I hated jobs like this. They affected me like an inquisitorial psychoanalyst, pushing and prodding for my weak spots, frustrating me until I lost control. Doing the job with Betsy especially scared me. She has a talent for spatial relations while I can’t even read maps, never mind diagrams for assembling a ceiling fan. The potential for a fight was large, for humiliation almost certain. There was a difference this time, though: Betsy and I promised we’d be patient with each other.
I turned the breaker off in the basement. Removing the old ceiling fan took only about fifteen minutes and involved some satisfying deployment of brute force on my part. But assembling the new fan was a painstaking and slow process that consumed two hours. Betsy read the diagram and found the parts. I turned screws and held bolts in place. Finally we were ready to install. As I held up the new ceiling fan my arms strained and started to tremble. Betsy used the electric drill to turn the last screws in. I could smell my sweat as the afternoon sun climbed through the southern-facing window.
I turned the breaker back on and ran up the stairs to try the fan. No luck. I refused to become impatient, instead driving to the hardware store to buy a cheap circuit tester. Again I held the sixty-pound fixture with my arms pounding as Betsy unscrewed it from the ceiling. The tester showed that there was electricity at the ceiling box. Our connections were secure and clean. Something must be wrong with the fan. I let myself cuss a little and even Betsy declared herself frustrated. We grinned at each other and disassembled the fan just as the boys came home.
I returned the ceiling fan to the hardware store, my third visit in 24 hours, exchanging it for another unit and making sure that this box was factory-sealed. When I got back, Peter and Bohdan were splayed side by side on the front sidewalk, playing with toy cars and trucks. Peter had used a fat yellow chunk of sidewalk chalk to write:
WARNING
Happy Family here
Do Not Enter!
When he saw me he jumped up and opened the door so I could heft the ceiling fan into the house. I called Betsy outside to see Peter’s sign.
On Saturday Betsy and I assembled the new fan. This time it took less than an hour and the fixture felt lighter when I held it up. And this time it worked. I gave Betsy a hug and we held each other for a minute, more hugging than we’d done for two years.
VIII
That July we set out for North Carolina to the beach where Betsy had gone as a kid, the trip we’d been planning for almost two years. The weather was hot and by the time we reached Virginia, our fourth day on the road, it was scorching. Like Humbert driving through America in Lolita, we looked for the Functional Motel, although our definition was duller than his: we wanted free breakfast, preferably with waffles, a swimming pool, and a predictable level of cleanliness.
Our last motel on the trip south was in Goldsboro, less than a hundred miles from the beach. We stayed in a Super 8 that had free waffles but no pool; we’d be in the ocean the next day anyway.
In the morning as we got dressed, Bohdan heard a scratch at the door. It was a starving orange kitten who cried in a miniature voice. Bohdan fed the kitten some milk from the breakfast room. He and Peter wanted to take it with us. We said no, but Betsy promised she’d call the local humane society to see if they could rescue the kitten.
When we stopped for gas on the way out of Goldsboro, Betsy made the call. A lot of abandoned kittens showed up in the area, the humane society said, and they had too many. Other animal shelters said the same thing. What if the kitten didn’t find any food, Peter wanted to know. Maybe someone will adopt it, I said, trying to sound hopeful. Bohdan refused to speak. It was impossible to explain to them that the world is full of orphaned creatures and you cannot rescue them all.
The beach was close enough that we could smell the air changing. Within two hours we arrived on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina, and then crossed the causeway onto Emerald Isle. We picked up the keys to our beach house at the real estate office and drove five more minutes to a section of the island that was so narrow you could see the sound on one side and the Atlantic on the other. We carried our luggage into the house and changed into swimsuits without unpacking. Betsy insisted that we all apply sunscreen. There was a low sand dune just beyond the house and then nothing but ocean. The boys sprinted into the water with their boogie boards. They dove into the waves and splashed each other, hooting and singing.
The sand burned hot under our feet and the sun blazed down. I’d forgotten the buoyancy of salt water and this was the first time I’d swum in the ocean unprotected by a reef. The surf crashed into me, rattling my legs, dropping shells and smooth rocks on the sand. Looking in either direction up the beach I saw miles of white sand and pure blue sky marked only by jet trails. The dunes just off the beach sprouted sea oats and low palms and the water was emerald green or sometimes a translucent blue, depending on the sun’s angle.
While Betsy was showing Peter and Bohdan how to bodysurf, I headed for the deck to read for an hour. Then I went back to the water with the boys, bodysurfing awkwardly compared to their relaxed movements, and Betsy took her turn on a beach chair. We’d discovered a sandbar just off shore that let us wade in shallow water for a long way. In the late afternoon we took cold showers in the hot sun on the deck, and at night we slept deep and dreamless.
The days passed, indistinct. The first of our two weeks at the beach was done, but it felt like we still had forever. I made only one diary entry and read only one book, the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote. The boys walked for miles on the beach early in the morning with Betsy, gathering shells and stones, and then maintained strictly proprietary collections in buckets on the deck. Peter began to tan a smooth copper shade, as he always does in a fierce sun, while the rest of us looked pasty and northern.
We fell into a lazy routine. After breakfast we let the boys drink Coke on the beach, something normally off-limits. Then they bodysurfed all morning while either Betsy or I kept an eye on them and the other adult read. After lunch we all piled in the car and went for groceries, or to the county library, or to the aquarium. Stepping out of the car’s air-conditioning and into the midday heat was like colliding with a wall pushing us into a drowsy, semi-conscious state.
For bigger grocery trips we went to the Piggly Wiggly in Swansboro on the mainland. I bought T-shirts for Jeremy and for myself that said I’m Big on the Pig. We devoted serious attention to snack foods unavailable in Canada such as Flip-Sides — which taste like pretzels on one side and a cracker on the other — and Nutter Butters, a great source of processed peanut butter flavour.
Then we hit the beach again for the afternoon, followed by cocktail hour, during which we enjoyed the gourmet snack foods, more tooth-rotting soda, and incredibly cheap Australian wine for the adults. At the end of cocktail hour a designated parent and child paired up to cook dinner. Bedtime was early for everyone. Betsy and I read the Dave Barry prequels to Peter Pan out loud to the boys, or let them watch TV in their bedroom. I checked the weather channel, marvelling how each day promised to be as monotonously perfect as the last. We slept with a fan on, but in spite of her peri-menopause, I put my arm around Betsy for a few minutes after lights out and she snuggled into me.
Toward the start of our second week I was out past the sandbar where the surf ran strong, Bohdan beside me lazing on his boogie board. Betsy and Peter were swimming closer to the beach. In the blinding sunshine about ten yards away, two creatures leapt out of the water, perfectly synchronized, with large fins on their backs. For a moment I panicked, thinking they were sharks. Then I realized they were dolphins and called to Peter and Betsy. They turned around just in time for all four of us to see the dolphins jump once again out of the water together.
Every day I’d spend several hours reading Don Quixote. It was much funnier and sadder than I recalled from reading it in my twenties. After the sorrowful knight is thrashed by the mule-driver, the narrator says that “he took refuge in his usual remedy, which was to think about some situa
tion from his books,” an obvious kind of “madness.”
Sitting on the deck chair, with the pulsing heat of the sun on my arms and reflecting off the bright red cover of the novel, I understood why Betsy had seemed so impatient with me since her mother died. When I dived low into a wave alongside Peter and Bohdan, all of us laughing like idiots at the water’s force, or when the four of us savoured fresh shrimp fried in butter at dinner, or when I simply held Betsy’s hand in the quiet evening, I discovered what she already knew: you have only one life; if it affords you extra chances, that makes you damned lucky, and you’d better jump in and enjoy the ride.
When Betsy and I were on the deck with our books that evening after the boys had gone to bed, my old confidence seemed to come back. I might not be able to distinguish dolphins from sharks, but I did understand my wife. The next day my back hurt but the rest of me sang like Walt Whitman.
On our last Friday it rained for an hour and in the afternoon a rainbow appeared in the northeast, with a purple sky above and a perfect blue below. The ocean darkened in layers, with a thin line of pale blue at the horizon. I stood silently on the rough wood of the deck with the boys and we stared at the sky, at the spray of surf falling like white hair against the greenish waves on the beach. I put my arms around their bony, widening shoulders, and I felt rooted to them and to this spot. There was a certain slant of light on this summer afternoon that made me believe, for a moment, in the eternal.
BACK IN THE USSR
We returned from North Carolina to an early fall, the season when trees shed their leaves and the cold sets in, when you remember things, as Peter told me two years ago, with your body — dark, hidden things you would rather not know.
The boys returned to school, and Betsy to work, and I returned to my study and took up some notes I’d made about my grandfather back in 2003. I had come to a dead end. There were no official records other than his death certificate, and no witnesses had survived. For raw material I had interviewed my surviving uncles who had been in Soviet prisons, and read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago more than once. Now I stared at the computer screen until it became invisible, and a ghostly feeling came into my fingers as I felt my way back to what his last chapter must have been like.
The Black Maria skulked like a short hearse, parked in front of my grandfather’s house in Nikolaifeld, Ukraine. It was late December 1937, the middle of the night. My dad was two months old.
Four men exited the Black Maria and knocked hard on the door. They had come for my dad’s father, Cornelius Mierau. Two of the men were teenagers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. The others were men from the village who helped the communists round up troublemakers in exchange for immunity from persecution.
Lil remembered: the white lace tablecloth in the kitchen, the dirty boots of the men who came for her dad, and how rusty the bayonets on the rifles looked in the candlelight. She remembered her father hoisting her up on his shoulders for one last ride while the men with the rifles waited, looking down at their dirty boots. She was five years old and her father was thirty-six.
My father was asleep in the crib while his mother cried, pleaded, moaned, until the noise of her terror woke him and he cried too. The Black Maria drove away with Cornelius.
Cornelius loved music. He built stringed instruments, and he could play violin, seven-string guitar, mandolin, flute, piano. In jail, without any instruments except his voice, he hummed quietly to himself. The guard told him to shut up. In the silence he could not escape memories of Lil’s soft dark hair when he touched her head the last time, his son’s smooth arms and milky burps, Helen’s beautiful forehead, the proud way she held it up even though they were poor. Would he ever lie in bed with her again, smell her nightclothes? He tried to clear his mind by repeating a prayer, over and over again.
Early the next morning the men drove Cornelius thirty kilometres to the city of Zaporozhye, where the GPU, Stalin’s secret police, used the local prison’s basement for interrogations. The basement was useful because it had many small rooms with thin walls, so the sounds prisoners made travelled easily to the other rooms and even outside, where wives and families could hear and were meant to hear.
Cornelius was accused of treason under Section 58 of the penal code for refusing to sing a communist song with his youth group, and for poisoning some farm horses. The charges themselves didn’t matter. There was a quota of German nationals from this area who had to die.
One of the GPU guards led Cornelius into a room with boarded-up windows. The guard grabbed Cornelius’s collar and spun him like a top, before throwing him to the floor. Cornelius was light, small to begin with and undernourished. As he fell, he hit a chair. He heard his ribs cracking and he slumped into the corner clutching his chest. He stayed there all night, trying to picture himself at home, or in church, playing a high note on the violin as a harmonic, his imagined touch on the string transcending the pain that staggered him.
“Toilet?” said the guard next morning, waking him up from where he lay crumpled on the floor.
“Yes, toilet,” he said, and he was taken to a little shed behind the building. The door had been removed. There was no water or toilet paper. He got shit on his shoes but there was no time to wipe it off.
The guard hustled Cornelius back into his cell. He saw no one except when he was given a meal or taken to the toilet. From the other cells he heard shouts, slaps, thuds, and almost every day, gunshots from the yard above. He tried to remember musical scores, hymns, the bass lines on a seven-string guitar. He moved his hands as if playing a guitar, or touching his children’s hair. He would spend more than a month like this, waiting.
One early morning Cornelius was taken from his cell to the interrogation team, always a troika who voted on the prisoner’s fate. The three men stood around a table with a single piece of paper on it.
“This is your confession. Read and sign.” The leader was a ruddy, tall man with highly polished black boots who held his back stiffly erect. He sniffed the air as if the smell of it bothered him. The troika leader reminded Cornelius of a deacon in their church, an officious man who dressed carefully and made deals with the bosses. The leader’s second placed a pistol on the table. Out of the corner of his eye, Cornelius could see a large bloodstain on the wall at head level.
“These are lies,” said Cornelius. One of the troika moved suddenly and pistol-whipped him. Cornelius saw blood drip from his head onto the table. The pain was outside him now, his vision fuzzy. He imagined the communion wine in church, how it stained your fingers when it spilled over the cup’s edge.
“I won’t sign,” said Cornelius, knowing this was not about justice, that they didn’t care if he signed the paper. “What will you do with me?” No one answered him. He thought of Jesus on the cross, beaten and calling to his father, but that was sacrilege. He was not Jesus. He calculated the odds of his own survival. They were not good.
Prisoners who did not sign confessions were shot immediately because there was no way to transport all of them to Siberia. The Stolypin train cars held only thirty-five people even if prisoners were stacked like salamanders, and there was little to feed them once they arrived at Construction Project 501, the tundra-spanning railroad in northern Siberia. In addition, there was always the quota to consider, and unreformable political prisoners like Cornelius were perfect for filling it.
Two guards grabbed him by the shoulders of his coat. He heard it tear. They pushed him against the wall near the bloodstain. He pulled his mind away and saw the fresh dill cut into soup, white potato slice, red beet floating in broth, the callous on his wife’s thumb where she gripped the knife. One of the guards held a gun to his head. The other held up the paper with the charges.
“I won’t sign,” Cornelius said. His bowels gave way and he smelled the shit just as he heard the explosion like a string snapping on one of his violins, the f-hole near his head, and brains and bone fragments spattered on the wall, enlarging the stain.
“Get
a goddamn bucket,” said one of the guards. “Regier will kill us if this place stinks any worse. Next time shoot at the neck and do it outside.”
My grandmother Helen tried to visit Cornelius in Zaporozhye. She took food for her husband, zwieback, dried prunes, and wool long underwear to keep him warm in Siberia, hoping they had not sent him away already, that he was still alive. Gunshots often rang out, but she’d heard that only the criminals got killed. Her husband was not a criminal. When she reached the front of the line, they took her food and promised to give it to Cornelius Mierau. She walked home without a glimpse of him and returned with food once a week for four weeks. Prisoners’ wives could only come on Sundays.
In early February, she met with Cornelius’s best friend, Gerhard Bergen. He’d been arrested with Cornelius, and also accused of being an enemy of the state. The charge against Gerhard was singing religious songs and strangling piglets on the collective farm. He’d seen Cornelius taken into a small room and heard the gunshot. Gerhard signed his own confession immediately, expecting to get at least ten years in a labour camp, if he survived at all. Instead they released him right away. There were shortages of bullets and so he was lucky.
“Helen, don’t wait for Cornelius,” he said.
“Do you know if he signed a confession?”
“He never did.”
I stopped typing. Somehow the act of imagining my grandfather’s horrific death, the brutality of his end, had laid something to rest in me. I sent a copy to my father and he had nothing to say about it. But his silence no longer frustrated me. Dad didn’t want this shit on his mind. I didn’t either. Now that the words lay like black grave markers on the white paper, I could leave the museum of the past.
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