“Time to look around, Halya. Time to stop mooning over that boy.” Halya stares out the window. “He’ll be in Bosnia by now and will have forgotten all about you. He could even have been killed.”
“He’d never forget me. And he hasn’t been killed. I’d know.”
Viktor ignores this claim. “There is something in this paper I want you to hear. He reads haltingly, translating as he goes. “‘Lady...desires...companion and...home helper.’ You understand? A pahna wants someone to come live in her house. Talk to her, help around the house. ‘Must be well spoken and clean. Apply by letter to Shawcross Ranch, Spring Creek.’”
He tears out a neat square of typed words framed in an important-looking black box. A happy smile spreads over his face.
Halya looks horrified. “I couldn’t do that, Batko. Honestly, I couldn’t.”
“Nonsense. You would be perfect.”
“I don’t know their language!”
“You’ll learn. In the meantime, I’ll write to her. Mr. Hamilton will help me.”
Halya continues to protest, but Viktor only smiles. He sees it all in his mind. His girl, in the pahna’s house.
“Now, I will teach you how to greet these people. They don’t say ‘dobre dehn’ as we do, they say ‘good day.’ It means the same thing! Say after me, ‘good day.’”
Halya picks up her sewing and runs out of the room. Viktor shrugs. He begins the letter.
When Viktor goes to see his employer, Halya picks up the newspaper. She pays more attention to Viktor’s English lessons than she lets on, reads the newspaper when he’s not around. She, too, needs to know how this place works. She’s learned that the best thing to be is British. Everyone else is judged by how close they come to Britishness. Other peoples who speak their own languages are considered quaint, a bit embarrassing, as if they must be trying to speak English and failing.
From advertisements she’s learned what things cost. What a hired girl can earn working long hours in a farmhouse or a house in town. If she had to leave, she could be a hired girl, but how could she leave Natalka? For now she waits, works in the house and yard, and sometimes in the fields. Here luck is with her. English women don’t work in the fields, as far as she knows. And Viktor wants them to be as English as possible. Luckily the crop was planted when he bought the place.
She’d never imagined Viktor would consider sending her to a place where he didn’t have daily control over her. Only the sweet, succulent promise of a daughter learning to be like an English pahna could have tempted him to this.
When Viktor returns from Mr. Hamilton’s farm in time for supper, he’s still smiling. Back home no one could have imagined Viktor Dubrovsky smiling. Mr. Hamilton will post the letter in town. Halya prays there will never be an answer.
Viktor and Halya sit on upholstered chairs in the parlour of Louisa Shawcross, a well-dressed, bored-looking pahna in her fifties. Halya wears an attractive cotton dress, dark blue printed with white flowers. Wishes she were somewhere else. Viktor puffs himself up in a black suit.
“My daughter very clean, strong. She work hard. No trouble.”
Halya sees a slight smile of contempt behind Mrs. Shawcross’s pahna manners. “I see, Mr., um...Dobson?”
“Yes,” Viktor says. “I change name so we more English. I want learn her...to be lady. Like you, madam.”
Mrs. Shawcross smiles. “Does Helena speak English, Mr. Dobson?”
Halya shakes her head, but no one notices. She’s Helena now, is she?
“She speak a little now. She learn fast, lady. Very smart girl.”
“Can she read and write?”
Halya understands the question and feels annoyed by it. “Yes,” she says in English. “My language. I read and I write. Read poetry.” She straightens her back and holds her head higher.
The pahna gives her a closer look. Oh no. Now the woman seems to find her interesting.
“I like to read poetry too. All kinds of literature. Perhaps we might get on.”
Halya tries not to look horrified. She’d never have spoken if she’d thought the pahna would approve of her reading. She sees that Viktor can hardly believe his luck. He’s never imagined any good could come of reading poetry. Well, what he thinks of as good.
“We have a woman in twice a week to do all the cleaning and wash clothes. But I assume you are capable of preparing meals.” Halya looks puzzled. “You know how to cook?” she asks slowly. Halya nods.
“Well, then, I think Helena might as well begin at once,” Louisa Shawcross says. “Then, tomorrow, perhaps, you can bring the rest of her things.”
What’s she saying? Has the woman hired her? Just like that?
“Thank you, madam.” Viktor looks as if he’s afraid to say another word in case the pahna changes her mind. Afraid of seeming too pleased. Besides, he probably can’t think of any more English words.
Don’t leave me here, Halya thinks. Please don’t. But Viktor is going to. She realizes they don’t expect her to say a thing.
Halya’s room is definitely a lady’s room: soft blue walls, a fancy brass bedstead and a polished walnut dresser. White organdy curtains. A framed print of a lady in a tight striped satin dress hangs over the dresser. The lady looks around her nervously, her small mouth pursed. She is outdoors, in a forest or garden, about to slip a folded letter into a crack in the bark of a tree. A note to some forbidden lover? It looks like some things are the same even for English women.
Halya hangs her flower-print dress in the closet. The pahna has asked her to put on one of her old dresses. She said it would fit perfectly and it does. It’s deep green and beautifully made. Halya knows at a glance that some poor woman spent long days on its cutting and sewing, especially on the vertical pleats across the bodice. She has to take shallower breaths because the waist is so snug. Apparently, though, it should be tighter, because Mrs. Shawcross tried to make her put on a corset that laced up the back. Halya couldn’t hold back a small shriek and that made the bossy old crow give up on corsets.
Of course a pahna would be bossy. What’s the good of servants if you can’t make them do things they don’t want to do? she probably thinks.
The lady in the picture must be wearing one. Nobody’s waist could be that small naturally. Halya wonders how women in such garments are expected to breathe. She wonders why looking so thin is considered attractive.
The pahna’s given her shoes to wear, too, black leather lace-ups with small, raised heels. They make her carry herself more stiffly. She has to think before she moves.
Halya looks at herself in the mirror. The green dress flatters her, seems to make her brass-coloured hair shinier. “Helena Dobson,” she says to her image.
Another reflection appears in the mirror. Mrs. Shawcross watches from the doorway.
A few days later, her chores done until it’s time to make supper, Halya sits in the dining room with pen and paper, bathed in light from the double windows, practising writing. The pahna actually wants her to do this. In fact she taught Halya the English alphabet herself. Halya still finds this alphabet confusing, because some letters are the same and others totally different. And some are just missing.
She can’t believe she lives here now. It’s the first time in her life that she’s slept anywhere other than in her father’s house. She doesn’t miss him. She does miss Natalka. Wonders what she’d think of Mrs. Shawcross.
The pahna is like no person she’s ever met. Interfering. Rich. Thinks other people are here for her entertainment. And she’s crazy for reading books; novels, she calls them. And for teaching Halya to read them. In English. Halya has no idea how long she’ll be able to stand it, but has to admit it’s interesting. She wishes she could tell Natalka all about it. Well, sooner or later the old lady will have to let her go home for a visit. Won’t she?
She pulls a paper from her pocket with words written in Ukrainian.
Don’t say my love is gone from the earth.
If he were, I would know.
His voice comes to me on the wind.
One day he’ll find me, or me him.
Yesterday I saw a swallow burn
a dark shadow on the sun.
As warm rain turns to bitter snow,
oh, swallow, ride the bright sky
across this wide land
and bring him home.
She stares at it, trying then crossing out different combinations of words. She wishes she could talk to Shevchenko. He would help her find the words and rhythms she needs.
Halya hears the pahna coming and hides the poem. Mrs. Shawcross enters, a little drunk, a glass of sherry cradled in her long fingers. “Hard at work, I see. Would you like a glass of sherry?”
Halya shakes her head. Louisa gave her a glass yesterday and she thought it was disgusting.
“No, thank you, Mrs. Shawcross.” Halya is sure that no reaction of any kind, let alone disapproval, gets into her voice, but the lady must hear something. Her face flushes and she leaves the room.
That evening, from the kitchen window, Halya sees the pahna’s son ride up to the barn. Mrs. Shawcross says that he stays in town most of the time, in a room at the hotel, but sleeps at the ranch a couple of nights a week. He dismounts, and a hired hand leads the horse into the barn as Ronald Shawcross walks up to the house. He’s a tall man with smoothly brushed brown hair, and he’s what people would call handsome, although there’s a self-important look about him she doesn’t really care for.
Halya hurries to her room. The pahna has said that she “must meet Ronnie,” so Halya changes into the green dress Mrs. Shawcross likes and goes down the hall toward the parlour and stops in the doorway. Louisa Shawcross and her son are drinking sherry and haven’t seen her yet.
“So you’ve hired one of those Galicians, Mother.” Ronnie lights a cigarette from a leather case. “Plenty of English girls who’d love to come here.”
“Oh yes, English girls. Can’t cook anything but roast beef and canned peas. But Helena... Well, you’ll see. She’s interesting.”
“You haven’t time to turn bohunks into ladies, you know. Don’t see why you’d want to.”
“You wouldn’t. And don’t say bohunks. It’s vulgar.”
Bohunks. Is that what this man calls Ukrainians? Halya comes in to get the introduction over with. In the green dress she must look a bit like an Englishwoman. Well, she’s not an Englishwoman. She looks at the pahna’s son defiantly.
Mrs. Shawcross smiles at her. “Helena, this is my son, Ronald.”
“How do you do, Mr. Shawcross.” Halya makes the small gesture between a nod and a bow that Louisa’s taught her. “Dinner is ready, madam.” Louisa has been drilling her in these phrases for several days now.
“Thank you, Helena. Please set another place for my son.”
“Helena...” Ronnie says. “Not a Galician name, I would have thought?”
“In my language, I am Halya.” She turns and goes to the kitchen. She can still hear them as she carries roast lamb and vegetables to the dining room.
“You never mentioned she was beautiful,” Ronnie says.
Oh shut up, Halya thinks. Stupid calf.
And then the pahna’s voice. “You’re to keep away from her. Do you understand?”
“Mother, what on earth are you on about?”
“And what brings you here tonight? I really wasn’t expecting you.” Halya has never heard any mother talk to her grown son this way. She wishes she could catch all the words.
“It’s that pack of coyotes, Mother. They killed a couple of my lambs.”
“Our lambs, Ronnie.” Halya misses the rest, but they’re arguing – something about his father’s death and Ronnie running the brick plant.
“Mother!” she hears Ronnie say. “I hadn’t realized you had such a poor opinion of my abilities.”
“That is because you don’t pay attention,” Mrs. Shawcross says in a nasty tone.
Ronnie’s face turns an ugly purple. Halya thinks he’d like to strangle his mother.
Mrs. Shawcross notices Halya in the doorway. Halya steps forward.
“Dinner is on the table, Mrs. Shawcross.” Another of Louisa’s little phrases.
“Thank you, dear. Ronnie, will you give me your arm?”
Ronnie lets the question hang, looking at Halya’s face – no, gaping – slowly forgetting his anger.
Have you never seen a woman before? Halya wonders.
Finally he offers his mother his arm and leads her into the dining room.
CHAPTER 18
Conspirators
March, 1916
A small party cuts firewood. The temperature is well below zero, but it doesn’t feel as cold as it would’ve in January. The sky is drenched in sun. Ice crystals reflect minute flashes of light. Impossible not to feel that winter’s back is broken. Sergeant Lake calls the lunch break and the men scatter to log and rock perches. Taras and the carver happen to sit near Lake in a sheltered corner of the clearing.
They see a black, weasel-like creature high in a tree. It leaps to the next tree. Its long tail works like a sail in the sparkling air.
“What’s that?” Bohdan asks. Taras sees he’d like to make a carving of this animal.
“Pine marten,” Arthur Lake says. “Almost looks too large to be so agile, doesn’t it? Moves like a squirrel. Eats them, too.” The marten pounces on some small animal and begins tearing it apart.
Taras raises his arm to take a bite of his sandwich. He hears a sudden squawk, sees a blur of claws and feathers, and the sandwich is no longer there. Until it disappeared, Taras had considered the sandwich barely edible, but now it seems like something precious. Lake can’t help laughing.
“What the hell’s that?” Taras glares at a handsome grey bird high up on a branch, pecking at the icy blob.
“Whiskey-jack. Also known as a grey jay.”
“Grey thief.” Taras picks up a spruce cone and flings it at the bird, but it falls short. The bird doesn’t shift a feather. He has to laugh.
Bohdan gets up to watch the bird more closely. Follows it as it hops to another tree.
“Look, I’ve got something I was saving until I was desperate.” Lake pulls out a thick slice of frozen fruitcake, takes a jackknife from his pocket, cuts the cake in two and hands one half to Taras. “My wife made it.”
“Dyakuyiu.” He takes an icy bite and sweetness fills his mouth. Seeing Lake’s knife, Taras decides to tell him about Bohdan and his carvings; how his knife has been taken away.
After a moment’s thought, Lake hands over the knife. “You give him this. I’ll come and see his carvings some time.”
Taras puts the knife away in his pocket. No one has seen. “Dobre. I’ll give it to him.” He bites off another chunk of cake and warms it in his mouth, tastes raisins and dates and chopped apricots. Smachniy.
Taras has cleared brush at the buffalo paddock under this man’s direction and cut trees for roadbeds and fuel. Of all the guards, only this one gives you room to breathe. Only this one seems interested in where he is.
He’s learned to refer to the prisoners as Ukrainians.
The marten appears in a much closer tree. Stares at the humans as if he’s trying to work out what they’re doing there and how this can benefit him.
“He’s like us,” Arthur Lake says. “Has to find something to eat.”
“Working in an internment camp is a damn hard way to find something to eat.”
“Bloody hard,” Lake agrees. “We’re sitting here freezing while the pine marten stays warm and eats fresh meat.”
“And the grey bird steals our food.” The whiskey-jack still pecks away at the bit of sandwich. “I guess he’ll know better next time.”
The break is done. They pull themelves up to get on with the work.
The temperature creeps above freezing and the men unfasten their mackinaws. By mid-afternoon, Sergeant Lake tells them to stop – they’ve felled and trimmed as many trees as they can carry. They take the logs
back to camp, cut them to fit in the stoves, stack them in the bunkhouses. They line up early at the mess hall, some of them without coats.
Sergeant Lake sets up his camera as the internees climb the steps to go inside. Only a few men notice him. At the last moment, a man called Yars sees him and turns, hands on hips, to the camera. His face, his posture say, “What the hell do you think you’re looking at?”
Arthur Lake takes the picture.
Back in the bunkhouse, Yuriy pulls a small sack of potatoes out of his coat and hides them under his bunk. He tells his friends what they’ll be buying next time they go to the canteen. Cigarettes and more cigarettes. To pay for the potatoes. He’s been collecting them for several days. Also sugar, and raisins.
They look at each other. This can mean only thing.
They borrow Bohdan and his new knife to peel the potatoes.
They borrow Taras’s extra shirt, recently washed.
They borrow a clean handkerchief from Myro.
Yuriy has noticed a closet in the prisoners’ laundry shack. It contains an old galvanized boiler, leaky if you fill it too full, but usable. No one bothers with it since a new one was bought. To clean their clothes, people heat water on the wood stove and pour it into round wooden washtubs where they rub their garments on scrubbing boards. Then of course they need to rinse them. The whole process takes a fair bit of time.
This means that no one should get too suspicious of how long it’s going to take Taras and his friends.
They begin early on Sunday. Six men – Yuriy, Taras, Tymko, Myroslav, Ihor and Bohdan take over the small room. Myro keeps watch at the door. They clean the boiler, set water to boil and begin peeling potatoes.
That is, Bohdan peels potatoes. He doesn’t like other people using his knife. Once a little guy called Big Petro took Bohdan’s old knife without asking – to cut his toenails. Big Petro’s toenails were thick and yellow, like hooves. Of course the knife slipped. It took hours to stop the bleeding.
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