The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  “I have to get on with this wash,” she whispered, feeling she owed him an explanation. He said that was fine; he’d just sit there and enjoy the coolness, if that was okay with her. She shrugged and continued with her work, though she couldn’t help darting glances here and there to see if he’d brought her anything. She realized, suddenly, that she’d never thanked him, and then decided he didn’t want her to—he’d be embarrassed, or he’d think her no better than a little kid. Liz Taylor—you wouldn’t hear her saying please and thank you very much, not for a measly tube of lipstick!

  How strange it had been, going about the washing, her back turned to him, feeling his eyes on her as she wiped a hand across her forehead to catch the sweat, or wrung out the clothes, then stood with her hands on either side of the sink, watching the dirty water swirl away. She had her two-piece on under her shorts but no shirt, so her back was exposed, the straps criss-crossed so they wouldn’t keep sliding off her shoulders. She was aware of the smell of her skin—the moist, slightly sour smell in her armpits that she couldn’t disguise no matter how much deodorant she put on, and the ripe smell of her hair, which she hadn’t had time to wash that morning. At last she’d turned to him, a basket of rinsed and wrung-out clothes weighing down her arms. He made no move to help her, he just said, “Come back when you’re finished—come back when they’ve left,” reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small, thin, silvery cylinder.

  “Mascara,” she’d said, by way of an answer.

  Laura’s the one who named it Tunnel Road, because of the way the trees reach across the asphalt, joining overhead as you walk or drive below. So the road really belongs to her, she thinks, walking quickly along, tripping over a stone or fallen branch, or sometimes her own feet; trying to pull her head up from her shoulders as her mother’s always telling her to do. Though it’s not because of her mother’s nagging, this attention to her posture; it’s because she needs to learn to walk like a Queen, an Empress of the Nile.

  On one side of the road are cottages, and on the other, woods dense with spruce and cedar saplings and slender, grey-barked trees. Through the dark leaves, light boils like bubbles in ginger ale; if you walk as far as you can through the undergrowth you find places where coolness rushes up, the way it does when you pass the opened door of a cellar on a scorching day. They are always warned not to go into the woods because of poison ivy, and because of bears, but the children pooh-pooh this; Katia glimpsed a skunk once, making its way through the brush, and several porcupines have been sighted. Her cousin Yuri says he heard wolves howl at night, but no one believes him: wolves belong in fairy tales, not at Kalyna Beach.

  At the end of Tunnel Road is the Shkurkas’ cottage. Next to the Plotskys’, it’s the oldest building at the beach, and it’s certainly the smallest. It needs fixing—the floors sag and the roof is nothing but patches, but Nettie Shkurka says she can’t afford to have a man in to do repairs. She says this at the store, or stopping in front of various cottages when she takes her morning walks along Tunnel Road, her daughter at her side, pale and plain as a pot of porridge. Nastia, who never looks anyone straight in the face and has a sleepwalker’s abstracted gait. When the Shkurkas pass by, the women on their verandas wave and remind themselves to tell their husbands to stop by at the small, decrepit cottage to see if they can’t give Nettie a hand with things. Though they know they will never carry through with these good intentions. There’s something so self-satisfied in Nettie’s misfortune, Sasha says—something so righteous in her feeling herself to be poor and neglected and eternally shining up that crown in heaven she’s buying on the instalment plan. And then Sasha laughs and says she never could understand how Nettie ever let a man near enough to father that poor, scared rabbit of a daughter.

  Laura has seen a picture of Mr. Shkurka that Nastia keeps folded in her prayer book: it’s not a photograph, but a blurred reproduction of one, printed in a magazine called Glory to Ukraine! There was an article on the Displaced Persons camps after the war, the educational and cultural events the inmates had organized there. Ostap Shkurka had been part of a musical ensemble including singers from the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theatre; they had staged parts of Taras Bulba with improvised costumes and minimal props. The picture showed Mr. Shkurka in a sheepskin hat and wide-skirted coat that were far too big, making him look like a small boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. He had played the part of the son who betrays his father by falling madly in love with a Polish countess. “He had a wonderful voice,” Nastia had whispered, holding out her hand for the magazine clipping, as if terrified her mother would walk into the room and find them. Laura had nodded, wondering if Nastia really could remember her father’s voice—she’d been younger than Alix when he ran out on them. And what if this Ostap Shkurka in the magazine had nothing to do with the man who was Nastia’s father? What if he was someone who just happened to share with him a name as common in Ukraine as Joe Smith is here?

  Now Laura is on her way to the Shkurkas’ cottage, having waited and waited for her mother to settle down in her bedroom with the book hidden in her night-table drawer. It’s not that her mother would forbid Laura to spend time at the Shkurkas’, but that she’d go on at her about how Laura should be making friends with other girls as well, girls less delicate and, though Sonia never says the word, peculiar. Laura never responds to her mother’s criticisms and suggestions, but just stands staring past her, shoulders slumped like a drooping shawl. Her mother doesn’t know anything; doesn’t know how Mrs. Shkurka keeps Nastia under her thumb, as if she were a prisoner so important she has to be guarded day and night. If Laura wants to see Nastia, she has to see her at the Shkurkas’, or not at all.

  Always, when Laura knocks on the Shkurkas’ door, she’s met by Nastia’s mother. For such a snip of a woman, she has an unusually powerful voice. Sometimes she refuses to undo the latch of the screen door: Anastasia’s asthma is acting up again, she might say, or Anastasia’s got a sick headache, or else a rash. Whatever the plot of Nastia’s “bad days,” the story always ends the same way: Anastasia has to lie down; she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Laura knows it’s useless, on such occasions, to ask if she could just call to Nastia through the screen door, just as she knows, but cannot actually say to herself, that Mrs. Shkurka’s lying when she talks about Nastia not wanting to see her. Cannot say it to herself, or to any of the mothers, for they’ll never take her word for anything, and everyone knows that Mrs. Shkurka is a Mother in a Million. And so on bad days, Laura leaves the Shkurkas’ cottage, with its worn, grey walls and sagging shutters, and makes her way back up Tunnel Road, running the last few yards, till she reaches the birch tree with the sign bearing the letters MARTYN burned into the wood.

  This afternoon she knocks at the door not hesitantly or defiantly, but with a certain cunning. She is not going to ask for Nastia when Mrs. Shkurka appears; she is going to ask if she can come in to borrow a book on the kingdom of Ancient Rus, which, as Mrs. Shkurka has so often told her, is the Glorious Cradle of Today’s Ukraine.

  Laura’s plan works—or perhaps she didn’t even need to try it, for when Mrs. Shkurka allows her inside, Nastia is waiting for her at the kitchen table. Nastia’s mother is a skinny woman with unnaturally pale skin and features thin as the teeth of a comb. If she were Nastia, Laura thinks, she’d have run away a long time ago from such a flimsy jailer. But then, who in the world is like Nastia? Pale, quiet, good as gold and far more pliable, Nastia seems to know what her mother wants of her before Mrs. Shkurka says a word or even gestures to her. In fact, Nastia is closer to her mother than Laura has ever thought it possible for any daughter to be. But then, Nastia has no father—or at least, he’s as good as dead and gone, and that would make a difference.

  Nastia is sitting at the kitchen table, her long, long hair pouring down her back and over her shoulders like some dark, silent waterfall. Laura bites her lips when Mrs. Shkurka tells her to sit down and wait while she does Nastia’s hair. She watches as the brush comes dow
n, hard, on her friend’s scalp; she notices the way Nastia nearly doesn’t flinch as her mother explains to Laura the importance of stimulating the oils in the scalp. Laura prefers not to look at Nastia’s face as Mrs. Shkurka proceeds to braid her daughter’s hair, pulling the strands so tight that the two long ropes hanging down her daughter’s back will look far more tense and indestructible than chain mail.

  Nastia’s mother teaches school from September to the end of June; she drives up to Kalyna Beach on the first of July with boxes full of workbooks entitled Grammar without Toil and More Fun with Figures. Nastia’s shown them to Laura, and Laura can’t believe how they’re all filled in with Nastia’s perfectly neat handwriting, and pasted with golden stars that Mrs. Shkurka keeps in a small glass jar that used to hold horseradish. She also lugs up a gross of embroidery thread and coarse-grained linen from which she fashions cross-stitched bookmarks to be sold at Church Bazaars and Easter Teas over the coming year. She is a tireless supporter of worthy projects in the Ukrainian community, Laura knows, for Mrs. Shkurka has made no secret of what she calls her “causes” and has even tried, so far in vain, to recruit Laura to help her out with them, as Nastia will, once they return to the city. Laura has seen with her own eyes how ardently Mrs. Shkurka kisses the cross and the gold-plated cover of the Gospels at the cathedral each Sunday. She knows by heart how many A-pluses Nastia has racked up on her report cards over the years, for Mrs. Shkurka has never failed to tell her. So why, then, has Laura come back to the Shkurkas’ cottage over and over again this summer? Why does she befriend a girl like Nastia, the kind of prim, proper, perfect daughter that her own mother wishes she had?

  Perhaps it’s because Sonia, for all the faults she constantly finds with Laura, has never warmed to Nastia. Down at the beach Laura once heard Mrs. Vesiuk telling her mother what a shame it was, the way Nettie had pinned her daughter down, like linen in an embroidery frame. And Sonia had nodded, saying something about how overprotective Nettie was, making Nastia wear those long-sleeved blouses and ankle-length trousers. She’s making a hermit out of that girl, Sonia had said—it’s all very well to say she has sensitive skin and needs to keep out of the sun, but to keep her locked away from all the other girls, as if she thought nobody was good enough for her, when anyone could see that. And then Mrs. Vesiuk had nodded, and they’d switched to some other topic, and Laura had been left trying to puzzle out her mother’s disapproval, not just of Nettie Shkurka, but of Nastia as well. For in spite of what she’d just told Mrs. Vesiuk, Sonia had never tried to invite Nastia over to their cottage; she had even hinted to Laura that it wasn’t a good idea, putting all her eggs in one basket as far as friends were concerned.

  Laura and Nastia’s friendship has nothing to do with chickens, as far as Laura can see. They know each other from Saturday Ukrainian School, at which Nastia’s distinguished herself for her ability to memorize vast chunks of Shevchenko, Franko and Ukrainka, while Laura stubbornly refuses to answer anything she’s asked, and comes last in everything, from dictation to dancing, where her lack of balance and her inability to tell her left foot from her right make her sadly conspicuous. Yet it’s only this summer that the girls have really taken to each other, becoming as inseparable as their mothers will permit; that is to say, they spend the odd afternoon together, from one till three, the universal quiet time. On this particular afternoon, they are sitting out at the back, on rickety lawn chairs. The trees have grown up to block the view of the lake, and the path down to the shore is overgrown, though they can easily hear the waves crashing below.

  Mrs. Shkurka sits close by in a rocking chair, doing embroidery while the girls talk, and listening in on their conversation with a clear conscience. She frequently chastises or upbraids them—most often because of Laura’s ruling passion for the history of ancient Egypt, which, Mrs. Shkurka constantly reminds her, is far less improving and important than the history of Ancient Rus. That depraved woman Cleopatra wasn’t to be mentioned in the same breath as the saintly Princess Olha—does Laryssa know that Olha sought conversion to Christianity, and tricked the Sultan of Constantinople into being her godfather instead of the husband he had so wickedly plotted to become? And does Laryssa also know that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, is descended in the thirty-first generation from a Prince of Ukraine? For King Harold the Second of England, killed at the Battle of Hastings by an arrow through the eye, had married his daughter Gytha to Grand Prince Volodymyr Monomakh.

  Whenever Mrs. Shkurka lectures her like this, Laura turns her face away, making savage scowls or sticking out her tongue, shocking Nastia with her bravado. If Laura has to look Mrs. Shkurka in the eye, she bites the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from saying something rude. Such forbearance is only possible because sooner or later Nastia’s mother always falls asleep—she sleeps poorly at night and is ruining her eyes with her embroidery, Nastia says. Whenever she talks of her mother she sounds as though she’s quoting her—not Mrs. Shkurka’s exact words, uttered in the heat or damp of the moment, but what that lady would like people to believe she’s said. Laura isn’t interested in Mrs. Shkurka, and if the truth be told, her attachment to Nastia isn’t entirely disinterested. For Nastia has provided Laura with a rapt audience for her obsession with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and her alter ego, Elizabeth Taylor. Nastia can be counted on to listen, mouth agape, as Laura reads aloud whole paragraphs from the Souvenir Booklet she’s smuggled to the Shkurkas’ cottage:

  She is a beauty beloved of photographers, for in the professional world of photographers it is axiomatic that it is next to impossible to take a bad picture of her.

  She is the foremost star of the screen, because she is beautiful, and because she is an actress of enormous talent.

  When she was not yet thirty, she fought and won a battle for her life.

  The costliest film production in the history of the cinema, the finest accumulation of talents, surrounds her appearance as Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt …

  “What do you suppose she was sick with—asthma?” offers Nastia.

  “Of course not. She would have had some kind of terrible fever. They would have had to watch at her bedside night and day, feeling her fluttering pulse for vital signs.”

  “Maybe it was T.B.”

  “Maybe,” Laura answers cautiously.

  “Lesia Ukrainka had T.B. She spent her winters in Egypt; she would have died of cold if she’d stayed in Ukraine.” Nastia brightens—it pleases her to be able to share this knowledge. It’s like a gift she’s making Laura, and she has so few things to offer. Emboldened, she ventures a little more. “I had a positive reaction to a T.B. test once. My whole arm swelled up and went bright red.”

  “Then it wasn’t T.B. Elizabeth Taylor had, that’s for sure.” Laura knows she’s being unkind, but she has the actress’s glamour to protect, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that Elizabeth Taylor and Nastia Shkurka could ever have in common. She decides to change the subject, reading out another passage from the Souvenir Booklet, one that sends shivers down her crooked spine. (Her mother is always at her to stop slouching, warning her she’ll be a cripple by the time she’s twenty.)

  Burton is five feet, nine inches tall, is as wide-shouldered and rugged as a fullback, can blaze into righteous anger on occasion, and will calm down just as quickly. Splendidly educated, he will in conversation range over a host of subjects with keen, piercing intelligence.

  If there’s anything that Laura longs for, other than being Elizabeth Taylor, it is the chance to have a keen, piercing conversation with Richard Burton. She imagines Richard and Elizabeth sitting by the pyramids or riding camels through the desert and ranging over a host of subjects: Shakespeare, and Shevchenko, and Skin Tone. Of course they wouldn’t discuss anything so trivial as the latter—but it so happens that Laura is preoccupied with skin tone right now, and she would dearly like to know what a splendidly educated man could say to her upon this subject.

  If there’s anything that La
ura envies Nastia, it’s her complexion. Not its colour—sallow, like ancient ivory—but its porelessness. A tight weave, something Laura’s heard her mother say about fabric: nothing can get in or out. Laura has terrible skin. Sonia’s is flawless. Once, watching Laura finish a plate of french fries at a restaurant, she had said, mournfully, “You had such beautiful skin when you were little.” As if it were Laura’s fault, Laura’s decision that the pores of her skin should each become a pit filled with tar; as if she’d taken a darning needle heated to some unimaginable temperature and gouged her face, every quarter-inch, with its tip. Gross pore structure: this is how it’s described in the beauty magazines Laura reads surreptitiously at drugstores and dentists’ offices. It’s a sign of ruggedness in a man, and hence desirable, or at least acceptable. Richard Burton, in his leopard-skin tunic, looking on at the banquet Cleopatra has conjured up for him, looking up, from under beetling brows, not at the Nubian dancing girls, nor at the platters of jellied peacock, but at the flawless skin of Elizabeth Taylor.

  Nastia, unsure of whether her friend has fallen asleep or into a trance, reaches for the Souvenir Booklet lying in Laura’s lap. Timidly, she takes it up, turning the pages until she finds a passage that she reads out in her whisper of a voice:

  If a scene requires from her the enacting of virtual hysteria, she seems to lose herself, as though unaware of the glare of the lights, the crew standing round. The moment the director has said, “That’s it!” she is back to herself again. Her hand reaches out for a lit cigarette (there is always someone there to supply it) and she waits quietly for the director’s appraisal.