“There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.”
-- Joyce Grenfell
Soon after, elephants began appearing mysteriously and anonymously in the Perskanski neighbourhood. Not long after a gulag prisoner would be released, an elephant chalk face would appear on the Perskanski stairwell or an elephant-fronted postcard from the Crimea would arrive, unsigned. And Magda would know Papa was okay, something all the more important now that her mother was desperately trying to distance daughter from father, having divorced him and taking up with some Party twit she thought would protect the two of them and wash away the father’s stain.
Once, Magda had had the good fortune to bump into one of the men who’d known her father in the gulag and asked about his health. It was then she found out he had died. Life expectancy in the gulag was generally less than seven years, the average length of sentence given out by the Soviet courts. If you outlived the term, you were considered to have cheated the State by shirking your duties or taking up more than your fair share of resources. Seven years under gulag conditions were more than enough to be a death sentence. Magda’s father had passed away years ago, long enough that the elephants should have stopped coming. But they hadn’t. On his deathbed, the men in the barracks had promised him to keep the custom going. Every time one of them got out or had a message get through to a relative, an elephant was sent to a little girl, a teen, a grown woman, all so that she wouldn’t worry about her Dad. He was that much respected. That much loved.
That was why Magda wouldn’t give up her elephants.
Chapter one: Genesis. God was so lonely, he created stories. He was still lonely, so he created humans to tell them.
“What's your story?” Magda demanded, looking around at the washed-out colour of Snow’s walls. Where others might have seen blah, she saw walls the colour of sturgeon grilled over a wood stove.
“What’s hurt you so badly you think you need to be alone? Here, I’ll start. My father was a quarter Ukrainian.”
“Yeah? Mine was half drunk.”
Snowden Nastiuk didn’t have a history, just a geographic location. It was his way of giving himself a past, since he sure as hell couldn’t imagine having a future. He had grown up thirty kilometres from Buffalo Jump and forty miles from good-looking, alone with his father on a ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills, dominated by his opinionated Dad’s predilections, preconceptions and prejudices. Snow’s father had been born in 1937 and began drinking shortly thereafter. He died in 1987, when it is believed he stopped. In between, he sired Snow, drove a wife to suicide and ranched.
“Your father has passed?” Magda asked. “Mine, too. I am sorry.”
“Passed? Hell, no! He was a full-on fucking failure. He sure as hell failed in raising me. I’m not sorry.”
“God you’re selfish,” Magda declaimed. “You can’t be like everyone else. No, your suffering and failure have to be something special, unique. Someday, you’ll have to face that your failures are no more special than anyone else’s.”
“We’ll see,” Snow said. “What would you know? He was my father.”
“It's better to have pain from someone who loves you than from a stranger,” said Magda, with all the logic of a true Slav. The possibility of no pain at all never seemed to cross her mind. You see, if there was one thing Magda had learned in the gulag, it was that the world doesn’t run on logic. It runs on the seven deadly sins. The sum of life was getting food into your belly. Everything else was pure luxury.
It wasn’t that Snow had had a bad relationship with his father. It was that they had had no relationship at all. As far as his dad was concerned, words were like window curtains, decorative screens to keep the neighbours out. On the ranch, they never had much use for any of them: curtains or neighbours or words. Snowden Nastiuk, he had been christened. Snowden was his mother’s maiden name, the son receiving the name to honour the mother, the only time his father had ever shown such an inclination. Nastiuk was his father’s family name. Nastiuk was a Ukrainian name, so Snow and Magda had something in common after all.
Snow’s father was nasty, rude and abrupt, with little time for anything that didn’t have four hooves or a twist-off top, which left his son on his own. After Snow’s mother decided to celebrate the arrival of Spring by walking down to Lee’s Creek and drowning her sorrows in the mountain run-off, Nasty Senior dealt with her death the same way he handled all of life: he ignored it. He made sure his son was fed and clothed, but that was about it. The rest of Snow’s upbringing, he washed his hands of.
Snow had only vague childhood memories of his mother before she died looking for the exit sign at the bottom of Lee’s Creek. How she’d return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a basket of eggs and a bucket of frothy milk hanging from each arm. Snow would sit around the snug cabin watching her bake bread, put down preserves, roll out dough for the perogies. No matter how busy she was, she always took time to share stories with him. Like the ones of Grandpa growing up in the Dust Bowl. Grandpa claimed during the Dirty Thirties, his folks would throw a gopher in the air and if it dug a burrow before it hit the ground, they would know it was too dusty to send the kids to school that day. Or of the baseball player rounding second base who ended up lost for three days and was finally found four miles out of town.
The ranch was home -- no, the universe -- to him. Snow learned more there than he ever could have at any school. He learned practical economics. He learned how to get along with adults. He learned how to be alone. About Life and Death. About sex and how babies got made. Most important was what he learned from watching his father. Work was what men did. Not whining or screwing around or feeling sorry for themselves. Work. A man was someone who worked hard, shut his mouth and bent over and took all that God could give him. And if it hurt, so what? That was what God invented booze for.
Other than the occasional rancher or Hutterite who dropped by, there was no one to tell Snow what was going on outside. Only afterward, after he started working overseas and his jobs had become his National Geographic, teaching him what the larger, outside world was all about, did Snow come to realize just how strange a life it was. How hockey ever reached out and found him there he had no idea. Because, if the mountains had been formed by glaciers scouring the land, hockey -- he knew -- had been invented by God. That – hockey – was what had kept him sane. That and some other thing. Some other one.
“You like hockey?” Magda asked.
Snow stood up and the bones in his backbone cracked like dominoes being slapped on the table. “No,” he answered. “I used to like hockey. It’s kind of like sex before marriage. It used to be fun. Now, it’s just one more damn thing to take your pants off for.”
“What else do you think is too much trouble to take your pants off for? I mean besides sex and hockey?”
Snow shrugged. “Pretty much everything,” he admitted. He reached into his pocket and slathered on a layer of Chap Stick to keep his lips moist. Magda watched him with interest. Vanilla with a hint of black cherry and some lanolin. There was something better than pork lard to be found here.
“What are these?” she asked, tugging at the box of Coffee Crisp bars Snow kept under his cot. “Do you mind?”
Snow sneezed from the dust rising up from the box. “Why not.”
Magda leaned down and helped herself to one of the golden wrappers. It was the start of a lifelong relationship. The confection proved to become a very popular item at the deficit exchange club. In future, Magda would have Snow order them for her by the carton.
“Quick! What was the last thing you were thinking about after you sneezed?” Magda demanded.
“What?”
“Before you sneezed. What were you thinking about?
“Why?”
“It is a sign from your guardian angel. At the moment you sneeze, you have to pay attention to what you were thinking about. Do it, and the thought will come true.”
“Really?
I was thinking you were just about to leave. Now, make it come true.”
Snow had lied. What he had been thinking was that he didn’t mind having Magda here to talk to at all.
Some people learn from books, some listen to their mothers and some are just fucking born geniuses (genii?). Some learn from their mistakes. Snow fell into none of the above categories. He had to leave the ranch before he learned there was more to life than heifers, mosquitoes, country music and fried bologna.
Or hockey.
Ask any American and they can tell you exactly where they were on November 22, 1963 at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time. That, of course, is when President Kennedy was assassinated. For Canadians, the equivalent day is September 28, 1972, the day the Canadian hockey dream almost died. Far more than Confederation in 1867, the defining date of when Canada came together as a country is 1972.
That Canada, the birthplace of hockey, was the best in the world at the game was taken as a given not only on the ranch but throughout the country, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had won the last nine World Hockey Championships. There was always the excuse that Canada couldn’t use its best players because they were professionals and not eligible for international competition. Then, in 1972, at the height of the Cold War, the two countries agreed to play an eight-game series to decide who was the best once and for all. The Soviets were not expected to give the Canadians any kind of challenge; Canada expected to win eight games to zero. And yet, after five games, the Canadian record was 1-3-1, with only three games left, all on Soviet ice. The Canadians would have to sweep the next three games to win the series, something that now seemed impossible. But that’s exactly what they did.
Any Canadian who is old enough can tell you exactly what he or she was doing on that date when Paul Henderson scored the winning 6-5 goal at 19:26 of the final period of the eighth game, just thirty four seconds from defeat. In retrospect, the win seemed divine. Henderson wasn’t even supposed to be on the ice. Never more than a journeyman player, once again sitting on the bench as a reserve, he suddenly stood up and, without the coach’s permission, waved star forward Peter Mahovlich off the ice. Later, he would explain that he just somehow knew that he was supposed to score the winning goal. Sitting in his basement thirty miles from Buffalo Jump, the young Snow was so excited he jumped up off the chesterfield and punched a hole in the ceiling with his raised fist. His father would make him pay for and repair the damage himself. Snow didn’t care. He spent the rest of the day racing around the rumpus room with a yardstick and a marble pretending he was Henderson with a stick and puck. Snow had found his game, something to replace his mother. Some thing to live for until some one came along.
Once, on the ranch, in the middle of the night, it rained. The next day, Snow skipped his chores for a game of pick-up hockey on the slough with the Hutterite neighbours. Halfway through the game the puck skipped over the snow piled around the edges to simulate boards onto a nearby stream. The other kids joined him and they took the game from the rink to the open fields. They skated for miles, following the game where it took them, no longer confined to the cramped boards of the arena. It was never-ending, almost surreal.
“You know,” Snow told Magda. “I think that was the first time I realized that there was hope after my mother was gone. And now I won’t even take off my pants to play."
“No, that’s not it,” challenged Magda. “There’s something more. Something you’re not telling me.”
Not something. Someone. Snow had spent a lifetime alone, but not necessarily lonely, keeping things close to his chest. It wasn’t easy to start opening up now.
Jillian Barrows lived on a ranch a few range roads over from the Nastiuks. The Nastiuks and the Barrows had arrived in the New World on different parts of the same ship. The Barrows enjoyed the high life above deck, enjoying the balls and social life, their grand piano and personal effects afforded better space below decks than the Nastiuks were given in the cargo hold. While the Barrows were deeded their land by Royal Decree, the Nastiuks worked their way through a series of increasingly speculative and dangerous jobs, until they eventually became homesteaders, pioneers, granted title only after they had managed to clear ten acres of the land and erect a residence. The Barrows first residence was made of mortar and brick, the Nastiuks’ from sod and buffalo skins. One was to the other as Velveeta is to Brie.
Didn’t matter. The two of them – Jillian and Snow -- hit it off, both the only children on large ranches where their parents were too busy to care who their offspring passed the days with. They grew up making tree forts in the willows down by the headwaters of the Oldman, riding to school together on a single mount, branding and calving and castrating during the seasons, giggling and tickling out in the high grass where no one could see them sunbathing topless.
Friends as much as lovers, the two of them filled a gap in the other that needed filling. They shared their first attempts at calf roping, first kiss, first place in the district spelling bee and first dance at the high school graduation prom. Neither ever imagined leaving the foothills, content to ranch and be with each other every day.
Nothing suited the two better than to saddle up a couple of paints with carefully packed saddlebags and head halfway up the Castle range and escape to the sanctuary of each other, cuddled up by the fire under a sleeping bag with a guitar and the smell of wood smoke flavouring the mountain pine, sleeping in late, sharing a sleeping bag, listening to the chipmunks chattering, the whisper of the wind sending pine needles tickling down the side of the tent. At night, the Northern Lights stretched from horizon to horizon, sheets cascading across the sky, Chinook arch off in the distance. It was just like being inside a huge neon tube sending coded messages only the two of them understood. One night, Snow stepped out in the middle of the night to pee, naked as newborn calf, arching a steaming geyser off the ravine into the crisp, fall air. He stopped to throw two chunks of spruce onto the fire, and a crack rent his world in two.
For no reason Snow could possibly discern – he’d puzzled over it for decades now -- a poplar had come crashing down in their clearing, crushing the tent and Jillian sleeping inside. Snow, just inches away, tending to the fire, was left unharmed. There was no wind, no storm, no reason for it to come down.
The fucking tree just fucking fell.
Snow’s next great love became vodka: the first sip, that tingly feeling at the back of his throat, that slow sensation of warmth in his chest, the onset of ease, almost sexual even, as full and rich and sensual and complex as a real relationship, the language and languor of liquor, a splash, a twist, the sounds of a gentle clink of ice in a glass, the hollow pop of the stopper leaving the bottle, until the whole relationship between the two of them grew like kudzu, rising and creeping over him until he couldn't imagine life without it.
“If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?” – (possibly) George Berkely, philosopher
“If a tree falls in the forest, it kills Schrödinger’s cat.” -- Magda Perskanski
After that, Snow tried. He tried to pick up the pieces of his life and go on. He really did. He had gotten as far as living with a woman once. He had not disliked her. She was decent enough company, fulsome, pretty good in the sack. Even had a nice rack that he was kind enough to appreciate. Still, she left him. She’d wanted more of him than he was willing to give. He had been willing to give nothing.
“Your phone is unplugged,” Magda observed. The cord was disconnected and tucked under the handset like a fresh cucumber tendril climbing up a trellis of chicken wire.
Snow noticed the bingle of her earring against her neck, the flash like a spoon calling to trout.
“I know. If I want to phone someone, I plug it in.” The handset was covered with dust. It didn’t look like that happened often.
“What if someone wants to phone you?”
“No problem. They usually give up after a while.”
“Know what? You can live without a telephone. You can’t live w
ithout friends.”
“Wanna bet?”
Snow had told Pig he hadn’t needed a telephone, to give it to someone else. The Camp Boss had informed him he had to have one in his room in case of a work emergency. Obediently, Snow had promptly put it on the desk table – unplugged -- and ignored it, having no desire to talk to people, not old friends, not family, not relatives, certainly not someone canvassing for the Heart Society or someone claiming they could save him money on his phone bills. What Snow wanted was to be left alone. Alone with his pain.
“You need anything?” Pig asked, pushing in through the door without knocking. Speak of the devil, there was that sulphur smell again.
“Yeah, the fucking lock fixed, by the looks of it. You’re the second person to barge in here without an invitation tonight.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the fucking lock,” Pig answered. “Snow just gets in the crack and blocks it open.” That was the Slavic way: deny anything was wrong so you didn’t have to do anything in response. Maybe the problem would just go away by itself.
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