The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

“My brother’s five now. He’s got hair just like Tato’s, and he’s so smart he can read the newspaper already—” Bonnie stops speaking, not because she’s run out of things to say, but because Marta has slapped her face, hard enough to make the skin burn and then go numb. Bonnie has never been hit before.

  “Never talk like that to anyone again. That baby’s a secret—he’s not your secret, he’s your mother’s. You keep him in here—.” Marta may be pointing to her heart, but she’s holding up her handbag against her chest and thumping it as if it were her breastbone.

  Bonnie doesn’t cry out, and she doesn’t cry, though her face stings and the whole room is shuddering from the force of that slap—the curtains shake on their rods, even the glass in the picture window shivers. She sits there watching Chucha Marta clutch her scarred black handbag to her chest, and then, summoning all her courage, she puts her hand out to the bag and touches it.

  “Your sister isn’t a secret, Chucha Marta. Tell me her name.”

  For a moment, Bonnie’s afraid that her aunt is going to hit her again, but Marta only grips the handbag tighter before letting it drop to her lap. And then she opens the clasp and plunges into the jumble of things that swim in that dark, sealed sea. She pulls up an ancient peppermint, closes her hand round it, then reluctantly offers it to Bonnie. But the child won’t touch it; she just stands there, waiting. Till Chucha Marta snaps her handbag shut and answers her.

  “Lyalka,” she says, at last.

  Bonnie nods—she knows that word; it means doll. A nickname. Her dead aunt was Chucha Marta’s baby sister, the way Alix is hers. Bonnie’s about to press Chucha Marta about her sister’s real name, her proper name, when Marta speaks again.

  “She had your eyes. Brown, with little gold fish swimming in them. And your hair—just that golden red.”

  Bonnie nods, trying to keep her mouth from falling open. For Chucha Marta’s voice, as she has spoken these words, is the voice of an utter stranger. It isn’t harsh and shrill any more: it’s hoarse, as if the tenderness in it has grown a rough coat of rust.

  “You are too trusting, little one,” Marta whispers in the same hoarse voice. “Someone has to teach you not to trust anyone—not your parents, and not God either.”

  When Sonia comes up from the beach to check on them, she finds Marta crocheting, her back turned to the window overlooking the lake, and Bonnie asleep on the sofa, clutching her blanket high against her face.

  Thick as thieves, Sonia moans to Sasha. Her daughter, her beautiful little Bonnie, who has never made trouble for anybody, the one even Laura loves without reservation, is thick as thieves with Chucha Marta.

  Sasha pours Sonia a glass of ginger ale with a dollop of gin in it. Sonia is too upset to know how strong her drink is; in fact, Sasha observes, Sonia is as upset as she’s ever seen her. It must have to do, she thinks, with the death of Sonia’s mother: Laryssa was the only one who could handle “the harpy,” as Sasha calls Marta, giving the word a Ukrainian flavour, rolling the r’s in a way that usually sets Sonia laughing. But not today.

  “She says she pities me for being married—she goes on and on about how stupid I was to ever give myself away! She says I’ve turned Max into a spoiled child. And the girls—she makes it crystal clear what a rotten mother I’ve been—”

  “Send her over here, Sonechko, and I’ll set her straight. Can you imagine what she’d say if she saw this house, and my kids? Come on, cheer up: you’ve only got her for a week. Thank your stars you’re not Annie. Can you imagine what it’s been like for her, having her mother-in-law move in with them even before they got back from their honeymoon?”

  But Sonia derives no consolation from comparison of her lot with Annie Vesiuk’s. She drinks up her gin and ginger ale and walks foggily back to the cottage, where Darka’s been left in charge while Marta naps. (Sonia hadn’t been able to tell Sasha what Marta’s judgment on Darka had been.) At the steps leading up to the screened porch—the rotting steps Max has been promising all summer to fix—she stops, listens for any noise of battle inside, and sits down to puzzle out what’s happening. It’s not that Marta’s showing any sign of affection towards Bonnie: it’s just a sense Sonia has of a thickening of the air between them, of something holding them together like the loops of thread in Marta’s crochet work, the webs she spins like the spider she is. And that’s what makes Sonia so uneasy—not the thought of Bonnie as a fly caught in Marta’s web, but of Marta turning the child into another, smaller spider, infected with Marta’s own bitterness.

  She sits with her head in her hands, resisting as long as she can, and then resigning herself, at last, to Bonnie’s defection. If it were Laura instead of Bonnie, she would put a stop to it, even if it meant bloodshed—and Marta is the kind of person who makes you think blood. Laura, Sonia’s often thought in her dark, dark moods, is really Marta’s child—she can see in Laura the same foul temper, the will to sour and spoil things. How can it work that way—that a child could be born not just with her aunt’s shade of hair or shape of foot, but also with her spitefulness? And how can Bonnie seek out Marta’s company, how could she not run screaming from that harpy hooking a hangman’s noose disguised as a tablecloth?

  On Tuesday Bonnie had spent all morning with her aunt. She’d been ordered down to the beach in the afternoon, but had raced back to the cottage before any of the others, supposedly to help Sonia make supper. She’d spent too much time looking into the sitting room, where Marta was jabbing at her crochet work, to be of much help. The third morning no excuse was offered: Bonnie got dressed with the others, but instead of trooping down to the lake with them, she settled onto the sofa across from Marta, with some old National Geographics and the piece of cross-stitch she’d been torturing for as long as Sonia could remember. “It’s okay, Mama,” she called out, “I’ll stay up here with Chucha Marta while you go down to the beach.” It was then that Sonia had proved weak—she should have ended it then and there, but the thought of being down at the beach with all the other women and their children, instead of spending the day with Marta in the confinement of the cottage, was too tempting.

  On Thursday, she put her guilty foot down. Bonnie was looking pale: she needed to be out in the sun, that’s what they’d bought the cottage for in the first place, to keep the children strong and healthy, soaking up vitamin D. Her sisters missed her company; Darka needed Bonnie’s help with the baby. So Bonnie went sadly down to the lake, and Sonia punished herself with cleaning out the big sideboard where the battered games and incomplete puzzles were kept, the odd socks and broken things she could never bring herself to throw away, in case their mates could be found or their innards fixed—and that she hated herself for hanging on to, out of some reflex of early poverty. Keep a thing and its use will come—you never know when you’ll be worse off than you are now. Her father’s words, spoken with the gravity of experience.

  But within an hour, Bonnie had sneaked back to the cottage, back to Marta, who betrayed neither pleasure nor irritation at the small girl with scuffed sandals, the child-skin smelling of lake water and suntan oil. After lunch, Marta had gone off to her room as usual, taken off her dress, and lain down on the bed in her slip, with her lisle stockings rolled up to her knees. She’d slept for exactly two hours, emerging disgruntled, as if sleep and dreams had lost any power to refresh her. Bonnie had taken her nap in her own room, as always, and Baby Alix in hers, while Katia and Laura visited their friends. Darka had held the fort while Sonia fled to Sasha’s in despair.

  By Friday, there was nothing left for Sonia to tidy or sort through in the cottage. She’d sent Bonnie down to the beach with the others, giving Darka strict instructions to keep her there, but Bonnie had crept back up—to use the washroom, she explained later on—how could anyone scold her for that? But what had been stranger, and far more disturbing to Sonia, was this: how, while she was off making lunch, leaving Marta crocheting by the picture window, the woman had vanished. Sonia had come out of the kitchen to ask whether Marta wo
uld prefer boiled or devilled eggs, and had found an empty chair. She’d made a fool of herself, calling Marta’s name, searching every room, even the bathroom, frightened half to death her sister-in-law might have had a stroke or heart attack there and be lying in a heap by the toilet. Sonia had found no trace of Marta until she’d rushed out to the lawn: from the lookout point under the empty flagpole, she’d seen the two of them, side by side. They were standing at the very edge of the lake, where the water rolled in clear and intricate, like some ruffled fabric far more delicate than glass. The two of them, Bonnie and Marta, standing side by side on the smooth, packed sand, Bonnie in her flip-flops and Marta in her men’s shoes, her stockings rolled down to the ankles, water splashing over her toes.

  Side by side, not touching, but seeming to be holding hands, though what Bonnie was clutching was one of the straps of Marta’s handbag, while her aunt held the other, the bag suspended between them like a sad, dark fish.

  Sonia knows, of course, that it’s not going to last, this collusion between Bonnie and Marta. Not only that it won’t last, but that when the rupture comes, it will be painful. But she hasn’t expected it to be brutal.

  It happens on Saturday morning—just after Max has finished his coffee. In spite of the traffic having been so awful last night, so that the car didn’t roll into the driveway till midnight and Sonia was on the verge of calling the police; in spite of how late it was before he was finally able to fall asleep, his nerves keyed up, his neck muscles aching, Max doesn’t allow himself to sleep in. Sonia is reading the letter he’s brought her from Olya. Marta has emerged, at last, from her room, and is standing by the table, looking over Sonia’s shoulder in a way that would have infuriated Sonia if she hadn’t known that Max’s sister had never learned to read in any language. Marta doesn’t wait for Sonia to finish with her letter, or for Max to drain his coffee cup before she drops the bomb:

  “She’s been stealing money from my purse. I caught her red-handed!”

  Sonia, clutching Olya’s letter, is about to leap to Darka’s defence, when Marta cuts her short.

  “Bonnie—what kind of a name is that for a child! And what kind of a child would steal from a poor old woman who has nothing, nothing in all the world!”

  Sonia is speechless. Max, on the other hand, falls straight into Marta’s trap. When he protests Bonnie’s innocence, Marta cries out in triumph.

  “My own brother is calling me a liar. The only family I have left in the world, and he accuses me of lying—which is even worse than stealing. Why don’t you just take that knife—” she is pointing to the bread knife, its handle loose, its teeth dulled—”and stab me to the heart. To the heart!”

  There is more in this vein, and before he knows it, Max is apologizing to Marta and promising that he will speak with Bonnie; he will punish her. As for Sonia, she has stormed out of the kitchen and over to Sasha’s house—she doesn’t trust herself to go down to the beach, she would explode in front of the children. Liars, the two of them, Max and Marta—for Max’s promise to punish Bonnie is so much hot air, he is grovelling in front of his witch of a sister. Though if he dares say a single word to Bonnie, if he so much as frowns at her, she will pack up the children, all of them, then and there, and—. As for Max, he has gone out to the porch and yelled for Darka, who finally shows up, flustered, from the laundry room in the cellar, and agrees to sit with Marta while Max goes down to the lake to have a word with his daughter.

  Even Sonia, who’s in no mood to forgive anyone, acknowledges the cleverness of Katia’s plan. Max is as grateful and astonished as he would be if Katia had shown him the solution to a legal problem that had stumped him.

  The word Max had with Bonnie was, of course, a confession of helplessness and not an accusation. If Bonnie didn’t apologize publicly to Chucha Marta for what she hadn’t done, there would be outright war. And if she did pretend to have stolen coins from Marta’s handbag, there would also be war, if not murder: Sonia was in a state, he confided—he didn’t have to say what kind of a state. Though the last thing he’d ever wanted for his daughter—any of his daughters—was to have her mixed up in a lie.

  At which point Katia, who’d been hovering on the sidelines, spelled out her strategy: their father was to give Bonnie fifty cents and send her to Mrs. Maximoynko’s store. There she would buy a slab of Mackintosh’s toffee, for which Chucha Marta is known to have a weakness. Bonnie would take the toffee to the cottage and present it to Chucha Marta, saying she’d borrowed the money from her aunt to make her a going-away present. Not having any money of her own, what other way did she have to spoil Chucha Marta? For everyone knew that Chucha Marta would never buy treats for herself.

  “Is that okay with you, Bonnie?” her father asked. Bonnie nodded her head quickly. There were some things you shouldn’t think about too hard or too long, and the surrender—the weakness—of a beloved parent was one of them. So she duly went off to Venus Variety with two quarters in her hand and returned with the toffee, which she now presents to Marta, in front of everyone. She isn’t able to say a word, though: it’s her father who has to explain that borrowing isn’t stealing; how a surprise is nothing like a theft.

  Chucha Marta stands there, her handbag clutched in her arms, her lips tight, her small eyes glittering. She too refuses to speak, except by finally taking the toffee from Bonnie’s hands and throwing it to the floor. Whereupon Katia nimbly jumps in, picking up the package, extracting the toffee, now shattered into bite-sized pieces, and handing them round to everyone. Only Bonnie and Chucha Marta refuse to eat. Not a word more is said on the subject.

  Sonia makes and dishes out lunch, after which the younger girls go off for their nap, and Laura and Katia sit on opposite sofas, reading, or pretending to read, battered copies of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames. Chucha Marta has her customary rest, and makes her customary fuss at the supper table, though everyone smiles politely, as if she has been praising the food and the company’s manners to the skies. For tomorrow Chucha Marta is going home; their father will head back to the city earlier than usual, so that this will be the Last Supper—until Christmastime, at least.

  Everyone goes to bed early tonight. Katia’s been allowed to sleep over at Tania’s house, as a reward for her cleverness, but the rest of the family is apprehensive lest Marta break the shaky truce they’ve all agreed to. Bed seems by far the safest place, even to Bonnie. Tonight, Laura isn’t asked to let her sister into her bed, to tell her stories. Listening to Laura’s steady breathing, Bonnie lies awake, thinking of the trick Chucha Marta has played on her; paying back, in some small way, the trick her own parents had played on her, leaving her behind with a dying sister as they ran away to Canada.

  But is it a trick Chucha Marta’s played, or has she given Bonnie a lesson? And what should she take from what her aunt has tried to teach her? The curtains let in a stab of moonlight. Bonnie closes her eyes tight, until she’s able to see a house unlike the dark, dank, narrow one on Dupont Street, or her own split-level suburban home, or even the cottage, with its thin, white-painted walls. In the dark in her head, lanterns are moving through a wooden house with chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s hut in the book of fairy tales. People are throwing clothes into chests, gathering up pillows and bedding. Except for one room, in which two little girls are tossing and turning, their bodies simmering with fever. An old woman is sitting beside them, rubbing their faces and arms and legs with a cloth dipped in well water, squeezing water from the cloth onto their gummed lips. The old woman looks just like Chucha Marta, with her black clothes and her old black scarf like a beetle’s shell. But one of the children lying on the bed is also Chucha Marta, and the other is her sister. Lyalka: Dolly.

  And now the dark wooden house, filled with lanterns and people with huge, soft bundles in their arms, gives way to a scene of broken trees and drifting smoke. Guns are firing, and people run in all directions, searching for shelter. A girl in a black dress trails after them, clutching someone’s skirt or trouser leg, so a
s not to get lost in all the smoke and ash raining down on the road. Sometimes she hears Russian being spoken around her, and sometimes Polish or German; some of the time—the only time she may be safe—she hears Ukrainian. She spends four years running like this, never settling, never having time or means to go to school or learn to do anything but survive. Until finally the war stops, like a watch that’s run down, and she’s taken back to the village where she was born, to relatives who take her in because her own house has been burned, and there is no place else for her.

  And just as she’s beginning to forget her life before the war, just as she’s given up hope that anyone will remember her, send for her, a letter arrives in the village, a letter from a strange city in a foreign country. In the letter is money, and instructions for Chucha Marta, who is now older than Laura, to take the farm cart, and then a train, and finally a ship and then another train to the place her parents will be waiting for her. One of the relatives, or maybe only a neighbour, comes with her all the way to the boat. Who takes care of Marta on the boat? Bonnie can’t picture this, or what it would be like to find yourself so utterly alone, even when she remembers how she got lost, one time, on a boat to Centre Island. How she sat on the steps leading to the upper deck, people nearly crushing her with their feet, until she heard her father’s voice calling out her name. She just sat there, her throat parched, with no voice to answer him, and yet she wasn’t afraid, for she knew he would keep on looking and calling till he found her.

  What must it have been like stepping off the train from Halifax, which to Bonnie is as remote a place as Austria? People speaking nothing but babble all around you, none of the words you know in Ukrainian or Polish or Russian. Around her neck, Marta has a signboard spelling out MARTA MARTYNIUK in the Cyrillic letters Bonnie has just learned to write at Ukrainian School. And here, at last, are the parents Marta last saw ten years ago, greeting the daughter who looks nothing like the dying child under the lantern’s light. Here is the brother who has taken her place, and the place of her dead sister. What do they say to each other on the platform at Union Station—do they just go home, have supper, wash the dishes and go to bed?