“Don’t let Mrs. Plaskett see that.” Tymko takes a deep drink and has to pound his chest when he starts to cough and wheeze.
“Sorry. I haven’t got used to drinking since they had us locked up all that time.” Taras isn’t fooled. Tymko’s lungs haven’t really recovered since he was dragged in the river.
Tymko always used to say, “The capitalist system will find some way to get you.” He sits in the scruffy chair amply vindicated. Clears his throat. “Don’t worry. I’m oh-kay, as the boys say down at the yard. Ohhhh-kay!”
Taras sees that Tymko doesn’t want to talk about it any more. He turns to Myro. “Professor. Have you found a job worthy of your talents?”
“I have. I teach little kids arithmetic. Just like before. I try to get them to see how easy it is. How much it’s going to help them.”
“And do they agree that it’s easy? And helpful?” Taras hasn’t had the chance to tease Myro for a long time now.
“Not always. But what do they know? They’re kids.”
Everyone laughs. Myro, in tweed pants and a dark jacket looks very respectable, only still too thin, as if his body is holding itself in readiness in case it has to go back to grubbing brush on a wretched diet.
“Myro, if these kids can learn at all, you will teach them.” Tymko looks at Myro as if he’s his best, smartest son. “The angels would stop to listen.”
“I wonder,” Taras says, “do the angels know arithmetic?”
“Good question,” Tymko says. “Since angels were never people, maybe not.”
“They were never people?” Taras realizes he hasn’t given angels much thought.
“I don’t think so,” Tymko says. “I think they were always up there with God. Isn’t that right, Professor?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” Myro says, “angels were never people. But they know all kinds of things, so maybe that includes arithmetic.”
“You’re right,” Tymko says. “They probably have an instinctive understanding of arithmetic. And socialism.”
He smiles sadly. After a year and a half of reading about the revolution in Russia, he’s not sure where it’s taking people. In fact, he’s not sure it’s actually begun. The real revolution.
Taras remembers his own questions. What if it doesn’t turn out the way you think? How do you make sure it’s more than just a bunch of people being killed?
He tries not to notice Tymko’s pasty colour, lank hair, diminished mass. Before, he could lift you in the air and spin you around.
“When I’m feeling better, I can maybe get a wooden foot. I’ll be able to walk a bit and they’ll try to find some job I can do. I can be one of the old buggers who sets out the signals and takes them down again when the train passes.”
Taras can’t imagine Tymko doing this.
“I’ll have time between trains to tell the other old buggers about socialism. We can start the Edmonton Old Buggers Radical Socialist League.”
“And the old buggers shall lead them,” Myro says.
“Revolution can’t be far away when that happens,” Taras adds.
“That’s right, boys. I see I’ve taught you well.”
“I guess you have,” Myro says. “Professor.” They laugh, but the laughs are getting thinner.
“Tell me about Shevchenko in that army camp he was in,” Tymko asks. “When he was in exile.”
“You don’t want to hear that now. It’s a bit gloomy.”
“I do want to hear it. Because it’s gloomy. It helps me feel better.”
“All right. Where to begin? Well, he spent almost ten years in exile, as you know. As ever, he was in trouble because he wasn’t careful enough about what he said. His ideas were an offence to the tsar and his family. And remember, the tsar’s family had once subscribed to the project to free Shevchenko from serfdom. They expected gratitude and found only revolutionary ideas of Ukrainian nationhood. Even though many of the Russian nobility were westernized and full of liberal ideas, you could only push so far.”
Tymko sips whiskey, sighs with pleasure. This is the Myro he loves.
“So it was that when the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius fell, he fell with them, and he fell harder because he was a better choice of scapegoat, being a former peasant without an influential family. And because they’d wanted to get him for a long time. And because the tsar never forgave him. It was a complex system of imperial control, but at the centre was a real person, the tsar, and he had the means to punish a former serf for his freethinking ways.”
Tymko settles back in his chair, nods his agreement.
“Our Taras never surrendered his spirit, but there were many terrible times for him. As a writer and artist he was true to his vision – he painted what he saw, and he saw with Ukrainian eyes. As a Ukrainian patriot. And that led to his persecution. He had tried to live the life he believed in, of personal liberty and freedom of expression. But he was essentially a poor man, dependent on others. Being only a freed serf, he didn’t have the safety of wealth and position so many of his friends had.”
In the camp, Taras remembers, not even the guards had freedom of expression. They had to pretend to believe in what the government said they were doing. Many of them did believe.
“Shevchenko lived his last months, a time when he was already very ill, in hope of hearing the tsar’s proclamation of the end of serfdom. Everyone knew it was imminent, but he died in February, 1861, before it took place. I know there must have been times when he sometimes lost hope. I have imagined the disillusion and pain that must sometimes have beset him.
I try to understand how my life has gone. How I have ended up in this place.
If I had not left the countryside, had not escaped serfdom, what could I have done? Next to nothing. But I did escape, and it was like a miracle. I met the most illustrious, the most generous people of my time and joined in their conversations. I wrote poems and stories, and created paintings and engravings that will speak for me when I’m gone.
I have been truly loved by many. But I was not one of these wealthy people. Not even among the Ukrainian nobles. I needed their patronage. Without time and enough to eat, you cannot write poems and paint pictures. I needed them to be generous with what they could spare from their comfortable lives.
I think I was their dancing bear. Their performing monkey. The child who sometimes does something unexpectedly clever. The thing about the bear or the monkey or the child is not only that they may perform well, but that you don’t expect them to be able to do it at all.
A bear on its hind legs makes an amusing parody of a man. A monkey can look into your eyes as if it knew your heart. It pleases you to cosset and reward that monkey. But it is still a monkey.
Unlike the bear or the monkey, I knew what they were doing, somewhere in my mind where I tried not to dwell, because I needed them.
Or am I wrong? Do the dancing bear and the frisking monkey also understand what’s happening to them? Are they simply awaiting the right moment for revenge?
Perhaps I should be proud to have made such an influential enemy. If the tsar hates me, surely that’s my highest recommendation. I made him almost angry enough to have me killed. But I was only exiled. And during that exile, I have been reviled and shunned and starved of joy. Forbidden to write or paint or sketch.
I have also been befriended by officers and their families. No, I don’t forget the commandant’s wife and our shimmering walks through the arid hills. I have gone on expeditions and been given real employment: recording scientific progress through my drawings. People have taken risks to let me work, for even at this great distance from Moscow and Petersburg, the tsar owns vicious curs who will sooner or later growl in his ear.
So here I am. Peasant. Serf. Freeman. Artist. Defender of ideas. And I have made some difference. The most powerful man in the empire hates me and wishes not to kill me but to destroy what makes me human. Surely I’m strong enough to prevent that. The tsar has many concerns, duties, entertainments
in his day. He doesn’t have the time to hate me with perfection or nuance. He sees my talent and wishes to destroy it. Very well, but I have time to think and to resist. Will people remember that some day? Will they consider it even a little bit brave?
It can’t only be my friends – and even they sometimes can’t resist patronizing me. Oh, they don’t mean it, really, but they think, If only Taras could behave more prudently, if only he could restrain his talk of Ukrainian independence. If only he could concentrate on those objectives which might be achieved. If only he could hang onto money. If only he could moderate his singing, dancing, shouting, drinking and declaiming of poetry. Well, perhaps not entirely. He’s great fun to be with. But he doesn’t know how to take care of himself. Doesn’t know how to look about him.
I do, though, too well. Ever since Englehardt had me beaten because I took his painting and copied it. I don’t say Englehardt beat me, perhaps I could understand that he might do so in a flare of rage. No, he had me beaten, by others. I don’t know why it didn’t break my spirit. I suppose that even then I was able to escape into a world of my own imagining. A world where it meant something to be a man.
“Enough,” Tymko says, suddenly weary. “That’s enough for one day. Thank you, Professor.”
“I told you it was a sad time,” Myro says. “But we do remember him. We’ll never forget if I can help it.”
“He was a glimpse of what we could be without our chains,” Tymko says.
“Man was born free and is everywhere in chains,” Myro says.
“Who said that?” Taras asks.
“I don’t know any more,” Tymko admits.
“A French philosopher,” Myro says. “I forget the name.”
Tymko looks very tired. “Hide the whiskey now,” he says. “Mrs. Plaskett will be bringing my supper any minute and she hates liquor. The clothes cupboard will do.”
Taras hides the whiskey and rinses out the glasses in the small corner sink, dries them and puts them away in the cupboard. Myro helps Tymko sit up straighter.
The landlady taps at the door and enters without waiting for an answer. She leaves a large tray with a dish of boiled beef and beans and a pot of hot tea with three cups. When Tymko begins to eat, Taras and Myro see how weak he’s grown.
Taras is relieved to find that Tymko can make it to the toilet down the hall on his own, using crutches. When he comes back, Myro settles him in bed, propped up with pillows.
“Hey,” Tymko says, “what’re you looking at? I’m not dead yet.”
“Of course not. Nobody said that.” Taras realizes he should’ve just laughed it off.
“Teach me some arithmetic, Professor. I need to figure out how long I’ve got.”
“You don’t need arithmetic. You need cheering up. Taras, tell us how your family is. And how Moses the black Ukrainian is faring.”
Tymko’s eyes brighten during the telling, but soon his eyelids droop and he falls asleep. They tuck in his blankets, turn out the lights and creep from the room. At the bottom of the stairs, they meet Mrs. Plaskett and she watches them out the door. Taras hears a tiny sniff and is sure she smells the whiskey. When they’re almost out of earshot, they hear her voice from the dim hallway before she closes the door.
“Come again. He’s glad for a bit of company.”
“We’ll do that,” Myro calls back. “Thank you.”
Myro insists Taras come home with him. His suite is small but very tidy and it has two bookcases full of worn books, some in English and some in Ukrainian. Taras leafs through them and Myro makes scrambled eggs and toast, taken with more cups of tea. Afterwards Taras feels tired to his bones. Myro makes a bed for him out of lumpy sofa cushions, but the room is warm and Taras is with a friend, who sleeps just beyond the doorway in a room barely large enough to hold the single bed and dresser.
Taras has known Myro as a serious, trustworthy person without realizing, until now, how rare that is. Without Myro and Tymko, and Yuriy and Ihor, and Bohdan, how could he have endured the camp? In the old country only Ruslan was as close to him. But he and Ruslan were only boys. In Canada he’s known the friendship of men.
CHAPTER 43
Zenon’s story
October, 1918
Zenon, Nestor and Halya are at work in the newspaper office, drinking coffee from an enamelled pot keeping warm on a hotplate. They’ve just finished proofreading the November edition and sent it to the printer. Halya’s contribution was an article on Canadian internment camps. Not the kind of piece she could be arrested for, at least they hope not, but quietly describing and questioning the entire project.
Zenon and Nestor are using the slight lull to go through old files, getting them in chronological order, chucking out duplicate copies of some old issues. Ordering the files is easier now than it used to be, because when Zenon was arrested, the government seized huge swathes of material, boxes and boxes of it, and most of it never came back.
Halya is working on a story they can’t publish. Not yet, anyway. As Joel Greenberg said after the police came for Zenon, this isn’t a country where you can say what you want.
The story she’s writing is Zenon’s story, about not only his arrest and imprisonment, but starting back in his childhood. She works away at it whenever there’s a bit of time. His family were farmers near Vegreville, Alberta, and when Zenon contracted tuberculosis at the age of four, there wasn’t much the local doctor could do for him. Eventually he got better, but the bacillus had by then worked its way into his bones and given him one leg that was shorter than the other. Not the best thing for a farm boy, but it didn’t really hinder him.
He went to a small country school, but one with an extraordinary teacher, a man who spoke Ukrainian and English with great fluency and made sure his students did the same. In those days most people thought that finishing elementary school was more than adequate for a farmer’s son, but Mr. Dubnyk didn’t think that way. And by the time he’d finished grade eight, Zenon didn’t think that way either.
He had to spend most of his day doing chores on the farm, especially during harvest, but there was less to do in winter. Afternoons, and in the evenings by the light of a coal oil lamp, he worked his way through high school by correspondence. Mr. Dubnyk would come over once or twice a week to help him with his homework, but mostly Zenon breezed through everything until grade eleven, when Mr. Dubnyk was very useful in explaining Algebra.
He also brought books. Halya was amazed to learn that Zenon had read the same Dickens novels Miss Greeley had lent her. Zenon is the second person she’s been able to talk with about Dickens, and it’s like being back in school; a really good school.
This is the moment Halya has written up to. The next part will be about how he managed to work his way through university and how, after writing for the local paper in Vegreville, he met Nestor and came to work for him.
She’s read through everything she’s written a couple of times this morning, but she’s having trouble concentrating. A headache started just after breakfast and it’s getting worse. She can see the letters on the page, recognizes the words they make up, but sentences are trying to crawl away across the page. Pages are blurring.
Reaching for a cup of tea, Halya misses the handle and spills tea over her tidy stack of papers. She groans and searches in her pockets for a hankie. Zenon looks up, puzzled. Halya doesn’t spill things. He comes over to her desk and sees her unfocused eyes. He feels her forehead and is shocked at the heat. Nestor notices and comes over. He and Nestor look at each other and nod.
“What is it?” Halya says a little crossly. “I’m fine. I’m nearly finished this part. I’m...” She looks puzzled. I’m what? she seems to be thinking.
Zenon grabs Halya’s coat and Nestor telephones for a taxi. As soon as Halya and Zenon are out the door, he calls a doctor he knows.
Zenon and Nestor have heard a rumour that Spanish flu has appeared in Edmonton, travelling up the rail line from Calgary. If it gets bad, there could be hundreds of peopl
e affected, maybe thousands, and many of them could die. They’re dying in Calgary, where no one goes out much if they can help it. Schools are closed, and theatres, even churches.
By the time Zenon has settled her into bed in their one-room suite, Halya can’t even answer his questions. He brings water she can’t drink and bathes her forehead with cloths that he’s soaked in cool water and wrung out. Her body is blazing hot, as if she has a small furnace inside her.
If only there were something useful he could do. If only she’d open her eyes.
The doctor arrives two hours later. As soon as he steps into the room, he sees Halya on the bed and pulls a cotton mask from his pocket. When Zenon sees him put it on, he feels terror pushing aside the common sense he always tries to live by.
The doctor takes Halya’s pulse and listens to her chest. Wherever he touches her, she moans but doesn’t seem to know she’s doing it. Zenon watches his every move, as if this will tell him what to do for her. The doctor is a middle-aged man named Houghton. Zenon can’t say it right because the letters don’t match the sound. It’s hard not being able to say it. The serious professional person Zenon’s made himself into is reduced to a poor immigrant who can’t speak properly.
“Is it the Spanish flu, doctor?” he asks.
The doctor moves away from the bed. “Yes, I’m afraid it is. She must stay in bed and drink lots of water.” His voice is muffled but the meaning is clear.
How could he and Nestor have been so stupid? They should have closed the paper down as soon as they heard the rumours. Who cares about a newspaper at a time like this?
“Will she be all right?” Zenon knows how lame his words sound, but he has to ask.
“I can’t answer that,” the doctor says gently. “Try to bring the fever down. Bathe her with cloths wrung out in cool water.”
“I’ve been doing that already.” Zenon feels panic in his chest and throat, a thick, stupid feeling in his head. He sees the doctor won’t stay much longer. He has to learn everything he can. “Is that all I can do?”
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