by Grant Buday
Eventually the police arrived. Drunk, distraught, Cyril resisted, had to be restrained, and was hustled out in handcuffs. A cop put his hand on his head and, as if shoving him under water, plunged him into the back of the squad car. He spent the night in jail, was advised to seek counselling, and was back home by noon where he discovered an eviction notice waiting under his door. It was all down on record, all down in a file, right there alongside the weapons charge for having pointed that pistol at those three guys in his cab.
PART FOUR — 1995
In Which Cyril Discovers Fire
ONE
CYRIL DREAMED OF Connie smoking a cigarette in long luxurious puffs that left red lipstick on the filter. Her black bangs hung to her black eyebrows, she wore a black turtleneck sweater, black Levis, black kung fu slippers. At her elbow was a cup of black coffee, the cup white with a black cat stamped on it. They were in a jazz club. She nodded to the mutter and thump of the upright bass and watched the black saxophonist bend his knees and lean back clenching his body as though to inflate the room through the bell of the glittering brass instrument. The storming music collided with the lounging cigarette smoke: the music laughing and the smoke sullen at having been disturbed in its slumber. Sleepy people bobbed their heads. Cups and cigarettes rose and fell with mechanical regularity while the bass player, a big black man with pitted cheeks and a goatee, cursed the white guitarist. “Play something!” he shouted. The guitarist cringed. “Play something!” repeated the bassist. The guitarist sweated and his eyes rolled like a panicked cow. People in the audience laughed. Each table had a candle burning in a red glass bowl making Cyril think of a pagan cave. The guitarist finally burst into a flame that flared then vanished. No one seemed to notice. Connie leaned close and blew smoke into Cyril’s mouth and he inhaled it deep into his chest and then exhaled it back into her waiting lips. She smiled and stood on the table and began to whirl like a dervish. Faster and faster she whirled, creating a wind that caught Cyril up like Dorothy and Toto and landed them outside in an alley. The club door whacked open and the bass player threw a man out. The man flapped off like a pigeon into the night. The bass player glared at Connie and Cyril and said, “Broadway Credit Clothiers—fifty short paces west of Main,” then went back inside.
He woke to light outlining the curtains like a rectangular halo. The clock read 5:01 AM. Rolling onto his stomach he shoved his face into his pillow and tried going back to sleep. He wanted to rejoin the dream but it had disappeared downstream into the darkness like a raft on a river. But there was another dream. This one involved his mother and a different raft: a ghoul extending a gnarly hand for a fare to transport Cyril’s mother to the far shore where fires burned and people writhed and chains snaked in the smouldering dirt.
The next time he woke he put his hands to his face and groaned and sat up. Today was his mother’s funeral. He dressed slowly in the same clothes he’d worn to Paul’s funeral. That had been a warm spring day as well. It occurred to him that his dad had died in the spring, and he wondered if this was some characteristic of his family to die when the days were getting longer and the grass and the flowers and the trees and the birds were all returning to life.
Father Shevchenko delivered his eulogy. “Our dear friend Helen’s life was a testament to faith and fortitude. Her early years were often an ordeal, but she never stopped believing . . .”
Cyril stared at his feet. His shoes were shiny and his toes pinched, and he was wondering just what his mother had believed in. For all her Virgins and candles it was certainly no God Shevchenko would approve of, more like some grim trickster with bells on his toes and a slippery glint in his eye. Cyril raised his face and looked up into the canopy of maple leaves. They glowed as translucent as a mosaic of tinted glass. He shifted his head and stared straight into the sun. When he shut his eyes yellow spots lingered and he thought of his father and kept his eyes shut until the spots faded. When he opened them he blinked in confusion, for something was up there—a charcoal coloured cat lying full length along a branch like some sort of panther, and it was staring straight at Cyril as though studying him. For a moment he expected it to start talking, to stand up on its hind legs and do a bit of soft-shoe with a cane and top hat, a Cheshire cat with a message for him. He flashed on the notion that it was a message from his mother, her spirit already having reincarnated, yet his mother had hated cats, and it seemed a most unlikely form for her to take.
He was diverted by the casket being lowered into the hole. Then Gilbert’s hand settled on his shoulder while with his other hand he presented the shovel which had a black ribbon tied around the shaft and a brightly polished blade. Cyril stabbed the blade into the heap of soil and poured it slowly, as though fearful of disturbing her, onto the casket battering the roses. The earthy smell of the grave was spiced by the scent of sap and grass. Steve took the shovel and did the same, then it was Chuckie’s turn. Cyril peered up into the tree again but saw only leaves.
Later, he walked between the gravestones and across the lane and entered the backyard. For her sake he’d done his best to keep up the garden and now the roses and hydrangeas were in bloom, the rhubarb was spreading vast primordial leaves, and the grass was up to his ankles. He felt besieged. As for the root vegetables, the beets and turnips and parsnips and cabbage, they were on their own.
He entered the slammed-door silence of the kitchen. His mother hadn’t acknowledged much less admitted that she was dying. There had been no final words, no noble last days, no truths passed on or secrets unveiled, instead she’d devoted her remaining strength to maintaining a facade of normalcy. She was bedridden, sure, but in control, as if it was her choice to lie there all morning and afternoon and evening like a lady of leisure, and if Cyril ever dared look troubled or tearful her eyes silently commanded him to control himself; after all, wasn’t she? He recalled a poem about a tiger that Connie used to recite, how the animal paced its cage yet didn’t turn because of the bars but because that was when and where it decided to turn, and he envied the animal—and his mother—their unbreakable spirits.
Staring out the kitchen window he watched the maples brood over the graves. Was the cat still up there? He got the opera glasses his mother used to watch funerals. He’d bought them for her at the St. Vincent de Paul as a joke, one that to his surprise and relief she liked. In fact it became an ongoing bit of comedy, a rare thing for them to share, her assuming a haughty pose and gazing upon the funerals like Madame La de Dah. He studied the tree but saw no cat. There were now three Andrachuks in the cemetery: his father, Paul, and now his mother, their graves side by side.
He went into the living room, poured himself a Ballantyne’s and found himself looking at his mother’s Virgin Marys. There were all kinds, plastic, metal, wood, glass, wax, stone, the one he’d brought back from Mexico which was surrounded by a halo of sea shells, and others that had haloes of crinkled plastic. He recalled Typhoon Freda back in 1962 when the power went out and the storm sent garbage cans banging down the street and the Madonnas had seemed to come alive, gleaming serenely in the writhing candlelight while the house shook and his mother prayed.
The scotch went down with a welcome burn. He refilled his glass. Steve had put the obituary in the paper, but Cyril hadn’t read it, he never read obituaries, regarding it as slightly obscene and certainly bad luck. Gilbert believed the opposite, savouring obituaries, examining the deceased’s picture, seeking out the cause of death, delighting in the maudlin phrasing as though it was immortal prose, laughing at Cyril’s squeamishness after having grown up next to a death yard. Gilbert had even suggested Cyril do a series of drawings, maybe turn it into a coffee table book, of graves and obituaries, insisting that it would become a cult classic and sell millions. Decanting the whisky slowly into his mouth, Cyril let it seethe over his tongue.
Returning to the kitchen he looked out the back recalling the time just after the Cuban Missile Crisis that he came home from school to find a backhoe digging a massive hole in th
eir yard. The machine operator saw Cyril’s expression and jerked his thumb indicating Cyril’s mother watching from the window. Cyril went up the steps and into the kitchen and demanded to know what was going on? She said don’t be a simpleton, it’s a bomb shelter. Apparently it didn’t matter that the Soviets had withdrawn their missiles, she believed what she believed, and began explaining in a quiet tone, as if Cyril was still a child and not to be alarmed, that it was a reasonable precaution—that one could never be too cautious—because the world had gone mad before and madness was like bacteria that lived on all around them, in the soil, in the air, in their very bodies, and could erupt at any moment. She put her hand on his as she spoke and her eyes pleaded with him to believe and Cyril had nodded and said quietly, soothingly, “Okay mama, okay.”
Paul had not been as indulgent. When he dropped by that evening and nearly fell in the pit he was angry. He and his mother argued and Cyril could see Paul was not only frustrated by her paranoia but humiliated by what the neighbours must be thinking. Paul took her face between his palms and forced her to look into his eyes. “We’re safe,” he told her, and thumbed the tears from her face. The next day he paid the backhoe driver to refill the hole.
For the wake Steve had prepared roast pork with apple sauce, duck with an orange glaze, garlic meatballs, an assortment of veal, pork, and liver sausage, potato dumplings, cabbage rolls, sausage rolls, poppyseed cake, walnut cake. An impressive achievement in such a small kitchen. Steve and Marlene had recently made the sudden and unexplained move of selling their five-bedroom house and downsizing into a two-bedroom apartment, an act that neither Cyril or his mother had understood.
Yet she would have certainly approved of all the meat on the table dominating the small dining room. There could never be enough meat. In her mind animals looked like butcher’s posters, sectioned into quarters and shanks and briskets. Side bacon, back bacon, all the varieties of sausage, all the organs, liver, kidney, heart, brain, tongue, tripe. Along with beef, pork, lamb, chicken, fish, duck, goose, squab, she was happy to eat goat and horse, all in compensation for the starvation years of the 1930s and 1940s.
In the living room stood a glass table with photos of Cyril’s mother, father, and Paul. There was also one of the sketches Cyril had done of Paul on his deathbed, framed in mock brass. He couldn’t recall having seen it on display before, not that he was often invited to Steve’s.
Bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white in the other, Steve draped an arm around Cyril’s shoulders.
“I’m grateful to have known her.” Gazing at Cyril with earnest drunk eyes, he added, “I only wish I knew my grandfather, too. Tell me about him.”
It had been forty years since he’d died and Cyril didn’t know what to say, more importantly he didn’t know what he wanted to say, or what he was willing to share: that his father had nightmares, that he was haunted, that he was never happier than when wearing his welding mask and leaning over his bench with that acetylene torch? So many memories of his father were fading. Had Paul never told Steve anything? “He liked Laurel and Hardy,” said Cyril. “And Chaplin. And Buster Keaton. All those old guys.”
Hearing those names drew Father Shevchenko into the conversation. “Chaplin. The Great Dictator. Genius. And brave.” Shevchenko smelled heavily of camphor and vodka. His long grey beard made Cyril think of a tangled root system. “Hitler wanted his head.”
Steve’s heavy-lidded eyes considered the priest, then he shocked both Shevchenko and Cyril with a story about the war. “Grandma told me there’d been rumours of Cossack regiments going over to the Germans. Grandpa considered defecting. She said what if they were defeated? He’d be shot as a traitor and then what about her and dad? In the end it didn’t matter because he was captured and put in a camp. Then when the Krauts overran them she and hundreds of women got transported into Germany. She left dad with a neighbour. Two years in a munitions factory. Munition factories were prime targets for the Allied bombing raids. Why waste good Germans when you can stick a subhuman Slav in there, eh?”
Shevchenko exhaled.
Cyril didn’t breathe at all.
“The manager’s assistant was a woman, Frau Wagner.” He pronounced it Vogner. “She needed a secretary, someone who could type fast and accurate. So grandma said that’s me. Can you do forty words per minute? She said she could do fifty. You believe that? Hadn’t typed in a year. They set her up and said type. She did sixty. That got her off the factory floor and into the office. Heat. Quiet. Flowers in a vase. Coffee, real coffee. She said she hadn’t tasted real coffee in five years.” Steve paused as if choking up. “She wept when she told me that.”
Cyril observed the dramatic touch. Coffee? She never drank coffee, she was a tea drinker.
“Apparently this Frau Wagner was beautiful. But ruined.
She’d lost her husband and her son. One day she couldn’t talk about it and then the next she couldn’t stop. She made up stories. How the boy was living in Argentina. How after the war she would meet him and they would go to the circus, because the boy loved the circus and practised magic tricks, could make cards disappear. Ten months grandma worked for her. Shared her meals, which meant she ate twice what the others did. They hated her for that but didn’t dare touch her. Sometimes grandma even went to her house to work. Place was full of clocks. Grandma remembered that. Clocks. Ticking like hearts. A house full of hearts. Those were her words. A house full of hearts. When the Red Army liberated them Frau Wagner was taken away and shot.”
Cyril nodded familiarly to Steve, meaning he knew the story well. In fact he was scalded. Why had she never told him? If she’d kept it from everyone he could understand, but to tell Steve?
“Incredible,” said Shevchenko, eyes brimming.
Steve nodded deeply. Then turned abruptly to Cyril. “Oh yes” he said, as if just remembering. “About the will. Grandma named me executor.” He shrugged implying that it only made sense.
“It’s what I do. Pop by the office tomorrow. Say ten. We’ll sort it out. Pretty straightforward.” And with that Steve slopped more wine into Cyril’s glass and, discovering that the bottle was now empty and he was lapsing in his hostly duties, went off to find another.
Father Shevchenko turned his considerable attention upon Cyril and asked how he was bearing up.
Cyril performed a long exhalation bespeaking his pain.
Shevchenko nodded quickly. He sipped his drink and smoothed his beard. “Your mother told me you’re a bit of an artist.”
He became evasive. “Is that what she said?”
“It’s God’s gift.”
Cyril made vague noises and wondered what she meant by a bit of an artist? Mockery? “I push a pencil around.”
“You owe it to your talent to do more than that.”
He’d read somewhere that a talent was a measure of ancient Roman currency. His mother had never mentioned anything to him about talent, his, hers, Paul’s, anyone’s, God-given or hard-won. Cyril didn’t know the priest well. As a boy he’d thought of priests as unimaginative wizards who performed the same act over and over each Sunday.
Chuckie appeared with a beer in one hand and a slab of poppyseed cake in the other. Shevchenko leaned away as though preparing for an assault, a reaction that Chuckie seemed to enjoy.
“How’s school, Charles?” asked Shevchenko.
“They invited me to leave.”
“Why would they do that?”
Cyril detected beneath the priest’s concern a hint of vindication, a hint of satisfaction at justice being served.
Chuckie was working on his PHD in Political Science. Something to do with Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the one advocating industrial expansion and the other agrarian expansion. Cyril had looked it up. The one time he’d asked about his studies Chuckie, perhaps tired, perhaps disdainful, perhaps simply a goof, had ignored the question and talked about baseball. Cyril hadn’t known whether to be insulted or bemused. Chuckie had been at his doctorate ten years an
d racked up forty thousand dollars in student loan debts and now worked part-time in the post office. Cyril could not deny that Chuckie had genuinely liked his grandmother, or at least found her an interesting source of information. He was always in the kitchen cross examining her about Ukraine, though never failed to end those sessions without borrowing money. In deference to the occasion, Chuckie’s thinning blond hair, usually in a ponytail, was combed and his goatee trimmed.
“It’s the law of the excluded middle,” Chuckie explained to Shevchenko. “Black–white.
Is–isn’t. In–out. I, it would seem, am out.” Chuckie smiled exposing a thick black grouting of poppy seeds between his teeth. He’d inherited Della’s teeth, long and white, and eyes that protruded.
“I don’t follow.”
“I don’t follow either. That’s the problem.
Nonconformity. By way of punishment they would fain deny me access to the means of doctoral production.” Chuckie’s grin widened.
“The PHD trap.”
“It’s a Mexican standoff. I owe them money and they owe me a doctorate.”
“So you’ve finished your thesis?”
