Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  I placed the blue fish in a new jar of water and set it by the window to take in the light.

  I found Llewelyna’s Mabinogion hidden beneath her bed. I ran my fingers over the dragon on the cover and considered throwing it into the stove unread, both out of respect for Llewelyna’s wish that I not intrude on her work, and because I wasn’t sure I was ready for what I might find inside. I knew her words, her secrets, would appear as nothing to me. I knew she wrote in Welsh. And still, the fact that she kept this book secret from me made me imagine I might make some sense of it. Llewelyna had bent over this book for years, scribbling furiously. She saved whatever energy she could muster for this one final task. I understood that she was not only translating the text back into Welsh but, like Henry had said, she was attempting to rewrite the stories, revise and fix them until they better resembled the stories her grandmother had told her as a young girl, the stories Llewelyna had told and retold Jacob and me. But I realized too that these written stories and Llewelyna’s grandmother’s stories and Llewelyna’s own stories could never be the same. They were bent by memory and experience, twisted to fit whatever meaning the storyteller might require at that moment. And because I thought there was something inside I might inherit, something I might bend and flex and mould into my very own, I opened the Mabinogion.

  There was nothing left of the original text. Llewelyna had written over the words, crossed out her own writing, and rewritten something else in its place so that in the end, all that remained inside the book were indecipherable puddles of black ink. I almost laughed when I saw it. What kind of sense did I expect from madness? Then I realized I didn’t need these stories. I already had them.

  I walked to the edge of the wharf and dropped the Mabinogion into the water. The book floated for a moment, the red dragon burning like an ember, before it sank into the bottomless lake.

  21

  Viktor returned early one winter morning. He had been away for months looking for Mary and Taras. It was still dark outside when I opened the door to him. He shivered in his thin coat. His shoulders were dusted with snow. I sat him on the yellow chesterfield and warmed us both some broth. He looked into the flames of the fire and said nothing. His broth remained untouched on the side table. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten in a very long time.

  “Viktor,” I said. I put my wrist to his forehead. “You’re not well.”

  “You’re in black,” he said. “Has someone died?”

  “Everyone has died.”

  “Yuri, is he…?”

  “I received a letter from him yesterday. He’s been offered some award.”

  “Is it Jacob?”

  I nodded and tried to keep the familiar bubble from slipping up my throat. As I told Viktor about Jacob and Llewelyna, my words turned to sobs. I could hardly breathe. Viktor clutched my head against his chest until I calmed down. His heart thumped against my cheek. Then my sadness was replaced by doom. Had Viktor found out what I had done? That I had betrayed Taras? I sat back up.

  “Did you find your parents?”

  “It’s terrible.” He wouldn’t look at me. He stirred his soup as if it were something he could read from.

  He knows, I thought.

  “I’ve never seen my mother so worn. I only recognized her by her old bonnet.”

  “So you found them?” I managed.

  “We spoke through a wire fence, the kind we keep the chickens in. They’re at a work camp. The prisoners carry boulders in wheelbarrows, work day and night, hard, hard labour. It’s inhumane.” He began to break down, his words gurgling out. “I had no choice. My mother’s hands were cracked, her nails torn and bleeding. And my father…”

  I pushed Viktor’s oily hair back, away from his face. He wiped his tears with his sleeve.

  I was relieved. It was clear he didn’t know. “What is it? What’s happened to Taras?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “I brought him the pistol, hidden in a loaf of bread. I thought he could use it to get out.”

  “Oh, Viktor…”

  “They saw the gun. Shot him dead.”

  Viktor slept in Jacob’s old room. We spent those first weeks taking turns being the invalid, reminding one another to eat, to sleep, to bathe. One unusually warm winter evening, Viktor brought up the whisky from his father’s liquor cabinet and a stringed instrument. We sat on the porch wrapped in blankets and watched a pair of loons nibble at the long grass in the orchard. Their white-speckled backs glimmered.

  “This was my grandfather’s.” Viktor strummed a few notes. He played it like a guitar, but it sounded more like a harp.

  “Did he teach you to play?” I asked.

  “No, my father taught me. I didn’t know my grandfather. He died before I was born. He was a kobzar.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Viktor continued to play softly as he spoke. The strings of the instrument appeared made of light. “A kobzar is a travelling bard. This here is called a kobza, but kobzars play banduras and liras too. In the Ukraine these bards organized themselves into brotherhoods and guilds. My grandfather was blind and it was common for kobzars to be blind. I’m not sure why.” Viktor smiled as he spoke. It was good to see his sadness break for once. I urged him on. “He sang well. He was nearly famous for a time, played in concert halls in Kiev until the Russians put a stop to it. The brotherhood nearly dissolved, forced underground. The Russians banned the use of the Ukrainian language. The Tsar’s wife was fond of my grandfather’s songs, and so he had them translated into Russian, but my grandfather refused to sing them. My grandfather’s songs were symbolic, political, about the Ukrainian state, independence. To translate those songs into Russian was treasonous. But my grandfather continued to sing his Ukrainian songs in the streets, for anyone who would listen, until he was arrested.”

  “Just for singing?”

  “His language was illegal. The Ukrainian culture was a speck in the eye of Russian sovereignty. Even my father’s name, Taras, after a great Ukrainian poet, was a kind of rebellion. When he was finally released my grandfather was weak and poor—and blind, remember. He died a few years later. But before that time, and in secret, he taught my father to play this kobza.”

  “And Taras taught you?”

  “Yes, in secret, just like his grandfather did. He said that is the only way to play the kobza. And someday I am to pass the skill on to my children.” Viktor stopped playing to take a drink of whisky.

  “But why in secret? Taras could speak Ukrainian freely here.”

  Viktor looked at me cruelly. “Don’t be daft. His language got him sent to that prison camp.”

  “Why did your father want to fight with the Russians if he hated them so much?”

  Viktor returned to the instrument and strummed. “The other side is Austria-Hungary and he hated them just as much as he hated the Russians. He wanted to fight for the Ukraine. For Galicia. But since those countries don’t exist on maps, he wanted to fight for Canada. All he really wanted was a place to call his home, his country.” He closed his eyes and continued playing the instrument.

  “Viktor,” I interrupted, “I stole that gun.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The pistol you gave Taras. I stole it from Mr. Bell when I was just a girl.”

  He jolted upright. “That was you?”

  “Don’t play coy. You were the one who found it in the woods.”

  “You let Henry take the blame for the gun.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “All those books were destroyed…”

  “It was terrible.”

  “I had never seen that gun before,” Viktor said. “I found it in the liquor cabinet.” Something startled the pair of loons and they launched into the painted sky, their wide wings beating.

  “If you didn’t find Mr. Bell’s gun, then who did?”

  The question hung in the air between us, but we both knew it could only be Yur
i.

  * * *

  I hadn’t received a postcard from Henry for a while. At first I had thought the worst, then wondered if he somehow knew about Llewelyna’s death. When a letter came from Wales for her, I recognized Henry’s handwriting. What was he doing in Wales? I fingered the postage stamp. The red dragon’s outline was so severe the ink had ridges I could run my finger along. There was no return address. I convinced myself there might be a clue inside as to where Henry was and how I could contact him about Llewelyna’s death, and that was enough to give me reason to open the letter.

  A photograph slipped from the envelope. At first I thought it was a picture of Llewelyna and me. The girl was pale with thin dark hair and the woman beside her was surely my mother, but something was off about it all. The two were sitting in the sand, wearing breezy spring dresses. The ocean stretched out behind them. The girl was about ten or eleven years old. She held a clutch of marigolds to her chest. Her eyes appeared closed because she was looking down at the flowers. I flipped the photograph around: Gwyn a Nia, Ebrill 1905. I wondered if this girl was my Aunt Gwyn’s daughter, my cousin. I ripped out Henry’s letter and read it voraciously.

  From the fragments of poor Henry’s rambling, broken thoughts, I learned that Llewelyna had asked him to travel to Holyhead to visit her sister. There, he learned from Gwyn that Llewelyna’s daughter had not died as an infant as Llewelyna had told him, and as I had gathered through her stories. The truth was, Llewelyna had simply vanished without a word when the child was only days old. She had refused to name the infant, referring to her only as Neb, Welsh for no one, and so Gwyn had named the girl Nia and raised her as her own. And although Nia did not die as an infant, Nia did die. At twelve she caught pneumonia and passed in her sleep. Nia’s father was never known, but Gwyn had assumed it was a violent pairing; Llewelyna was fifteen years old when Nia was born.

  Henry’s letter was full of questions. He couldn’t understand why she would make up something so horrifically, monstrously false. To me it was clear. The stories Llewelyna told about killing her baby were not confessions, as Henry and I had both assumed, but revisions. These terrible retellings were easier for her to face than the truth: she had abandoned her daughter, her firstborn. Instead, she revised the events so she could attempt to make sense of what she had done, even if it meant turning herself into a monster. I thought then of Llewelyna’s version of the Rhiannon story, where Rhiannon has told the tale of eating her own son so many times that despite its fabrication it becomes true to her. Like Rhiannon, Llewelyna became trapped in a story of her own making.

  If Llewelyna had sent Henry to Wales, she wanted him to know the truth. I wondered if she had ever meant for me to learn about this sibling. I wished I could see into my sister’s eyes, which were forever looking down at those marigolds. But she would never see me, nor I her. And so, what of this new sibling I had gained in a photograph and lost in the space of a paragraph?

  I had Viktor to care for now and I didn’t have any room for this loss. I slipped the photograph and Henry’s letter into the oven with the rest of the words I would rather have scalded from the earth.

  * * *

  Viktor and I continued to hear good news from Yuri. Thankfully he had given up on his poetry. I responded to Yuri’s letters with a new kind of enthusiasm, as if I already had something to hide from him and cover up. Yuri was championed by his regiment and was to achieve an award for service. Viktor scoffed.

  “You don’t want to know the atrocities a man must commit to get an award like that,” he said. I didn’t have to remind Viktor that it was he who convinced Yuri to join up in the first place, for Viktor’s guilt was apparent in everything he did. The weight caused him to hunch over. He resembled a man twice his age. His hair greyed at the temples. Viktor wouldn’t let me write to Yuri about their parents. He said it was best to wait until Yuri returned home.

  Most evenings that spring, Viktor drank at the Pearl Hotel, which had become much more popular since the wounded soldiers had returned to Winteridge. Juliet worked tirelessly pouring ale and liquor for the soldiers. Viktor would leave the house angry and stumble back hours later whistling eerily cheery tunes.

  One night I woke to the familiar tick-tock of him climbing the steps with his crutch. He stopped outside my bedroom. My stomach tightened and my entire body grew hot. He pushed the door open just a crack, then stepped in. As he approached, I was shocked to find my exhilaration was not unlike fear. I pretended to sleep as he slid into bed next to me. He ran his fingers up and down my arm; my skin tingled. He breathed in my hair, kissed the back of my neck. His beard tickled my skin. I forced myself not to move, afraid I might break whatever moment we were suspended in. Then he got out of my bed, picked up his crutch, and limped to the door.

  “Viktor?” I whispered. I still faced away from him.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a fool.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ve been drinking. My bed is cold. I just…”

  “Come back.”

  “No. I should go.”

  “Come back,” I said again. He didn’t move towards the bed, but he didn’t turn to leave either. I rolled over to face him. His body was silhouetted by the moonlight coming in from the window. “My bed is cold too.”

  Viktor hopped forward. “But, Iris…”

  I lifted the blanket. “Just lie here with me until morning.” We faced one another in the darkness. I could smell sour alcohol on his breath. “We’ll pretend we’re frontiersmen and we have to keep each other warm to survive.” I was thankful the little joke was enough to make Viktor laugh, though my easy betrayal of Yuri scared me. I thought of the two of us as children, curled together in the tree fort like puppies.

  “Give me your hands,” I said. I held his hands in mine and blew warmth into them. We lay there for a while and listened to one another breathe. Azami’s necklace slipped from Viktor’s shirt. The silver tag caught a sliver of light.

  “Did you see Azami?” I asked.

  “Azami? When?”

  I could make out the whites of his eyes, the gleam of teeth when he spoke.

  “When the boat landed, she was there. Did you see her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Is that why you stayed on the boat?”

  “There were many reasons.”

  “Do you wish I hadn’t made you get off? Do you wish you were somewhere else?”

  “Do you?” He ran his fingers down my cheek. “Do you wish you were someplace else?”

  “No.” I smiled.

  “I am glad Azami found happiness,” he said, though his tone was flat. “Two children.”

  “Yes,” I said. It made me sad to think that Viktor might live his entire life not knowing he was a father.

  “It’s so cold. My feet are—my foot is like a stone,” he said.

  “Come closer,” I said.

  Viktor wrapped his arms around me.

  “You know I can still feel it sometimes, my missing foot. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll never run. I’ll never work on the orchard again. I’m forever half a man.”

  I thought of Viktor’s letter and what he had said about killing the German soldier. The boy. I knew this was the real reason he felt like half the person he was. “You’re not half. You’ll be okay.” There was a silence that was broken by his stalled breathing, then a kind of whimper. “You’re not half.” I pulled him close. His face was wet with tears. “You’re not half,” I kept repeating until we both fell asleep.

  In the morning I woke to an empty bed. Viktor was asleep in Jacob’s room. For a moment I had to wonder if it had all been a dream. Then that night Viktor came to my room again. This nighttime routine of ours continued for a few months. After leaving the Pearl, Viktor would slip into my bed and return to Jacob’s room before morning. Some nights we talked until we fell asleep,
and Viktor would tell me about his childhood in Vernon, about his mother and father. We never spoke of Yuri. Some nights, instead of speaking, we communicated only in the smallest of movements. Viktor’s hand would slip between my knees until it was warm. My foot would push up against his calf. My fingers would find the crescent scar beneath his shirt where the bayonet had once punctured him. We wouldn’t speak about these evenings in the light of day. It was a kind of rule. I thought of the Maya, who believed the night and day were separate worlds and the jaguar was the only one that might traverse from one to the other. I hadn’t seen my own jaguar for a while, and I wondered if having Viktor with me at night kept her away.

  When I ran into Juliet at the Nickels’ store, the young girl in me was tempted to tell her all about Viktor and me, but I knew what I was doing looked terrible and cruel, and I wasn’t ready to face the truth of it and what it meant, never mind her opinion. Although Viktor and I didn’t speak of the changes that came over us at night, he looked at me differently now. His eyes settled on me as if in deliberation, as if each part of my body presented a mystery he might solve.

  Sometimes Viktor called out in his sleep: mutti, mutti, mutti. He thrashed back and forth, his skin slick with sweat. I would shake him awake from the night terror, and he would jolt up terrified and tell me of dead horses as far as the eye could see—fields of dead horses, killed by poison gas. And tunnels underground, men crawling like worms, and German boys screaming for their mothers. And then Viktor would weep.

  22

  One evening late that spring, Viktor and I sat drinking whisky on the secluded beach curtained by willows. It was dark and the water was calm. We passed the bottle back and forth until our minds became heavy and our bodies light. A flock of geese appeared out of nothing in the sky. We looked up to see their white bellies moon past. They honked above our heads and faded into the distance.