Blood and Salt

by Barbara Sapergia

  As Taras and his friends line up for the mess hall, Ihor and Tymko walk up looking surprisingly relaxed. The meal is not as good as the one on English Christmas, of course, but somebody’s found a little cream to go in the coffee. The internees who work in the kitchen must have talked the officer in charge into it. The men have had so little fat for so long that it goes to their heads like whiskey.

  “Cream is the opiate of the people,” Tymko says, raising his cup in a sort of toast.

  In the bunkhouse afterwards men gather to hear what it was like in the guardhouse. Soon there’s laughter and then a few tentative voices begin a carol. In moments the bunkhouse rings with men’s voices. Christ is born and the day is theirs.

  On January 8th a miracle happens: a mild day.

  That’s not all. After lunch the internees are taken for baths and then for a visit to the hot springs pool, a short distance up the hill from the bunkhouses. For “swimming,” the guards call it. They go in small groups of a dozen or so, taking turns putting on the small assortment of plain black bathing trunks which have somehow turned up in camp.

  At first Taras can’t believe they have to go outside on a winter day wearing nothing else – is it some bizarre new form of punishment? – but moments later he stands on the edge of the pool and climbs down the steps, and then he understands. To say he likes it is completely inadequate. He has never imagined there could be this much hot water in one place. He smiles at Yuriy and Ihor, who look equally amazed, and wades out toward the centre of the pool. He crouches low until the water reaches his chin, and lets heat enter his body and warm his brain. He never wants to leave this pool, despite its strong sulphur odour.

  Maybe hot water could be the opiate of the people.

  The wonder of it is, they’re doing something any person might do on a visit to Banff. A tourist, for example, maybe even a tourist from Europe. The Austrian emperor, if he happened to be visiting. It’s something people pay to do.

  Heat penetrates every part of his body. Tingling, saturating heat – soaking away pain and almost dissolving thought. His arms and legs feel light, his genitals float in the mineral water. If he could come here every day for a week, or a month, he could start to live again. When you’re always cold, there’s no point worrying when you had your last bath, but now that he’s clean and warm he wonders how long it’s been.

  Who consented to give the internees something so wonderful? Won’t the commandant hear what’s going on and order them out? Until he does, Taras will let his mind cease its endless working. Let peace lap at his brain.

  Is it possible the commandant knows? After all Taras has been through, it’s hard to imagine. But the commandant and his ways are a mystery he never expects to solve, so maybe he does know.

  Standing near the steps, Zmiya watches him still. Taras looks away. He’s not having this time spoiled.

  They look almost like any group of men discovering the hot pool, except for a certain defensiveness, or vulnerability, in the way they stand, arms crossed or hands touching their chests. Well, who would want to bathe, almost naked, with armed guards standing over them? Even so, a couple of prisoners smile, sun glancing off their faces and pale shoulders.

  One man crouches low in the water, arms outstretched, as though in a moment he’ll swim to freedom.

  The Stoney people say these hot mineral springs have healing powers. Arthur Lake hopes this is true for the prisoners.

  On the terrace above the pool, a guard slouches, coat open. Another looks more posed, standing on the stone steps that lead down to the pool, a hand on the wooden railing. Perhaps this separation into two levels, guards and prisoners, makes a fitting image.

  His wife, Winnie, has asked whether there are never any happy times in camp. This comes close: for once the prisoners are at least having a pleasanter time than their warders. Arthur Lake, Sergeant Lake, takes the picture.

  On January 10th, even the commandant thinks it’s too cold – 38 below – for the men to work. It stays that way for a whole week. Men go out only to get firewood.

  Barkley comes in to check on them, just in case a drunken brawl may be taking place, and sneers that they’re getting a free holiday in the mountains. He launches into the usual lecture on gratitude. It’s odd, Taras thinks, that some guards cling to the possibility of gratitude, since they haven’t seen a single example of it so far. He closes his ears to the rest of it, just seeing Barkley’s red lips flapping in the all-white head.

  During this week of “sitting around,” as Barkley calls it, escape talk seeps through the bunkhouse like meltwater. Everybody knows men have escaped and not been brought back. Men from the coal towns, for instance.

  It’s also impossible not to think of women. If only they could see women, talk to women. Touch them.

  One day, shovelling snow off Banff streets, Taras notices a young woman watching him. Her face has a lively, curious expression, not the disapproving look he usually sees from the town women. She might almost be ready to smile. For a second she’s his Halya.

  Some days the picture of Halya he carries in his mind begins to slip and he’s afraid he’ll forget how she looks. Other times memory surges back – the cool way her eyes take in everything around her, the warmth of her lips, the touch of her body against his – until he thinks he’ll go crazy. Most of the time he’s aware of sexual feeling as something locked away deep inside him, but there are also times when he wants to yell and scream. Wants to know why everybody isn’t yelling and screaming. But keeping quiet when you need to yell and scream seems to be one of the secrets of waiting out imprisonment.

  Sometimes he goes to the latrine where he can be alone and relieve that tension, but he feels miserable afterwards, humiliated. He wonders if the others ever do the same, but nobody talks about it. One night, he asks Tymko if it’s normal. He says not to worry, that everybody does it sometimes. It’s a scientific fact.

  After a week of being stuck in the bunkhouse, everyone – except Bohdan the carver, who always has work to do – feels unusually restless. Not that they want to be out felling trees or chopping kindling, they just don’t want to be here. People try their best to keep the card games and the political discussions going, but every activity, every thought, seems exhausted.

  After an unusually lousy supper of fried noodles and sausage shrapnel, Taras sits, with Tymko, Yuriy, Myro and Ihor, around a table in the bunkhouse. Hands have been dealt and each man has a pile of matchsticks to bet with. Yuriy’s is the biggest. You’d think Myro the arithmetic teacher would have the most, but Yuriy just has a gift.

  They were going to play poker, but couldn’t decide on what kind. Tymko suggested hearts and dealt the cards, but nothing’s happened since. The only person doing anything at all is Yuriy, who keeps flicking through his cards and nodding wisely.

  “For God’s sake,”Tymko grumbles, “how can your hand be that bloody interesting?” Yuriy shrugs. It’s interesting to him.

  Taras sits by Tymko, so he should lead, but he just stares into the air, his cigarette slowly consuming itself in the tobacco tin ashtray. Four pairs of eyes drill into him. He doesn’t notice; sees only that he’s got terrible cards. As usual. Tymko clears his throat loudly. Yuriy nudges Taras’s foot. Ihor whistles through his teeth. Myro pretends to scowl. Taras looks up. Tymko leans toward him and moves the eyebrows up and down.

  Taras sighs and lays his cards, face up, on the table. After a moment the others do the same. Time passes.

  Suddenly Tymko smacks his fist against the table. “I have it!” he says. “We’ll take turns, and each of you will explain why he doesn’t at least try to escape.”

  “What about you?” Ihor asks. “Aren’t you in on this too?”

  “I thought that might be unnecessary,” Tymko says. True. They’ve all seen the scar on his chest.

  Yuriy has an answer ready. He has a better farm than anyone he knew in the old country. Soon he’ll be able to make a good living for himself, his wife, Nadia, and her mother. He
figures they’ll have to let him go some day, as Tymko has said so many times.

  “But if I run away... They might send me to prison. Take my farm. Everything we’ve worked for.”

  “Dobre,” Tymko says, “I can see you’ve thought it through. Myro?”

  “That’s easy. I want to be a teacher again some day. A teacher can’t have any kind of criminal background.”

  “Won’t it be just the same having been interned?” Tymko asks.

  “No. Things won’t always be the way they are now. In time, people will realize a wrong has been committed. There will be an apology, and restitution of what has been taken away. I will be a teacher of arithmetic, history or whatever is needed.”

  The others listen, hoping he knows what he’s talking about. It sounds convincing, at this moment, anyway.

  “Hey Myro,” Yuriy asks, “how does an arithmetic teacher get sent to an internment camp, anyway?”

  Myro smiles. “Not because of arithmetic. It was my other passion.”

  “What’s your other passion?” Tymko asks suggestively.

  “I write articles about interesting people. Interesting Ukrainian people. I wrote a perfectly reasonable article for The People’s Voice about Ivan Franko.”

  “Ah, the author of novels and poems,” Tymko says. “The great democratic socialist.”

  “That’s him. My article was about his novels and how they helped develop Ukrainians’ political and cultural consciousness.”

  “Subversive, you mean.”

  “I can hardly think how. But that was what they said. That I favoured a free and independent Ukraine.”

  “That’s a crime now, is it?” Tymko shakes his head. “Well, boys, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll tell you why I’m still here. Other than that I now know what a bayonet feels like.

  “You see, the camp is likely the safest place for me right now. Wartime isn’t a good time to be a socialist union leader. The government doesn’t like them any better than it likes Ukrainians, and I’m both. So I might as well stay here, imprisoned for being Ukrainian.” He grins. “There are more Ukrainians in Canada than socialists, so I’ve got more people to sympathize with me.”

  “That sounds scientific,” Yuriy says.

  “Also,” Tymko winks, “if they did want to kill someone who’s escaping, to make an example, who do you think it would be? That’s right. The socialist.”

  “Or one of his radical friends,” Myro says.

  “That’s possible too. Anyway, I’ll stay put. Where I can talk to other men, I mean consort with other men, about how the world could be run better. And you, Taras?”

  Taras considers. “I don’t want to get my parents in trouble. They didn’t want to come to Canada, but I had to leave, so they came too.” What he wants most is to find Halya, but he doesn’t know how. “If I knew how to find Halya...” He leaves the rest unsaid, but everyone understands: he’d escape in a moment. But would he really?

  “When we get out of this place,” Tymko says, “you might find this woman you love. Don’t give up.”

  If a scientific, revolutionary socialist thinks he shouldn’t give up, maybe he shouldn’t. In fact, Taras sees that he never has given up. His hopes are like a river: frozen on top, with a cold, silent flow under ice.

  The story helps keep him going. In the telling, he understands it better himself.

  “Time to get on with your story,” Tymko says, as if reading his mind.

  Taras hesitates. “You understand, there are parts I don’t really know.”

  “Make it up then. Isn’t that what you did before?”

  “Tak. Anyway, I know some parts because I was there, others because Natalka’s friend Maryna told my mother – how Viktor sold his land, the day he left the village. For some other parts... Yes, I make things up. But I know these people.”

  “Taras, it’s all right,” Tymko says. “Nobody cares. Just give us some more story. Proshu.”

  So he does, beginning with Halya and her grandmother Natalka sitting in the kitchen the day before they will leave Shevchana.

  CHAPTER 12

  A square of linen

  Halya was in the kitchen, breathing in the warmth of newly baked bread. Everything else that spoke of daily life was gone – embroidered linen scarves on walls and benches, herbs and flowers hung from rafters, plain pottery dishes. All of these, all of the icons, clothing, pots and tools and utensils, and Halya’s few books, except for one she’d kept out to read on the journey, had been packed in a carved wooden trunk sitting in the middle of the room. A length of cream-coloured linen lay unfinished on the loom. Natalka ran her fingers over the tightly woven square. She’d probably never weave linen again. Only now could she admit how much her hands ached.

  Halya paced around the trunk.

  “Can’t you sit, Halychka? You make me dizzy.”

  “We’re going to Kanady tomorrow. I’m afraid I’ll never see Taras again.”

  “Now, now, Halya. He’ll come to Kanady and find you.”

  “What if he’s caught? The government doesn’t want young men to leave!” Halya shakes her head and her long hair, in waves from her braids, whips across her face. “War’s coming! Everyone says so now.”

  “Maybe it won’t come. Anyway, even if it does, not everyone dies in a war. Maybe he’ll –”

  “Maybe? Maybe’s no good to me!”

  Meanwhile, Viktor had decided not to wait for Kondarenko to raise the money to buy his land. Or for Mykola’s friend Yarema. Let them find other places to buy. Viktor Dubrovsky couldn’t wait around forever. So he’d driven over to see the pahn, and they were sitting in a small office off the pahn’s kitchen. Radoski placed banknotes in Viktor’s hand, looking all the while as if he’d like to snatch them back.

  Viktor counted the money carefully.

  “It’s all there, damn it. You don’t need to count every crown.”

  “Certainly not, Pahn, but mistakes happen. I know you wouldn’t want that. You are respected by everyone as a man of honour.”

  Radoski rifled through the papers Viktor had given him. “It wasn’t easy putting my hands on the cash,” he said. “I’ve had many expenses lately. Had to pay young Kuzyk for training my horse.” He threw this last bit in just to irk Viktor.

  “That’s not my problem, is it, Pahn?” Viktor had no stake in annoying the landlord, but it felt good all the same.

  Radoski puffed up with spite. “Of course, you know why he needs money.”

  Viktor’s head started to boil. He’d have liked to wipe the leer off the pahn’s face.

  “He wants to marry your daughter.” Radoski barely concealed his glee.

  Be calm, Viktor told himself. Soon this posturing lump will be a distant memory. “Wanting is not doing. My daughter will be far away in Kanady.”

  “Of course, he might follow her. After he gets out of the army.” Radoski enjoyed the horrified look on Viktor’s face. His lips formed the fat smirk everyone in the village had learned to hate.

  “If he gets out of the army.” Viktor put his purse away, heavy with the pahn’s crowns. He could barely stuff it in his pocket.

  At the same moment, Halya stared at the loaves of bread cooling on the table. She heard the door open, and her friend Larysa crept in the door, glancing back over her shoulder, as if she were afraid someone was following, or watching.

  “Larysa, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “You mustn’t tell anyone.”

  Halya shakes her head.

  “I’m going to have a baby.” Larysa’s eyes, a little bit blue and a little bit green, filled with tears.

  Halya held Larysa close, patting her hand, and they both started to cry.

  Natalka came in, bristling with energy. “There now, Halya, it’s not the end of the world.” Halya and Larysa broke into fresh gusts of tears. Natalka looked more closely at Larysa’s red-splotched face and at her belly, and saw that it was rounder than it used to be.

  “Dear God.”

&n
bsp; “That’s why Ruslan came to the meeting at the reading hall. We were going to get married. Now his father said he’s sleeping in the guardhouse and doing hard labour.”

  “Ruslan must get leave and come home to marry her,” Halya said. She patted Larysa’s head, her coiled braids.

  “Oh, they won’t let him do that. Soldiers can’t get married. Not without special permission,” Natalka said.

  “They could give him permission. Surely the Austrians understand such matters.”

  “No, I don’t think they do.”

  “They think we’re barbarians,” Larysa cried. “Who cares what happens to peasants?”

  “Do your parents know?” Natalka asked.

  Larysa covered her face and wailed. “No, but they soon will. My father will beat me and my mother will push me out the door.”

  Natalka put her arm around Larysa’s shoulders, thinking hard. “If they make you leave, go to Maryna. She’ll look after you.”

  “I want Ruslan!” Larysa shrieked, although Natalka had made a truly generous offer. Too generous, really, to be made on another person’s behalf. A person who hadn’t even been consulted.

  “I know, I know.” Natalka kissed her cheek. “And maybe he’ll get leave. Maybe it’ll work out all right.” She clucked like a hen with a hurt chick. “But if there’s trouble, go to Maryna.”

  “What can she do?” Larysa said in a shrill voice. “She’s just a poor old woman.”

  “Just go,” Natalka said fiercely. “Will you do that?”

  Choking on tears, Larysa managed a nod. “I’d better leave now.”

  The young women embraced. Natalka lifted the skirt of her long apron and wiped Larysa’s face. Held her tightly and kissed both her cheeks. Larysa left without another word.

  “This is terrible,” Natalka said. “That poor child.”

  “Will Maryna help her?” Halya looked uncertain.

  “I think so. Someone must.”

  Halya picked up the twig broom and swiped at the already clean floor, but Natalka took the broom away and put it in the storeroom.