. So we stayed and moved into the building you work in now. It was a sanatorium before.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And so life was really not much different than it had been, but there we were. And then my father died, and then Tadao. And I stayed.”
It was said so quietly, in such a matter of fact way, that I couldn’t say why I suddenly felt my eyes pool with tears. Natsumi was up and cleari
ng our teacups.
“What about your boys?”
“Tom found work at the mill at Salmon Arm. Terry is studying dentistry in Vancouver. His father would be very proud.” She had gathered Audrey’s winter things from beside the door and brought them into the kitchen where she pulled her chair across from ours to help push Audrey’s sleepy, bendable feet into her boots while I held her on my lap. “It is keeping family close that is so hard,” Natsumi told me. “And I think it is the most important thing of all.”
WE WERE APPROACHING the shortest day of the year. I walked to work in the dark and came home in the dark. The clouds sat low on the mountains, which appeared black and brooding. Even Joyce seemed out of sorts, angry because someone had thrown a stone through her window, retaliation, she was sure, for her complaints to the Dormitory after she had found two boys “up to no good,” behind the building. Visiting privileges had been cancelled for those boys, and extra work duties assigned. It felt as if the air was full of bad feelings fluttering like so many bats through the cold Dormitory rooms. And the rooms were cold. Broken windows weren’t replaced but just covered up. Two more people were let go as more funding was cut: Sally, another one of the cook’s helpers, and Agnes, who cleaned. Mrs. Doerksen was in a perpetually foul mood. I waited to hear that I had been let go, too, but for now, I seemed to have a job. I had no idea what I would do if I lost it.
I saw more of Vera, then, who came to help me mornings before class with the breakfast cleanup. One morning as she pushed a cart full of dirty dishes into the kitchen, I could see something was wrong.
“Are you all right, Vera?” I asked.
“I don’t feel well,” she said. “My ear hurts.”
I looked at her ear, and it did seem a little red. “You’d better go and see Matron,” I told her. “They’ll keep you home today.” The word home sounded odd when I said it, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“No they won’t. They don’t like us to stay behind.” She began to stack the dishes from the cart beside the sink, her movements slow, like molasses on a cold day.
“Really, Vera,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“No. Please.” She looked at me, and I thought of what a pretty girl she was. I imagined her on a summer day, playing outside her family’s home.
“Okay,” I told her. “You should go and get ready for school, then. Go now, and you’ll have more time. And dress warm!” I said to her departing back.
Later, as I was getting ready to go home, the maintenance man, Jerry, stopped in to look at the stove, which had been giving us some trouble.
“Your helper’s in the infirmary,” he told me as he rooted through his toolbox.
Although I was anxious to pick up Audrey, I hurried over to the infirmary, my hard soles slipping on the ice in the yard. I found Vera looking very small under several blankets on a narrow cot. She had a hot compress against the side of her head. There was nobody else around.
“I fell down,” she told me. “I guess I lost my balance. Mrs. Sellinger told me it was because of my ear.”
“Who’s Mrs. Sellinger?”
“My teacher. She said it was terrible that they sent me to school.” Vera smiled a little and shifted the hot compress. There was a glass of water beside her bed, but nothing else.
I sat on the chair beside her bed. “Is there something I can get for you? Some books?” I felt helpless, there, and torn, needing to go home — Audrey would miss me. “Wait,” I told Vera. “I just need to do something.”
I walked over to the administration office; Mr. Neilson was there behind stacks of paper on his desk. “So many reports,” he said. “That’s all they seem to want, all the time.”
He just waved towards the telephone when I asked to use it. I felt awkward calling while he was working, but he got up abruptly and walked down the hall to the washroom, whistling under his breath. I dialed the five numbers I knew were the number for the store, and asked Joyce if she could send someone to ask Natsumi to keep Audrey for supper. Neither Natsumi nor I had telephones. Joyce was sure it would be all right, but promised to get the message to her. Then she mentioned that Natsumi and Audrey had been in the store just that afternoon.
“Audrey showed me a Japanese clapping game Natsumi taught her,” Joyce said. “She’s a happy little thing, isn’t she?”
I met Mrs. Doerksen in the hallway carrying a tray of soup and bread. I assured her she should take a break, and that I’d sit with Vera for a while, although it was evident that nobody had been sitting with Vera for some time. Tucked under my arm was a pad of lined paper and some pencils.
Vera didn’t want the soup, I suppose because her sore ear made her stomach sick, too, with the dizziness that would have come with an ear infection. But I convinced her to eat some, and she finished about half of it before she put her spoon down and I took away the tray.
I showed her the paper and pencils. I had thought we could draw pictures together; it’s what Audrey liked to do best, and although Vera was older, I thought she might like it, too. But what Vera wanted to do was talk, something she hadn’t done so very much of in the kitchen. I asked her how she came to live at the Dormitory.
“It was scary, when the police came. We were told to hide, and in some houses people had made places under the floor. But I was afraid of the dark and I didn’t want to go under the boards, so my mother told me that if the policeman came I should hide under the bed.” Vera looked out the window as she spoke, the pictures clearly in her head, still. “They came in the early morning, when we were just getting up. I was still in my nightgown, and my mother looked out the window and saw the car, and said: ‘Hurry, under the bed with you!’ I crawled under as fast as I could and made myself small behind a trunk. I could hear my mother at the door, saying ‘No, no children here,’ and I could hear the boots of the policemen as they came in anyway. My father was trying to tell them they had no right, but he said it in Russian. My mother and father don’t speak English very well.
“I had my eyes shut very tightly. I was only six, and I think maybe I thought that if I couldn’t see them they couldn’t see me.” Vera gave me a little smile. “When I opened my eyes I saw a big upside-down face looking at me, and I almost screamed, but then it was gone, and I could just see big black boots. I heard two men talking in English, but I don’t know what they said because I didn’t have many words in English then, either. But then I heard my mother say ‘See, no children,’ and I was surprised because it meant that the policeman must have pretended he didn’t see me. Then I heard the other policeman say something, and I could feel the bed being moved away from the wall, and then there was the other policeman looking down at me. I was picked up in his big hands and my coat put on me, and my mother was putting my dress right over my nightgown and my feet in my boots and she was crying and she had her hands on both sides of my face, kneeling on the floor in front of me, when the policeman picked me right up off the floor from between my mother’s hands and took me to the car. Petya, a boy I knew, was already in the car, and I could see his mother running down the road towards it. I looked out the back window as we drove away and there were our two mothers, Petya’s and mine, holding onto each other in the middle of the road.”
Vera was crying, now, and so was I. It was more than I’d heard her say if I’d put all of her words together that I’d heard these last few months.
I was still hoping to put things in a positive light, even after all that. “But now you are in school. Now you’re learning things.”
“I was in school then. But my mother took me out; she said we all needed to be the same to protest the government. I liked school. But I don’t like it now.” She looked down at her hands, young fingers knotted together. “Now, my father has gone away. It’s just my mother. It’s hard for her to come.”
“Do you write to her?”
“At first, I didn’t
because I was angry. Because if I’d stayed in school, maybe I wouldn’t be here. Now I don’t because I don’t know what to say. When my mother does come, she just cries. She feels bad.”
There were footsteps in the hallway, sharp heels like the hooves of horses, and we both wiped our eyes.
“I’ll take over now, Bernice,” Mrs. Doerksen said. “Vera should sleep if she’s going to get better and get back to school.” She reached over to pick up the tray.
“No, I’ll take it back,” I said. “I was just saying goodnight.” I reached for the hot compress. “Vera said this was helping,” I said, although she hadn’t. “Maybe it could be warmed up?”
After she left, I put the pad of paper and pencils on the nightstand. “Maybe you could write a letter to your mother now. I’ll bet she’d like to hear from you.”
Vera said nothing, just shimmied down in the bed. I pulled the covers up and laid my hand on her shoulder for a moment, thinking I might say something more, but her eyes were closed.
I hurried home through the dark streets.
IN APRIL DYNAMITE was found on a rail line near Brilliant. I read it first in the Nelson Daily News, a copy Mr. Neilson had left for staff to read. He’d warned us that things might be starting up again, and to keep a firm hand on the children. Less than a month later a power pole near Glade was dynamited.
“They’re crazy,” I said to Joyce. We’d moved our visits to the bench outside the store, where we could watch the world go by on the main street while Audrey played in the sun.
“They’re dangerous,” Joyce agreed. “How are things at the Dorm?”
“Not so good. At least classes will end soon. They’ll have fun swimming in the lake. There’ll be more time to play. It will be like summer camp to them, compared to this past winter.” The children would not go home in the summer, but would stay at the Dormitory until they were of age to leave school, or until their parents agreed to send them. I wished their parents would agree to send them. I remembered what Leona had said, back at the Woolworth’s lunch counter: They wanted us to be like you. Was that so bad?
