Blood and Salt

by Barbara Sapergia

  “So I guess you just became my star reporter.”

  “Nestor, I’m afraid for him.”

  “Me too.” Nestor looks haggard. “But we’ll do everything we can for him. Right? Now I’m gonna get him a lawyer.” In a moment his footsteps echo on the stairs.

  Next morning Nestor is in the hall replacing the glass in the office window when a tall, middle-aged person in a long overcoat and fur hat appears at the top of the stairs and nods to him, then goes into the office and introduces himself to Halya. Zenon’s lawyer is Joel Greenberg, a Jewish man whose parents came from Chernowitz and whose grandparents came from various points in eastern Europe. He speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, German and English, all with an edge of long-suffering humour. Joel Greenberg knows what it’s like to wish you had your own country, although his expectations are lower than Zenon’s. He makes his living working for some big companies but also donates time to helping immigrants and their families. Everyone in his family has been an immigrant at one time or another.

  The hat and coat go on the wooden coat tree. Greenberg sits at Nestor’s desk. Nestor proceeds to pound a nail in the wall and Halya pulls up a chair.

  “So,” Greenberg says. “I’ve seen him. He says to tell you he’s fine.”

  “Is he fine?” Halya asks.

  “He says to tell you he is.”

  “I feel responsible,” Halya says. “Some of those words were mine. The very ones the police got upset about. I suggested them.”

  “This is the last time I want to hear you say that. Ever. I’ve already got a client, I don’t need another one. And I’m sure Mr. Andrychuk has a better idea than you do about what upsets the police. So does Nestor here.”

  “That’s true.” Nestor sighs and puts down the hammer. “Halya and Zenon are such idealists. I should have known better.”

  “Of course. We should all know you can’t say what you want in this country. We should only say nice, inoffensive things. Keep pictures of the king on the wall.” He looks up to where Nestor is putting up just such a picture, beside the one of Shevchenko. Halya can’t help laughing.

  “Now Zenon is, of course, from Galicia,” Greenberg goes on. “So when he said he wanted Ukraine to be free, he was referring to freedom from the Austrian Empire.”

  “No,” Halya says, “he wanted all Ukrainians to be free, as far east as Kharkiv and south to Odessa.”

  “That’s the last time I want to hear you say that, too. And by the way, there are more Jews in Odessa than there are Ukrainians.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My mother’s father came from there, that’s how.”

  “Was he Ukrainian, then?” Halya asks.

  Greenberg laughs. “People from Odessa didn’t think that way. They thought of themselves as citizens of the city. My grandfather was a Jew of Odessa.”

  The picture is up. Nestor straightens it and gives it a mock salute. “Good thing I never let him put The Communist Manifesto on the bookshelf. Of course, he was only interested in it as a historical document.”

  “Not even funny, Nestor,” Greenberg says. “If you’d had that up when the police came, I’d never get your boy off. It’s going to be hard enough as it is.”

  “You mean you’re going to get him off?” Halya’s been too consumed with guilt and worry to consider the possibility.

  “I’m going to put up one helluva fight. If I can’t do it, I don’t know who can.”

  Nestor looks worried. Maybe nobody can. And until the preliminary hearing, which won’t be for another month, Zenon will sit in jail.

  Halya feels an icy stab of guilt. She is responsible. If only she hadn’t egged him on. If only she’d shut up.

  In the end, after a quick trial in which a bored judge seems deaf to all his arguments, Greenberg loses, but does win Zenon a shorter sentence than he expected. Three months hard labour. The newspaper is put on notice: watch what you write. We can close you any time we want.

  A few days later, Halya sits at her desk, scanning long lists of names of internees in concentration camps that Nestor obtained from the Canadian government. Lately she’s been wondering again if her father lied about Taras’s death. What if he really did follow her to Canada, only to be interned? She’s been through the lists of men in the Brandon camp in Manitoba and the Spirit Lake and Kapuskasing camps in Ontario, and is now working her way through the many camps in British Columbia and Alberta.

  Looking through the list from the Banff camp, she sees the name Taras first and then the initial “K” and can’t hold back a small shriek. Nestor rushes over to look, in time to see her disappointment. Kalyna, not Kuzyk. He pats her on the arm and it’s too much. She starts to cry, and Nestor puts his arm around her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You shouldn’t have patted my arm. Sometimes sympathy is harder to take than indifference.” She manages a small smile and goes on searching.

  CHAPTER 32

  They’re not like us

  January, 1917

  The days are viciously cold. Taras is tired before work even begins. The chill clutches at his heart, his gut.

  One morning he’s felling and trimming trees when all at once he feels he can’t do it any more. Just can’t do it. He throws down the axe. Let them send him to the guardhouse.

  Close by, a prisoner shoves someone who got in his way. The second man shoves back, and they fight. So cold and hungry they can barely stand, still they thump each other. A couple of scarecrows, thrashing around in the snow. There are bloody noses before Andrews and Bullard can stop it. Barkley fires his rifle in the air. Just what an asshole like Barkley would do. What good is a gun if you can’t scare people with it?

  The two men sit stunned, their blood a scarlet code written on the snow. The other prisoners watch them. Some flop down on the ground. The man who started it begins to weep. The other one crawls over and pats his back.

  After a while the guards decide to call it a day, and the prisoners carry the tree trunks back to camp.

  That evening an officer they’ve never seen before comes into the bunkhouse with Andrews and Bullard. He looks briskly around and glares at the men. What the hell do you want here? their faces give back. We have done our day’s work. Eaten food that leaves our stomachs aching with hunger. Food so poor and sparse that our muscles have shrunk and the cheap, worn clothing hangs on our bodies. Our gums bleed.

  “I’m Captain Workman,” says the tall, angular young man with close-clipped black hair and moustache and a back held unnaturally straight. “I am in charge of camp arrangements now, and I’m going to run a very tight ship. Captain Roderick Workman. Remember that name.”

  Why? Taras wonders. We aren’t going to be friends.

  He tries to understand what lies behind the harsh manner. What this man believes or guesses about the people he’s in charge of. And who he thinks he is. That part’s easy: he appears to think of himself as a very important kind of person; skilled, intelligent, upright. Part of the natural ruling class.

  “You people have had it pretty good here.” The men stare in disbelief. “Your maintenance is costing the Canadian government a great deal of money. From now on things will be different. There will be an end to all waste and unnecessary expense.”

  So. He seems to think they’ve all come here for a holiday in the mountains. It’s an Austrian custom, isn’t it? See the beautiful scenery and bathe in the mineral waters? And they’ve actually been expecting the government to pay for this. How selfish.

  Andrews and Bullard watch uneasily.

  At first Workman doesn’t notice their discomfort, so intent is he on his message. He looks more closely at the prisoners and sees hatred in their eyes.

  “Very well,” he says crisply, “that’s all.” Taras thinks he meant to say much more, that he’d had a long speech prepared. But he turns and walks out, followed by the guards. Angry voices rise like a sudden gale. Yesterday Taras wouldn’t have dreamt he could want to kill a man five minutes after first seei
ng him.

  Hating’s not worth the trouble, he knows that, but for a moment it feels good.

  Still, he wonders what in hell goes on in the man’s mind. Workman reminds Taras of some Austrian officers he crossed paths with when he was looking after horses for the army. Their posture, their way of speaking, made it clear that they came from the better class of people, and he didn’t.

  Here in the camp Taras has seen hostile and surly guards before, but Workman has something extra. He must come from a very well-off family. You can hear it in the way he speaks – his words clipped and ringing with authority. Almost as if he speaks for the Canadian government and the king and the Duke of Connaught all rolled into one.

  Something must be keeping him in Canada, something that would have made it impossible for him to fight. Like the bad lungs or consumptive limps of some of the soldiers in this camp.

  Or is just that the well-off family has pulled some strings to keep him out of the war?

  Or is he not the top product of the well-off family? Maybe the older, smarter sons are already off in the trenches. Maybe Roderick has just failed at something else, and is here to make his name in an unexciting posting in an internment camp. If ordinary soldiers hate it here, how must this fancy captain feel?

  The next morning Taras wakes chilled, from his belly to his toenails. His cheeks feel frostbitten. His brain, however, seems to have been working briskly all night, reviewing everything he’s learned since he came here, and the moment it thinks he’s awake enough to take it in, it starts telling him what it’s figured out.

  He is an Austrian. Austrians are not as good or intelligent as people who originated in Britain. They don’t think or plan as well. They don’t feel pain or cold as much; or hunger. They are suited to hard, physical work. There is a good reason why they’re here.

  They’re Austrians. The enemy.

  Dobre. He can almost believe it himself, despite a lifetime of thinking he’s Ukrainian. Except that he’s actually seen real Austrians. Colonel Krentz, for example, but he’s just one of many. And aside from the German Prisoners of War who were around when the camp first began, Taras never sees anything like real Austrians here.

  Haven’t any real Austrians ever come to Canada as immigrants? Why aren’t any of them interned? They’d be even more dangerous. More Austrian.

  So where are they? There seems to be only one possible answer: they must be out blowing up bridges. He wonders how many bridges it’s been so far during the war. If only the government realized that there are people in Canada who are more Austrian than the internees, they would probably do something about it. Save lots of bridges.

  Taras is completely certain, and has been for some time, that there haven’t actually been any bridges blown up since the war started. By Austrians or anybody else. Despite the withholding of newspapers and other sources of information, he thinks they’d have heard about it if bridges were exploding at regular intervals.

  He himself would have had a hard time blowing up bridges around Spring Creek, for the simple reason that there aren’t any.

  “Christ, it’s freezing,” Yuriy says from his bunk.

  “There’s frost all over the goddamn walls!” Myro doesn’t swear, or didn’t till now.

  “Fuel has been found to be an unnecessary luxury,” Tymko says.

  “What’s next?” Myro wonders.

  “Food,” says Tymko. “Then clothing.” He pauses. “Then dirty jokes.”

  “Then clean jokes,” Myro says, and for a moment there’s a rustle of laughter. They aren’t sent to work that day. They spend the time huddled around stoves, going out in one-hour shifts to cut firewood.

  This allows Taras to continue his philosophical rants and musings.

  All right, he may as well think about this matter of being white or not white. Apparently Ukrainians are not white; this has been made clear by the Banff newspaper. Given that Austrians and Ukrainians seem to be roughly interchangeable, does that mean that Austrians are also not white? He wonders if anyone’s told them.

  Can Austrians also only be gentled with the handle of a pickaxe?

  Damn, he should be writing this down. But he can’t write that fast. Or he should be telling it to Tymko. It’s his kind of subject. There’s just one problem; even Tymko has lost interest in talking politics the last few days. Taras hopes he’s not getting sick.

  So, back to thinking about whiteness. And also Austrian-ness. He tries to imagine the thoughts in the mind of the commandant. “Oh,” he might say to himself, “I’m in charge of all these dangerous Austrians. I’ll have to watch my step... Oh, say, I learned German in school, perhaps I could talk to some of these chaps and trick them into telling me their plans for espionage and sabotage. Yes indeed, if I could prevent one bridge or building from being blown up, I would surely be promoted. I could forget about this dull, boring assignment.”

  He wouldn’t think or do this, of course. Because when they really consider it, the commandant, and all the guards, know perfectly well that the prisoners are, with a few exceptions, Ukrainians who speak Ukrainian.

  And that no man in this camp has ever imagined, let alone planned, how to spy on Canada and report his findings to somebody in the Austrian military; or how to blow up bridges or railroads. They have to know this.

  But there’s another way of thinking – if it can even be called thinking – that can divert their attention whenever they get too close to admitting to themselves that the prisoners are here for no good reason at all. It can be summed up in the phrase Taras heard early in his imprisonment: “They’re not like us.” That was Taveley, a soldier who was sent away because he was too nasty, too prejudiced to fit in, even in this place.

  Racial superiority is a way of thinking that helps reinforce all the selfish and all the stupid reasons why the internees have been put here. How soothing it must be to have, always ready to hand, that feeling of comfortable superiority toward the people you exploit. They’re used to it, in fact they’re suited to it. They don’t mind it; it’s all they know.

  Taras thinks that the commandant probably also agrees that it’s important for Ukrainians to be imprisoned because their labour competes with the British-born and northern European workers who came here first. Yes, the Ukrainians were invited to come, when they were needed, but now they’re unwelcome. If they can’t be shipped right back, they must be imprisoned. And while they’re hanging around eating free food, there is, as luck would have it, a highway that needs to be built. And in summer, nine holes of a golf course.

  And after all, as they’re not white, they really shouldn’t mind too much.

  Or maybe he doesn’t think about any of it. Maybe Taras is giving him credit for more brains than he’s got. As far as he can tell, even the soldiers think the commandant is a bit stupid. So maybe he just sits in his office during the day and goes to the officers’ mess in the evening. From what the Crag and Canyon writer said, the food and drink are good and just what a senior officer requires. The commandant doesn’t have to know why he’s here and why there’s a camp here. He just has to keep it going and keep order.

  Maybe Workman’s trying to make a name for himself so he can be a commandant some day.

  Workman. Now, that’s an odd name. Shouldn’t it belong to a man who works with his hands? Maybe he’s trying to run away from his name. Trying to rise above it.

  Taras’s theorizing carries him through the afternoon. As a topic for serious thought, Workman has been of some use. Just not in the way he aspires to.

  The next day it’s apparently a few degrees warmer, because the men are sent out once more to work in their flimsy clothing, guarded by Andrews and Bullard. They’ve been promised new jackets and pants, but nothing comes when it’s needed. By noon everyone’s dead on their feet, shaking with cold, including the guards.

  “They’re freezing, for Christ’s sake. Let’s call it a day,” Bullard mutters to Andrews.

  Andrews thinks for about six seconds. “Hey, every
body, let’s get the hell out of here.” Neither of them care that the prisoners heard.

  The men nod at the guards in some kind of acknowledgement. Not that they’re suddenly comrades, but still, they did something. Even Bullshit, in fact it was his idea. They stumble off through the trees. When they reach the bunkhouse, they’re too tired to do anything but slump on their bunks. Even Tymko, usually sustained by political analysis and sarcasm, looks defeated.

  “It’s thirty below out there,” Myro says. “Our coats are shit.”

  “Food’s shit,” Yuriy says.

  “The new captain’s crazy,” Tymko says sadly.

  “Even the guards think so,” Yuriy says.

  “We have to do something,” Tymko says.

  Taras hears a new tone in his voice. Or maybe an old tone – the way Tymko sounded the night they met him.

  “What can we do?” he asks.

  “Yeah, Tymko,” Yuriy says, “don’t you socialists have the answer to everything?” Tymko gives him a dirty look. “No offence.”

  Yuriy’s only voicing the question many of them have been thinking: If your political analysis is so goddamn great, why can’t you think of something we can do?

  “I was in a hunger strike when I first arrived at Castle Mountain,” Taras says. “And once, we refused to work when it was too cold. But now we need something more.”

  “Like what?” Yuriy asks.

  A man called Nick Melnychuk starts coughing. He’s been coughing for a couple of weeks, but now it’s getting worse. He didn’t get out of bed this morning.

  Taras realizes Nick must be really ill. He has a vision of the old man in the village reading hall reciting from memory.

  “We can remember who we are.”

  “What?” Myro asks.

  “We’re not Ruthenians or Galicians or bohunks, or any of their words for us. We’re Ukrainians.” Taras wonders where his words are coming from. “And if we stick together, we might get somewhere.”