Tatiana sits in a ruby velvet-covered chair between Taras and the American. Translator for a former serf and the descendant of slaves. Thrilled at the chance to help.
Seated on a plain wooden chair, Ira Aldridge holds himself with straight-backed dignity. His warm brown skin glows with light that comes from within. His eyes note every detail of the room and the people in it.
Our poet sings a merry folk tune that has Ira nodding his head to the rhythm and applauding when it’s done. Tatiana tells him the meaning, and as she speaks the foreign words, Taras realizes how little the song accords with his memories of peasant life. No use telling their visitor that. Perhaps he knows without telling.
Ira will sing next. Tatiana explains that the song is about Moses and the people of Israel, held in bondage by the Egyptians. The song begs God to free the Israelites. Ira stands, a man of medium height and build, and seems to grow larger and more powerful, as he does on stage when he plays Othello the Moor – welcome when he’s of use to Venice but despised for his race. Ira draws a breath and seems to take up life from the room, life the others hadn’t known was there.
“When Israel was in Egypt land,” Ira sings in a deep baritone, “Let my people go. Oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go.” The notes saturate the room, the bodies of his listeners. Taras is reckoned a fine singer but knows he could never match this.
Yekaterina creeps back into the room and sits on a stool in a corner as Ira’s voice sends waves of emotion toward her.
“Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. And tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go.”
The song flows through Taras like a river. Tatiana begins to explain it, but her words drift away. Taras has understood. The song is not about Moses and the Israelites. It’s about Ira’s own people, black people from the west of Africa.
As Ira moves back to his seat, Taras presses the black man’s hand, marvelling at the intense colour against his own hand. Yekaterina runs to her mother and pushes onto her lap, pulling at the abundant material of her mother’s skirt to make herself a small nest, but keeping her eyes on Taras and Ira.
“Perhaps, my dear Taras Hryhoryvich, you would favour us with one of your poems,” Kalnikov says. “Something about youth, for instance.”
Taras smiles at his old patron. He recites from memory and Tatiana translates line by line, looking apologetic, as if unsure her words will match the original ideas. She doesn’t understand Ukrainian as well as Russian.
She begins with the title, “My thirteenth year was passing,” and Ira nods.
“Watching the lambs one day, I walked far past the village. Perhaps the sun shone, or was my joy without a cause? Joy as if at the throne of God.” Tatiana sees she can do it and takes the story to heart as if it is her own. Kalnikov watches as if he’s never quite seen her before.
“They called us for our midday meal...but I stayed among the weeds and prayed. Why a small boy wished so...fervently...to pray I cannot tell, nor how my happiness came about. But around me, the village and God’s sky, the lambs even, all seemed to rejoice. The sun shone warm but did not burn.”
She understands, the poet thinks. She recalls some moment of perfect innocence and wonder.
She continues, translating after he speaks, a phrase or two at a time. “It was not for long the sun kept kind and warm...not for long I prayed, when the sun turned to red fire and...now my heaven burned. As one awakened from sleep, I saw the village grow dim...God’s blue sky become dark. I saw the lambs...knew they were not mine. In the village no home awaited me.”
Tatiana is distressed now, wishes perhaps that she hadn’t taken this on. Her arms pull Yekaterina closer as she strains to think of the English words.
“My bitter tears flowed...but by the roadside...a girl was picking hemp and...heard my sorrow. She wiped away my tears, kissed me gently.” Now Tatiana finds her way again.
“It seemed once more the sun shone...as if the world were mine... Fields, groves, orchards. Laughing, we drove the lambs to water. Now when I remember, my heart weeps. Why, God, could I not have lived...my short time in that dear place? I would have died knowing nothing else...never knowing an outcast’s life.”
The last line is “never cursed men and God,” but Tatiana can’t bring herself to say it. Kalnikov nods, tears in his eyes.
Ira rises and embraces Taras. Tatiana and her father say nothing to disturb the moment. Yekaterina peers like a small animal from her tangled blue burrow.
Semyon, the butler, stands in the doorway, a silver tray with pastries in his hands. Tears stain his sallow cheeks. Feeling Taras’s eyes upon him, he straightens himself and carries the tray to the table where the samovar awaits.
When Myro stops, neither of his listeners can speak for a moment. Then Tymko says, “You should write that down.”
And he weeps as though for all the sorrows of life. His land, his people. His wife and daughter. The exile and death of Shevchenko. The millions killed in the war and afterwards. The Revolution. Myroslav and Taras kneel beside his chair, each with a hand on his shoulder.
“There’s been too much blood,” he says. The younger men nod, but Tymko knows they don’t see the things he sees.
Mrs. Plaskett must have a sixth sense. She brings in a kettle of hot water to refresh the teapot. Taking care not to look at Tymko.
“He could use a little whiskey in that,” she says as she goes out, and Taras could almost swear she winks at them.
After she shuts the door, Taras takes out his flask and adds whiskey to all their cups.
CHAPTER 46
A man who died
Halya sits at the typewriter, a pile of neatly typed pages beside it. She has finished writing Zenon’s story and now stares blankly at the wall behind the empty bed. She’s done what she set out to do, and now everything seems to slow down, a little at a time, until she thinks she might turn to stone. She could sit here for a day, two days, more.
Her work at the newspaper has ended. Nestor doesn’t know when, if ever, he can get The People’s Voice running again. She has a little money in the bank, mostly saved by Zenon during his years at the paper. Enough to live on for a few months. She could stay on in this suite, eating toast and tea and gradually adding things back into her diet. She could look for a job, although she doesn’t know who’d want a refugee from a newspaper shut down by the government for its seditious views. Or was that revolutionary views? Treasonous views?
And she’s still just a woman who didn’t finish high school, because she couldn’t do it all in eight months. Mind you, she’s a woman who didn’t finish high school who won a prize for an essay on the novels of Dickens. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? No, probably not.
Nestor says they can take her back waiting tables at his uncle’s café. She could make a living.
Or should she try to go back to her father and Natalka? She could write to him, see how he responds. She doesn’t think she could go back to being the dependent daughter, someone he thinks he can control. And yet she must see her baba. She can’t understand how she failed to find a way to visit them until now.
Yes, she’s sent letters. But does Viktor even read them to Natalka?
Halya slowly becomes aware of noise outside, coming closer. Then shouting, car horns and what she thinks must be rifle shots. She makes herself get up and look out the window. A wave of people flows down the street. Like lava pouring out of a volcano, she thinks. John Madison at Briarwood taught her the exports of many countries, and about lava, and this is the first time she’s found any of it useful. People flow like lava, coming closer.
Sirens shriek. Far away a train whistle blows, on and on. Men run down the street, leaping, bawling, setting off firecrackers. Laughing. It takes her a while to understand. They signal not war or danger but something new.
She walks downstairs and out the door. The cheering crowd surges down the street. Men in working clothes and a few in uniform, eyes wild. Women in housedresses who have run i
nto the street without coats. Nobody wears a white mask.
A young soldier calls to Halya. “Hey sweetheart! The war’s over!” Other people echo his voice: “War’s over! War’s over!” The soldier holds his hand out to her. She lets herself be pulled into the torrent. She knows the November air is cold, but doesn’t seem to feel it.
The soldier whirls her around, kisses her, his lips burning. She feels tears on her face, his or hers she doesn’t know. She kisses him back and for a few seconds they hold each other close. The crowd jolts forward with its own odd, irregular rhythm, pries her fingers loose from the soldier’s grasp. Another wave deposits her at the edge of the street, like silt.
She sees a man on the other side and he glances her way across the colliding bodies. He looks like someone she once knew. A man who died. The human tide ebbs for a second and they face each other across the street. It can’t be him, but so much has happened to her, she has lost all control of her life, so what if it is? They watch each other, feeling the weight of the years apart, the pain of separation and loss, falling away. Taras crosses over to her.
Up close, he sees how thin she looks, how pale. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
She knows she must look like a bag of old sticks. “I had the influenza. My husband too. He died.”
A wave of vertigo passes through her brain and for a moment she thinks she’ll fall, but he reaches out an arm to steady her and it passes. It is him. It is. Taras.
“I’m all right now,” she hears her voice say.
They go up the stairs to the suite. Taras can’t believe the power of his desire, all over his body. It blazes through his arms and legs and belly. They lie down on the bed.
She touches his face, his hair, his chest. She doesn’t want to know yet how he can possibly be here. But he’s real, not some fevered dream, and somehow they’ve found each other. That’s enough. When she was a girl, she loved him, but now she’s a woman. Longing flows through her. She helps him undress, and he helps her. Their clothes fall to the floor.
When he enters her body, deep shudders shake him and their tears break free. He’s afraid to move in case it will end too soon, but he can’t think about that for long. He feels himself coming closer and closer, feels her moving with him. It seems to go on and on, although there’s no way of knowing how long. And then he’s still inside her and it begins again.
Afterwards they lie together a long time. For now they don’t need to put anything into words.
Halya hands Taras a cup of hot tea. He drinks and almost scalds his mouth. Across the table he looks at a face he both knows and doesn’t know. It must be the same for her. Four and a half years have passed since they came to Canada. They have led separate lives; changed from untried boy and girl to man and woman. Her hair is darker, her face still pinched from fever. He is healthy once more, but he’ll never again be so young, so unknowing.
“He told me you were dead,” Halya says.
“I know. Don’t think about it.” He’ll tell her all about Viktor soon, but not yet.
“How did you find me?”
“I didn’t. I came to see Tymko. He’s dying in the hospital. I wandered into the street and saw all the people. I thought they’d gone crazy, and then I realized, it’s over now. The war’s over. I walked with them until I was tired. I looked across the street –”
“Who is Tymko?”
Of course she doesn’t know. She thought he was dead. She doesn’t know the men who became his brothers, his teachers.
“Taras?” She takes his hand.
“Tymko is...” He stops as his throat tightens. Tries to smile. “Listen, Halychka. I have a story to tell you.”
“Dobre. I want to know how it is you’re alive.”
They decide to marry right away and the wedding is very small. The witnesses are Nestor and Paraska. Myro comes, and Miss Greeley. Taras didn’t want to wait for his parents to travel so far. And there is no moment for a celebration with Tymko dying in the hospital, but they will do that over time, in their own way.
After Tymko’s small funeral, they take the train to Spring Creek. They have written to Viktor, and to Daria and Mykola, to say they’re coming.
Moses meets them at the train. He and Halya look at each other for a long moment without speaking, as if remembering and verifying what each has been told of the other. Then without either seeming to go first, they hug.
They stop at his house to drink tea and exchange news. Moses has been to see people who look like him – not only in being black, but in countless small ways. The shape of one person’s nose or another’s eyes; a small gesture or the way a smile forms. The cadence of laughter. Voices that blend like music. No, that are music. When he’s with them, he fits. They are his family.
His aunt and uncle wanted him to stay. Find a nice woman and get married. He did meet a woman he liked, named Esther, but she told him from the start she’d never leave her country, especially not to be the second black person in a small town somewhere south of Moose Jaw. He would like to find someone but thinks that if it happens it will have to be here, in these hills.
He reminds Taras of the story of the old man, Ostap, in Shevchana: “Then ask yourselves: Now who are we?” he quotes back to Taras.
It seems that Moses is a black Ukrainian man of Saskatchewan.
He says he had a lot of time to think on the train, watched over by black porters. They often looked puzzled by him; he didn’t belong in any category they knew. And he sometimes saw white people look at him the way Stover did.
Lately he’s been remembering his time at school, when he was the Orphan Boy. Then he’d had the feeling of being someone special, even if it was for a terrible reason. Even if he mostly felt sad. But he doesn’t think anyone noticed Stover much one way or another. Maybe it’s all that simple: he wanted to be noticed and no one cared. Racism is always out there, easy to learn if you want to.
He drives them to Viktor’s place. Natalka meets them at the door. Halya and her grandmother hold each other a long time, stroke each other’s hair and faces. Viktor is ill in bed. Something to do with his heart. Natalka’s had the doctor in.
In his room, Halya looks into her father’s eyes. Understands that he’s dying and that he knows it. He holds his hand out to her and she takes it. He sees Taras standing in the doorway and beckons him in.
“I know you’re married already,” he says in a hoarse voice. “But I want to give my blessing. May you live a long life. A happy life.”
Halya kisses his cheek.
“Tell Mykola I’m sorry.”
“I’ll tell him, Batko.”
“I have made my will. You and Taras will inherit this land. Will you stay and run the farm?” The question is for both Halya and Taras.
Taras thinks a moment and nods. Halya too. Moments later Viktor sleeps. He is slipping away. His soul, or whatever a person has inside that tells him who he is, is leaving.
Taras realizes that Viktor has achieved one of his goals. He has become a new man.
A few days later they bury him in the town cemetery. A Ukrainian priest comes down from Regina and Moses is cantor. Daria and Mykola stand beside Taras and Halya.
Taras feels something shift inside him and then settle. He is tied now to this land between grass and sky. He is reasonably sure that he will never again be taken away and imprisoned, and that he and Halya can be together as long as both of them live.
As winter sets in, the farmhouse takes on something of the feel of a village house. Taras buys a grindstone to make flour. He braids leather harness for Smoke and works with him in the yard. Tymko gave Taras the beaded flower from Leah Beaver, and Natalka sews it onto a linen sorochka for him. She cooks the most beautiful food, and soon Halya begins to look healthy and strong.
Halya writes articles about Ukrainian issues and mails them to Nestor. They can’t be published with the paper shut down, but some day they might be. On Sundays they pick up Moses in town and drive out to see Taras’s parents.
“Ah,” he says, “never let a man know things like that unless you’re serious.”
“Go on,” she says, blushing.
Taras writes to Myro, who is seeing a young woman, also a teacher, and to Yuriy at his farm. He writes to Ihor, who is still at the ranch in Alberta.
The Kalynas – Taras and Halya and Daria and Mykola – and Natalka all spend Christmas in town with Moses.
Moses throws the kutya on the ceiling. It will be a prosperous year.
In the New Year, a letter comes for Pahna Natalka Antonenko. From Maryna, written for her by Larysa. The first letter Natalka has ever received. Maryna and Larysa, and Larysa’s son, Ruslan, are in Canada. So is Lubomyr Heshka.
“I gave you such good advice,” Maryna says in her letter, “that I decided to follow it myself. After Ruslan died, we sold everything we had to buy the tickets. The necklace helped.” And then, she goes on, seeing what they were doing, Lubomyr said that if two women and a baby could emigrate, surely a strong, more or less young man could do the same.
They left the old country a couple of months after Taras and his parents, just in time for all of them to spend the war in an internment camp at Spirit Lake in Quebec. They survived that, somehow, and now they live in Hamilton, Ontario. Lubomyr has a job in a steel plant and a Canadian sweetheart. Maryna and Larysa run a tailoring business and hope to visit Spring Creek some day.
Maryna has become someone’s baba.
Just before Easter a parcel arrives, forwarded from Taras’s old boarding house in Edmonton – an album of Arthur Lake’s photographs. Halya looks at the pictures for hours and Taras tells her about the camp. He’s used to making stories now. When he can’t remember what happened in a picture or wasn’t there when it was taken, he makes something up.
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