“Sorry, it’s all over the village.” Maryna moved in front of the peech to keep Natalka’s eyes out of it. “Pavlo and Lubo were fixing my fence. I could have done it myself, but they wanted to help a poor old lady, so I let them. You don’t get chances like that too often. Anyway, they heard Viktor talking – in the tavern, of course.”
“Those fools!” Natalka exclaimed. “They spend too much time in the tavern.”
“Probably eavesdropping for all they were worth. But it’s all true. The men talked about it last night in the reading hall.”
“Anyway...I’m not going.”
Maryna hesitated a moment, then decided to speak. “Maybe you’re the fool, then.”
“What? You want me to leave my home? My village?”
Maryna enjoyed Natalka’s outrage. Really, it was almost comical. A best friend should support you, not undercut you, but Maryna didn’t lie to her friends, at least not if the truth might be helpful.
“Why not?” Maryna bent over and tasted the soup, added salt, stirred. “What’s so great here?”
Natalka had to pull her eyes away from the spoon, stirring and stirring. She had to get back to her outrage. “You can’t mean that.”
“Can’t I?”Maryna stirred harder, then realized it wasn’t going to put meat in the soup and stopped. “Every other coin I get goes to pay off my husband’s debt to Radoski.”
“But my friends –” Natalka said.
“Don’t stay for my sake. I’ll be dead soon.”
Maryna glanced at two squares of paler whitewash on the walls, where once there had hung a holy icon and a portrait – the kind everyone had, of Shevchenko – both long since sold for what little they could fetch.
“My, I wonder if I’ll see my Marko in heaven like the priest says. I wonder if he’ll still look old or if everybody gets young again up there. What do you think?”
“Don’t give me that, Maryna, you’ll be here another twenty, thirty years.”
“I don’t think so.” Maryna’s lips twitched. “God couldn’t be so cruel.”
Natalka looked startled and then started to laugh. Maryna cackled. Then they laughed so hard, deep in their bellies, they could barely get breath. They collapsed on the wooden bench, gasping; lifted their aprons to wipe their eyes.
“Dobre,” Natalka said. “I haven’t laughed like that for some time. I don’t really feel like it with the wild boar around.”
“You have to keep watch always. You never know what a wild boar’s going to do.”
“No,” Natalka agreed, “only that it won’t be what you want.” Her eyes met Maryna’s. “There’s always so much of what you don’t want. Is that what life’s meant to be like? I suppose it must be.”
“Well well, never mind,” Maryna said, “we may as well have some tea. The soup’ll be ready soon. And we have good bread.” She poured tea from a pot keeping warm on the peech. Sliced Natalka’s dark rye onto a plate and set it to warm. Steam from the soup twined its way through rays of sun, and the sharp, warm fragrance of the heavy bread mixed with it, turning the room, for a moment, into a haven of warmth and plenty.
Maryna pressed Natalka’s rough hand. “What to do, eh? What to do? Every day’s the same – same chores, same food. For me, each year just means the soup gets thinner. Maybe if you go, something will change. You’ll have choices. Things we can’t even imagine.”
“Dobre,” Natalka says, “I’ll be a beautiful pahna in a long silk gown with strings of coral and amber around my neck, right down to my apron.”
“A pahna wouldn’t need an apron.”
“That’s true. Down to my knees, then.” Maryna laughed. “Oh, and I’ll have soft white bread every day.”
“And eat your meat with a silver fork?”
“And wear fine leather shoes and silk stockings.”
“Well, we’ll see about that,” Maryna said. She filled two bowls with hot soup and passed the bread. The scent wrapped around them. Dust specks floated in the slanting light.
There was no butter to put on the bread.
“So the tendency of this little tale,” Myro says, “seems to be that immigration was a good thing.”
“Well, a lot of people have had that idea,” Taras says. “Or we wouldn’t all be here.”
“But wait a minute,” Yuriy says. “You said Halya told you about this visit, and yes, your mother also, but how could you know what those two babas thought? Were you listening at the window?”
Taras smiles. “No. I had to imagine it.”
“Make it up, you mean?”
“Something like that.”
“I think it sounded quite realistic,” Tymko says. “Scientifically speaking.”
“Me too,” Ihor says. “I felt like I knew them.”
“But –” Yuriy begins.
“I’m telling the story, aren’t I?” Taras pretends to glower. “Do you want to hear more or not?” Yuriy nods and smiles. As Taras has been telling the story these cold nights, more men have come to hear, sometimes ten or twenty. They listen as if their souls depended on it.
“You know,” Yuriy says, “I remember those immigration posters. Men even came up to us in the taverns – to tell us how happy we’d be, if only we came to Canada.”
“Agents from steamship companies,” Tymko says. “Sometimes they even paid Ukrainian people in Canada to send letters home saying how good everything was here. Even if they lived in holes in the ground.”
“Why did they go to all that trouble?” Yuriy asks. “What did they want with us?”
“Labour,” Tymko says. “For their factories and mines and sawmills. Most of all, for farming. Somebody had to break up all that land. Chop up all those roots. Who better than a bunch of Ukrainians?” Everyone is silent for a moment, taking all this in. It fits with what they know, but they’ve never talked about it this way.
“So that’s what the government had planned for us all along?” Yuriy doesn’t like to believe this, it’s so cut and dried.
“That’s right. Everything planned in advance. We were set up, boys.”
“Set up,” Ihor agrees. “As if we weren’t really people, just things that could be useful to them.” He looks sad.
“Or pieces on a chessboard,” Myro says.
“But that’s not all,” Tymko goes on. “The Indians were set up too. And we’re part of that.”
“What do you mean?” Taras asks. “What have we got to do with Indians?”
“Think about it. England finds this whole vast land now called Canada. They want to take it over. Make it their colony. But how do they do that? People live here already. No, not people in cities or on farms. People who move around so they can hunt. Food, clothing, shelter; everything depends on hunting.”
“What has that got to do with us?” Taras is still puzzled, but sees understanding in Myro’s eyes.
“The land is given to us. We cut trees, break land, build fences. Indians can no longer move freely or hunt on that land. Railroads are built. Every year more land is broken. Trails the animals take through the trees disappear. Suddenly everything you know how to do is no good any more. It doesn’t help to be a fine hunter, and know how to make everything you need, if there’s no more hunting.”
There’s a long silence. Taras wishes he hadn’t heard this. Tymko says the government has given them other people’s land. It makes sense. How else do you have that much land to give away?
“But the land was empty,” Yuriy says. “Or almost empty.” He has a good farm, or what soon will be a good farm. He wants to be happy about that.
“I didn’t say they lived like us,” Tymko says. “There weren’t so many of them. They didn’t fill up all the spaces like we do. But they were here.”
“I guess they were.”
“How did you come to understand this?” Myro asks.
“When I was working in the mines, I met Indian people. Stoneys. Nakodah. They came to town to buy supplies. Flour. Bullets. Clothing. Sometimes we talked.”
Silence settles again. This puts what they’re living through in a different light.
“Did you have to make us feel even worse?” Yuriy asks.
“Would you rather know the truth or not?” Tymko says.
“If it makes me feel worse, probably not.”
“Perhaps Taras will give us more of his story,” Myro says. “Just to finish out the evening. Then we can sleep.”
“Yes,” Ihor says. “We’ll have such beautiful dreams.”
“Oh well, then,” Tymko says, “let’s listen. Then we’ll all have a good stiff drink and off we go.”
“I wonder,” Yuriy says, “if we could get some homebrew going.”
“I’ve thought about it for months,” Ihor says, “but I can’t see a way. We don’t have anything to make it out of, or any container to make it in.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Yuriy agrees. “But it would be nice. Maybe the cooks would give us some potatoes and a big pot. We could hide it under the bunks during the day.”
“Yes,” Ihor says. “Along with the pork roasts and the sweet, soft pampushkas and the garlic sausage rings.”
“And the pretty girls,” Tymko says. Everyone looks miserable. “Taras. You may as well go on.”
“Maybe a little more, just to finish off this part. But I warn you, it’s not all cheery.”
“Oh, we’re getting used to that.” Yuriy manages a wink.
“So you remember I said that I’d realized I didn’t want to go into the army. And my parents were going to drive me to Chernowitz – five days after Halya would be leaving, as it turned out. So Halya and I had to talk to them right away, and tell them I was going to take the money I’d saved and follow her to Canada.”
Halya and I sat on the bench on one side of the table, my parents on the other.
“Taras, think. You’ll lose your language, your people,” my mother, Daria, said.
“Your country,” Batko said.
“I don’t need those things.” I can hardly believe I said that. I was younger then.
“Stay, my son.” Mykola nodded toward the portrait of the great poet. “Help to build Ukraïna.”
“Don’t take my grandchildren from me.” Tears slipped down my mother’s face.
Halya cried silently. She knew that after I was born, my mother couldn’t have any more children. She also knew what it was to be an only child.
“Mama, I have to leave.” I held her close, kissed her cheek. “I love Halya, just like you and Batko love each other. And if I stay, I’ll have to go into the army.”
She looked scared, but she tried to brush it away. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ll do your service, as your father did, and then go on with your life.”
My father looked worried. He’d been going over some recent articles in the newspapers that came to the reading room.
“There was no war when I did my service,” he said.
“And there won’t be now. The Austrians don’t want war. What would it get them?” Mama thought this was a good point, and in some ways it was, but Batko wasn’t done.
“They’ve avoided war for a long time,” Batko said. “A long time full of grievances, large and small. Alliances made and broken. But now? I’m afraid.”
I was surprised to hear him say it. If he admitted this, how could he ask me to stay?
In a moment, Mama was ready for me to travel halfway across the world. But how? There was no time. I had no papers, no steamship ticket.
Somehow this doesn’t cheer Taras’s listeners up. They do want to know the rest, sometime, but for now it seems they’ve had enough of the story.
So maybe it’s a good place to stop for a while. Later, they’ll have time to wonder, How did he get away?
CHAPTER 9
Kobzar
December, 1915
In the forest, trees crack in the cold, pierced to the heartwood. It reminds Taras of gunshots. Today it’s too cold to work and the prisoners are allowed to stay in the bunkhouse, except that a party goes out every hour to cut firewood. The stoves have to be fed constantly, and still frost lines the walls and coats the windows in heavy lace. Taras sits with his friends: Ihor the Mountain Man, Tymko the Socialist, Myro the Professor and Yuriy the Farmer. Their card game has come to a halt because Taras can’t choose a card. After a few minutes he realizes the others are waiting for him to play. Nobody had the heart to yell at him. He’s been staring at his hands, chapped and cracked and stiff from clenching an axe handle. He’s never had a landowner’s soft hands, but he’s never seen anything like this either.
Myro passes around a box of caramels from the canteen. For a while everyone sucks on the gooey candy.
“God, what was that slop they gave us for supper?” Yuriy says, his face a mask of gloom.
“Don’t ask,” Myro says.
“Be glad you don’t know.” Tymko flicks his cards at Taras. “Play.”
Startled, Taras pulls a card from his hand without looking and sets it on the table. Tymko gives him a disgusted look.
“The really pathetic thing,” Myro says, “the thing I can’t believe? I wanted more.”
Private Barkley, who guards prisoners from another bunkhouse, strides in, followed at a distance by Andrews and Bullard. He grips his rifle with clenched fingers, and stares at Taras’s table. Especially at Tymko, whom the guards see as a known agitator. He must surely be planning something. Escape. Sabotage. Spying, although Barkley couldn’t say on what.
Tymko waggles his eyebrows at him and Taras has to choke back a laugh.
Barkley tells anyone who’ll listen that he wanted to be sent to fight in France. His brother’s there, while he has to sit home guarding enemy aliens, losing his chance to be a hero. He walks with a limp, the result, Taras heard Andrews say, of childhood tuberculosis that went to his bones. It’s amazing how the guy manages to both limp and swagger at the same time.
Barkley has hair and eyebrows so blonde they look white, and pale eyes like the shadows on ice. His skin is almost as pale as a field of snow. His red lips are the only colour he has about him and Taras finds it unnatural in such a pale man. Of course, if Barkley were someone you could like, he’d never give it a thought. But he isn’t, if only because he came up with the stupid idea of sudden bunkhouse inspections. Who knows, he must have thought, what a hundred exhausted men will get up to at night? Sabotage is only one possibility.
Taras has in fact considered burning down the bunkhouse, but doesn’t want to find out where they’d end up after that. Anyway, you couldn’t do it at night, because they’re locked in. You’d have to get something smouldering before the morning’s work started. It doesn’t seem worth the trouble.
Barkley also boasts that he’ll sniff out illicit stills and keep an eye on men spewing dangerous ideas. Thinking subversive thoughts. It’s a lot of work watching a man think and guessing what’s in his head, but apparently nothing’s too much for Barkley. Including bending over to look under bunks.
“If only we had some stills,” Ihor says sadly.
Myro winks. “We do have a few subversive ideas.”
“Yeah – decent food,” Yuriy mutters.
“Getting the hell out of here,” Ihor says.
The guards continue up the wide central aisle and stop for a moment at Zmiya’s bunk. Zmiya’s not doing anything, but Barkley gives him a nasty look anyway. After a look like that, who would dare make any trouble?
Now you’re getting somewhere, Taras thinks. Find out what that one’s up to. But no, they’re not interested in crazy people, and they move back toward the stoves. They watch Taras and his friends play a card game with no beginning or end, and no one keeping score.
Again Barkley fastens his icy eyes on Tymko, who does his best not to let on the man’s there, and they carry on the game in their own language. “Let’s see, what’ll I play? I wonder what Yuriy’s got. And what’s the professor’s holding back, hoping I’ve got nothing left?”
“It’s t
hese guards I can’t stomach.” Yuriy gazes thoughtfully at his cards, flips one carelessly onto the table.
“What do you expect?” Tymko says. “These are the guys even the army can’t use.” The guards frown, especially Barkley. They don’t understand the words, but they do recognize the sound of sarcasm.
Myro nods. “Makes the Austrians look like princes.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Yuriy says.
“You’re right. That’s going too far.” They laugh.
Barkley moves on, giving Tymko another evil look. The guards head for the door.
“What’s wrong with him?” Yuriy wonders. “He can’t possibly speak Ukrainian.”
“Don’t you see?” Tymko grins. “They know I’m a radical socialist. So now they’ve decided you’re all socialists.” He plays a card. “They see you consorting with me.”
“Oh shit, just our luck,” Yuriy says to Myro. “Now I’m a socialist farmer and you’re a revolutionary professor.” He plays a card.
Myro plays a card and takes the trick. “I’m not a professor.”
“Okay, Myroslav the revolutionary arithmetic teacher.” They all laugh.
“Nothing more dangerous,” Tymko says. “Socialists who can add and subtract.”
They laugh again but the momentum soon fades. Taras throws in his hand and, after a quick look around, the rest follow. Before he was sent here, each man had things he wanted to do. People he cared about. Maybe even that sneaky bastard Zmiya, who’s been watching them all afternoon, had someone. Well, that’s hard to imagine.
Months, maybe years, are being stolen. Who among them can know how many days his life still holds? Or what is happening to parents, sweethearts, children, while they wait in this cavern of chilled, indifferent air? Canada has never seemed so foreign and yet so frighteningly like the old country.
Taras hasn’t taken up his story again. He hasn’t got the heart for it.
“So why do the guards think you’re a radical?”
Taras and Tymko are felling trees but have managed to edge a few steps into the forest, away from the eyes of the guards, especially red-faced Jackie Bullard. They are consorting, as Tymko called it, about politics.
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