“The officers, from the Commandant down to the non-coms, have a true conception of the meaning of the word hospitality, which they dispense with lavish hands, and a dinner in the officers’ mess tent leaves nothing to be desired by the most fastidious epicurean.
“To reach the limit of enjoyment the night should be spent at the camp, if one is fortunate enough to receive an invitation from the officers. The evening can be most pleasantly spent in watching the fantastic shadows which play over the heights of Castle Mountain.” He skips ahead again. “And to be awakened in the morning and introduced to a plate of hot buttered toast and a huge cup of steaming coffee with the request or command to partake of it before arising is the acme of hospitality. A substantial breakfast in the officers’ mess, followed by the run to Banff in the fresh, cool air of the morning, makes one think that this old world is a mighty pleasant place to live in.”
They look at their shabby clothing, their coarse, reddened hands. Finally Yuriy asks, “What’s an acme?”
“I’d like to introduce this guy to my fist,” Ihor says. “That’s my idea of mountain hospitality.”
“Maybe he could join us in our dining tent,” Yuriy says. “I’ll give him hot buttered toast right up the sraku.”
“Never mind him,” Tymko says. “He’s not even part of the actual ruling class. Just one of its toadies.”
“No,” Myro says, “let’s be honest. He’s an asshole.”
Taras wonders if he should try to escape before the winter snows arrive. One chilly day he grubs roots. They look exactly like all the others although he’s better at digging them now. He’s sweating, but he’s also cold, with only a button-front sweater over his shirt and pants.
He blows on his bare hands to warm them, looks to the mountain side of the road. Mike Pendziwiater, a man he knows only to say hello to, walks slowly, looking neither right nor left, into the trees! Slowly, that’s the key. As Ihor says, if you want to escape, don’t look like you’re trying to. Taras goes back to digging. He feels a little warmer, or so it seems.
Mike is missed when they return to camp. Taras tries not to laugh at how outraged the guards look about this latest example of ingratitude. A search party gets ready to go out, but a man hails the soldiers at the sentry post. It’s Mike, reporting in. Men lined up at the mess tent rush over to him. Guards yell. Mike doesn’t say anything. Taras watches the guards consider putting Mike in the hoosegow or denying him supper, but after they’ve hollered at him for a while they let him join the others for supper. Mike still doesn’t say a word.
Six days later, he walks out again. This time the guards are ready. Bullets fly all around him, but Mike keeps going, untouched, and disappears into the trees. Again the guards can’t find him. Again he walks back to camp in time for supper. They send him to the guardhouse overnight.
“Is he crazy?” Tymko rails. “The man was free!”
“I hear they might send him to an insane asylum,” Yuriy says.
“Then he wouldn’t have to work outside,” Ihor says. “They probably have better food too. Maybe that was his plan.”
Plan? Taras thinks. The most likely outcome would be getting shot by the guards.
“Anyway, what’s insane about wanting out of this place?” Ihor says, as they walk back to their tent. “Maybe he just needed a long walk in the forest.”
As he speaks of forest, Ihor’s eyes soften and he’s back home, warm in a sheepskin coat, a curved pipe clenched between his teeth.
After supper he and Taras stop to smoke, looking up at Castle in the fading light. Sometimes Ihor will stare at it for half an hour. Coming from mountains more rounded and worn, he strives to understand the Rockies. His conclusion pains him.
“I can’t find this mountain’s spirit.”
That evening, Yuriy sits on his pallet, holding a letter from his wife Nadia, his mind far away, tears in his eyes. Taras approaches quietly so as not to startle him and pats his shoulder, knowing that it doesn’t help. Or maybe it does, but not enough.
Next morning it’s very cold. Yuriy puts on his woollen pants under his serge overalls and his outdoor sweater over his shirt. Looks like a good idea, Taras thinks, and does the same. At breakfast, he misses Yuriy for a moment, then sees him, quick as a weasel, duck out of the cooking area, where a guy he knows works, pockets bulging. Later, on the march to the road bed, he watches Yuriy without seeming to and so notices the moment when Yuriy looks calmly around him, then drifts slightly off course until he’s in the forest. He doesn’t run, he lies on his belly until the work gang passes. Taras gazes straight ahead.
Yuriy is missed at lunch break. The guards look suspiciously at Taras. He manages to look as puzzled as the rest of them really are. Andrews and Bullard are sent to look for Yuriy, but have no idea where to start. With them gone, there aren’t enough guards to supervise the work gang and they’re marched back to camp.
Two weeks pass and Yuriy hasn’t been caught. Two and a half weeks. The men in the tent are surprised Yuriy didn’t tell them what he was planning. Finally Taras tells Tymko, Ihor and Myroslav about the day Yuriy calmly walked away on the road to the work site.
The next evening they hear rough voices outside the tent and Yuriy staggers in after being shoved by a guard. For a moment no one speaks. Then Tymko gives him a huge hug.
“It’s our Yuriy back!” he says. “Our favourite son of the soil! Where in hell have you been?” He looks Yuriy over, sees rounded cheeks and a look of well-fed contentment. Definitely not the Yuriy they last saw.
Yuriy grins. “If that Mike guy could do it twice, I figured I could do it once. I went to see my wife.”
“And how is Nadia?” Myro says.
“Nadia’s beautiful. The harvest is beautiful. Thirty bushels to the acre.”
“Was she glad to see you?” Tymko asks, waggling his eyebrows.
“Very glad.” Yuriy grins.
“Did you walk the whole way?” Taras asks.
“Walked, got rides with farmers. Sometimes they took me home for a meal. I even stopped once and worked on a threshing crew so I could buy more food.”
“Did you walk back too?” Myro asks.
“No need. My neighbour – a good man, not the one who got me sent here – lent me some money until Nadia can sell the crop. I took the train back. Got off at the Castle siding and walked in.”
“Why’d you come back?” Tymko asks. “You must be as crazy as that other guy.”
“I didn’t want to get Nadia and her mother in trouble. Or give that other bugger a chance to run to the police again. I did what I had to. Now I’m back. Also, I couldn’t desert all you guys. You’d be lost without me.”
“That’s true,” Ihor says. “We’d be really short of bullshit.”
“Anyway, I feel like a man again.”
Tymko winks. Yuriy’s got his swagger back.
“They’re not going to punish me. I guess coming back cancels out leaving.”
The last week in September Taras’s letter to Halya is returned. Someone has scrawled on it “No longer a student here.” No longer. So she was there. Now she could be anywhere. Is she married? Does she still think of him? He can’t answer those questions. A crumb of hope has kept him going, but now it’s gone, or nearly gone. Snow covers everything and temperatures have dropped below freezing; the camp is truly a white city. Soon they’ll go back to Banff for another winter of aching cold, poor food and clothing and lost freedom. Who said serfdom was abolished?
CHAPTER 29
Ways of leaving
Thanksgiving is a holiday, with a not bad meal. But at night the temperature falls to ten below. Taras’s sweater is worn thin. They all need winter clothing but no one can say when it will come. That’s the thing about this place. No way to learn anything about your own imprisonment. When it might end. What your crime was.
The last day of October heavy snow falls. The commandant’s tent is given to the prisoners for a dining tent. The prisoners’ dining tent, which has a
stove, is turned into sleeping quarters. Two of the smaller tents are still needed to accommodate all the men, and small stoves are found for each of them. One of them is the commandant’s stove, a guard tells Taras and Yuriy.
“The commandant’s own stove,” he says in wonder. He must expect joy and gratitude. Maybe tears. That’s the acme of hospitality, Taras doesn’t say.
He and his friends end up in the former dining tent. Oleksa and Kyrylo and their group are there too, still playing cards and denouncing the government.
They find that having a stove doesn’t quite make up for their boots and socks falling apart. But in the evening, lying with their feet toward it, it’s an improvement.
They’ll move to Banff in another week. In a couple of days they’ll start dismantling the camp. Already it gives off a faint odour of abandonment. By the last night only the tents are left to strike. For next year, no doubt. And the year after that? Taras can’t let himself think about it.
A week into November, the prisoners huddle in the tent after supper. In one corner, Oleksa and Kyrylo and Toma play cards in the dying light. The deck is grubbier than ever.
“They can’t keep us here forever,” Kyrylo says, chewing on his droopy moustache.
Oleksa snorts, continues arranging his cards. His red-brown moustache seems to glow in the lamplight. As usual, there’s the impression that it doesn’t match his white-flecked dark hair. He spits a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt.
“No, really, people will start to question this. You’ll see.”
“Maybe when the road to Laggan is finished.” Oleksa throws a card into the middle of their circle and takes the trick.
Kyrylo picks up the filthy cards and shuffles.
Taras becomes aware of a sound like a giant breathing. Maybe it’s Castle Mountain, finally showing its spirit. Seconds later he smells smoke.
Outside someone shouts. “Christ! It’s the hoosegow!”
“Fire! Fire!”
The noise grows to a roar as Taras and his friends run to the tent door, sure the fire is upon them. They come back when they see that the hoosegow sits far enough outside the fence to be no danger to the camp.
Taras feels a bit of warmth in his belly. For once a hand goes to the prisoners.
In the tent Oleksa and his friends, looking bored to death, play one more trick. Then Oleksa looks at Kyrylo and nods. They throw down their cards and go out to look, along with their buddies. Taras and his friends follow.
The smoke thickens and the fire roars. Outside the fence guards run around the fire, blankets flapping, but after a while they just watch. There’s not a lot left to burn and snow cover will contain the fire.
Internees stand along the fence. Already the jail has lost the look of a building. Logs wrapped in fire sag at new angles. A plume of smoke rises high overhead and sparks spit at the guards. It must be warm by the fire.
Thank God there was no one in the hoosegow.
At last the roaring fades and the fire dies to glowing stumps. Prisoners drift to their tents. Leaving sentries to watch overnight, guards straggle back to their tents, as the commandant slips out of the compound for a look.
“Son of a bitch burned real hot. Like a big goddamn bonfire.”
“Good way to say goodbye to this stinking place.”
“Goddamn stinking place.”
“God, I need a drink.”
The guards probably have whiskey. Whiskey would be nice now. Or potato wine.
Taras and his friends go back to the tent. The cards are still on the ground. Oleksa and his friends haven’t come back. Their blankets are gone. Taras remembers Oleksa nodding to Kyrylo.
“What in hell?” Yuriy says. “Nobody asked us.”
“Didn’t trust us,” Ihor says.
“Maybe they thought we weren’t ready to go,” Tymko says.
“And maybe they’re right,” Yuriy says. “I’m not, anyway.”
“Me either.” Taras has known this for a long time.
“If I ever try to escape,” Ihor says, “I don’t want it to be this cold.”
This would be a good time to be asleep. To have missed the whole thing.
Next day the guards stop by the tent and discover men are missing. They get nothing out of Taras and his friends, who are apparently not even awake. Once awake, they swear they got bored watching the fire and came back to sleep. The guards tear across the camp like demented squirrels, looking for the captain in charge. They’ll have to go out and search, but there really aren’t enough of them and the escapees have about a ten-hour start.
The hoosegow smoulders as the prisoners take down the tents. Taras still feels pleased. Someone’s managed to strike back. He likes the fire even if it happened because of someone’s carelessness and the escaping men only took advantage of the situation.
No, it had to be Oleksa and the others. They were waiting for it. Since the prisoners have been eating in the commandant’s tent, they’ve been outside the fence in the evenings, with more chances to hide and start a fire. More stoves with live coals a man might conceal somehow. Oleksa knew as he played that last card game that it was just a matter of time until he heard the shouting and the flames.
That afternoon they make the short train ride to Banff and are marched to the Cave and Basin camp. On the way through town Taras picks up a Crag and Canyon lying in the road. He and Tymko take turns looking at it as they walk. In an article about the “diminished number” of internees, he learns that the town of Banff no longer likes having the camp on its doorstep. Apparently the town no longer “derives any pecuniary benefit from the interns.” Tymko reminds him that everything seems to come down to profit. The story says that “the great majority of our citizens are of the opinion that the scenic outlook is not vastly improved by the presence of the slouching, bovine-faced foreigners.”
Taras is surprised such words still hurt. “You’d think we asked to come here.”
“Pah! Never mind,” Tymko says. “They think they’re being sarcastic, but I could be way more sarcastic than that. They’re just a bunch of spoiled kids trying to be clever.”
This winter Taras and his friends find themselves in a different bunkhouse. Most of the men are different than the ones from last winter, and there’s one big change for the better. Zmiya won’t be with them, watching Taras and his friends. Realizing this, Taras finds himself taking a deep breath, feels his shoulders relaxing.
Clearing snow off the Banff streets a week later, Tymko finds another newspaper someone dropped. It says the “alien curs” have been making catcalls at local women while being marched through the town. The commandant must take “strenuous measures,” it says, “otherwise some muscular Canadian will wade into the gang of foul-mouthed, leering Austrians and, armed with a club or some other persuasive weapon, teach the brutes a lesson they will not soon forget.”
Even Tymko has little to say. They decide not to show the story to anyone else.
“Why do they hate us?” Taras asks.
“Why does one people ever hate another?” For the first time since Taras has known him, Tymko shows no interest in analysis.
Just before Christmas, Myro grabs a copy of the Crag and Canyon that a guard left in the canteen. A General Cruikshank has recently inspected the camp and some prisoners brought grievances to him. “A number of the interns took advantage of the occasion to complain to the general that the guards were ungentle in handling the prisoners,” the newspaper says, and adds, “the majority of the foreign scum should be ‘gentled’ with a pick-axe handle.” Taras begins to wonder if people are leaving newspapers around on purpose for them to find.
The first weeks of December are warmer than last year, which is good because winter coats haven’t come. Daytime temperatures are above freezing and water still runs in the Bow. But on Canadian Christmas Eve, it turns much colder. The men are brought back from work early and allowed to visit the canteen after supper.
Ihor stumbles into the bunkhouse that evening, hi
s face a pasty grey. Taras missed him at supper and wondered where he could be. He sits down on his bunk, shaking. Myro wraps a blanket around him and brings him a glass of water, all they have to offer.
Tymko gets the story out of him. He manages only a few words at a time, his body convulsed by dry retching. A Romanian, George Luka Budak, thirty-five years old, was found under his bunk in the guardhouse in the middle of the afternoon. His throat was cut through the larynx and his stomach so badly slashed that his bowels spilled out. For once the guards managed to get a doctor quickly.
Private Bernie Woolf, a Jewish guard who speaks Romanian, was called to see if he could find out what happened. There was blood all over the floor and all over Budak. A straight razor covered in blood lay on the floor. Budak couldn’t talk, but he could nod a little. Woolf was supposed to find out what happened – ask Budak if he’d done it himself. Woolf thought maybe Budak had agreed with this, but he couldn’t be sure the man even knew what he was being asked. Woolf knew that was what the brass wanted to hear, though. He said he thought Budak was probably saying it was suicide. By 4:20, Budak had gone into shock and died. Woolf had fled the building.
He ran into Ihor before supper. He needed to talk to somebody else who spoke Romanian. He told Ihor everything he’d seen. They both threw up in the trees near the bunkhouse. Melted snow in their mouths, swirled the water around and spat. Melted more and swallowed it. They weren’t interested in supper.
Budak hadn’t been in the guardhouse as a punishment, though. He’d been staying there because he was afraid of some of the other prisoners. “I never talked to him.” Ihor says. “Maybe he’d still be alive.”
Taras knew who Budak was, like everybody else. He knew the man was pushed around sometimes. Not by anybody in Taras’s bunkhouse, but sometimes you’d see a sudden movement in a clump of men, or hear a harsh shout. Now the man’s dead.
Blood and Salt Page 29
