“Why aren’t you at school?”
Erik jumped at the sound of his father’s voice. He turned around and regarded the man, who was so tall and muscular that he took up practically the whole doorway. No one who looked at father and son together would ever have realized that they were related. Although his job as a construction supervisor provided him with plenty of opportunity for physical exertion, he supplemented that with a daily six-mile run. Erik noted his father’s sweat-covered T-shirt and realized that his father had been able to leave the job site long enough in the middle of the day in order to have an early run. A rare occurrence.
“It’s lunch time,” replied Erik, waving his sandwich as proof.
“Do you think this is a good way to start off the year?” asked his father, who had grabbed a hand towel from the upstairs bathroom and was mopping off his sweaty brow. He cleared a space for himself on Erik’s bed by dumping some more dirty clothes on the floor. “When are you going to clean this mess up?” he asked.
Erik sighed. This was so typical of his father. Nothing he did was ever right. What was so bad about a messy room? And what was so terrible about being home at lunch? You’d think he was an axe murderer, the way his father went on. He couldn’t admit the real reason he came home, because his father was decidedly unsympathetic when it came to bullies. Mr. Romaniuk had urged him to take boxing lessons, karate, anything so he could defend himself, but Erik had steadfastly refused. He didn’t want to get into that argument again. “I forgot my lunch,” he lied. “So I decided to come home and get it.”
“Okay,” said his father. “But let’s not make a habit of this. I want you to make some friends at this new school.”
Like that’s possible, thought Erik. But he nodded in agreement for his father’s benefit.
“When do you have to be back at school?” asked Mr. Romaniuk, glancing at his wristwatch.
“I’ve got another thirty minutes,” replied Erik.
“Well, finish up with that computer stuff then, and come on outside with your old man and we can shoot a few hoops before I jump in the shower.” Erik knew better than to argue.
When Emily Romaniuk came home from work just before six o’clock, she was delighted to see that, as usual, her daughter had already begun to make dinner. Potatoes were boiling in a pot on the stove, and the aroma of garlic sausages sizzled from the frying pan. Mrs. Romaniuk removed her red silk jacket and hung it up in the front hall closet and then methodically went through the pile of mail that was neatly stacked beside the telephone in the kitchen.
“You’re supposed to call Dr. Del Roy as soon as you can,” called Paula as she pulled apart a head of romaine lettuce and arranged the pieces in a glass bowl.
“Oh darn,” said her mother. “I meant to call him back before I left the hospital.” Emily Romaniuk was the manager of pharmacy at the Brantford General Hospital, and due to cutbacks, pharmacy services for all three local hospitals had been consolidated into hers. Unfortunately, more help didn’t come with the added responsibilities. Sometimes it felt like she lived and breathed her job.
Mrs. Romaniuk rooted through the kitchen freezer and drew out a shrimp and Oriental vegetable Lean Cuisine. “Can you zap this for me, honey?” she asked Paula, handing her the package with one hand as she dialed the telephone with the other.
“Why don’t you just eat what we have for a change?” asked Paula. “I think you’ll like it tonight.”
“You know that I don’t eat potatoes, hon. And garlic sausages? Seriously! I’ll have some of that lovely salad you’re making, though.”
While her mother finished one phone call and started up with another, Paula got the dishes out and plopped them in the middle of the table. She walked out of the kitchen and over to the foot of the stairs, “Erik,” she hollered. “Come down now! Supper will be burnt and you don’t even have the table set.”
Moments later, Erik loped down the stairs and walked into the kitchen. “Smells good, sis. Are you going to make gravy for the potatoes?”
Paula lifted the lid from the frying sausages and tilted the pan. There was a fair bit of sausage fat at the bottom of the pan, so she added some water from the kettle and some gravy thickener. “Sure,” she said, reaching to tousle her brother’s hair, but he darted out of the way in the nick of time.
Mr. Romaniuk had been home for an hour already and just finished mowing the lawn. He sat down at the kitchen table, his powerful chest and arms still sweaty from exertion.
Paula opened a bottle of beer and set it before her father, and then got out a Tab for her mother. She poured Erik a glass of milk and got a tall glass of ice water for herself.
As she placed the food on each plate, Mr. Romaniuk grimaced with irritation. “Emily, why are you eating that crap again?”
“You know I have to watch my weight,” replied Mrs. Romaniuk.
“Look at Paula,” Erik Romaniuk responded. “She’s cut back a bit and now she’s almost thin. You could learn a lot from your daughter.”
Paula stared down at the food on her own plate and felt her cheeks burn a bright red. She hated it when her parents had this argument, and they seemed to be having it frequently of late. She speared a single round of garlic sausage and carefully chewed, trying to block out the sounds of her parents arguing.
“Good gravy, sis,” broke in Erik. Paula looked over at her brother who was enthusiastically digging his fork into a huge mound of gravy-covered mashed potatoes. The sight made Paula feel slightly ill.
She turned to her father, “We got our projects for multicultural history today,” she said.
He smiled at her and said, “What’s the topic? Not that it matters, I know you’re going to ace it as usual.”
Paula explained what the possibilities were and how she was interested in interviewing Baba and Dido Romaniuk about their immigration experiences from Ukraine.
Her father shook his head. “I very much doubt you’ll get either of them to talk about it,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“They had a rough time,” her father responded. “Your grandfather especially. He went through some nightmarish events. I don’t think you’d be doing him any favours by making him relive them. Just leave it alone, okay?”
Paula agreed, but reluctantly. What was she going to do for her project now?
Emily Romaniuk speared a shrimp with her fork and pointed it at her daughter. “You should interview Gramma Pauline.”
Paula shook her head. “Her family must have come over ages ago. Besides, MacDonald isn’t exactly a multicultural name.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said her mother. “Gramma Pauline immigrated to Canada when she was little girl. She’s Armenian, you know.”
“Armenian?” repeated Paula. “Then my grandfather must have been Scottish.” Paula could not recall ever meeting her grandfather. He was probably dead by now, she reasoned. She knew that he had taken off on her grandmother decades ago.
“Your grandfather was Armenian too.”
“Then how did he end up with a name like MacDonald?” she asked.
“He was an Armenian orphan, and no one knew his mother or father’s name, just his first name, which was Mgerdich, or Johnny in English. He got the name ‘MacDonald’ because that was the name of his sponsoring family.”
How was it that no one had ever told her any of this before? “Do you think Gramma would mind talking to me about how and why she immigrated?”
“I’m not sure how much she even knows,” replied her mother. “Why don’t you ask her and find out?”
After supper was over, Paula gathered the dirty plates and scraped the excess food into the garbage. This was a job that she always elected to do by herself. There was barely any food left on Erik’s plate or her father’s. Her mother had eaten every last molecule of her Lean Cuisine. What the rest of the family hadn’t noticed was Paula’s own plate. She had eaten most of her salad and that single round of sausage. The rest, she scraped into th
e garbage.
Saturday, September 11
Gramma Pauline lived in a small brick house on Grand River Avenue just two miles away from the Romaniuk residence. On Saturdays, if the weather was good, Paula pulled on her running shoes and jogged over to her grandmother’s house in the morning, where they would share a pot of jasmine tea and some good conversation.
She was like nobody else’s grandmother. Even in old age she was beautiful, with a certain birdlike fragility. Today, her shock of white hair hung loose — a cloud of ripples down her back, and as always, she wore far too many rings. She had on one of her many brilliantly coloured but mismatched silk palazzo sets — today a crimson tunic and orange pants.
Gramma Pauline was sitting on her wooden verandah swing with her legs curled up under her, sketching with charcoal in an artist’s notebook. A pair of gold half-glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and as her granddaughter jogged into her driveway, her brown eyes sparkled over the rim.
“Hi Gramma,” said Paula, slowing her run to a stationary jog as she cooled down. She did her cool down stretches and then walked over to the verandah and gave Pauline a firm hug.
“Honey, it’s great to see you,” said Pauline, returning the hug. Then she held her namesake at arm’s length and looked at her in her revealing shorts and T-shirt. She noticed that Paula was thinner than she had been the week before, but she said nothing.
“Do you want your tea out here, or shall we go inside?” asked Pauline.
“Let’s go inside,” replied Paula, drying the sweat from her arms with a towel her grandmother had handed her. “I’ve had enough fresh air for the moment.”
Paula loved her grandmother’s house. Even though it was at least a hundred years old, it had a huge new picture window in the living room. And what used to be the dining room was now an artist’s studio with recently added skylights in the ceiling. Paula breathed in the familiar scent of turpentine as she stepped through the studio door.
When Paula was younger, she used to love sprawling out on the Oriental carpet that adorned the floor of this room and she would watch in fascination as her grandmother stirred paints and deftly applied them to canvas.
Her grandmother had a kitchenette set up in the corner of her studio, and the electric kettle was already on a slow boil. Pauline made the jasmine tea and Paula settled down into the overstuffed sofa on the other side of the room and looked around to see what her grandmother had been up to lately. Her eyes were drawn to a new oil painting. It was an abstract design, and depending on how you looked at it, it was a bouquet of spring flowers, a spiral burst of sunbeams, or just random flecks of colour. Gramma Pauline brought over a china cup of tea and followed Paula’s gaze. “That painting is for you, honey. I’ll frame it for you once the paint is fully dry.”
“Thank you, Gramma, it’s beautiful,” said Paula. “It’s quite a bit different from anything you’ve painted before.”
“That’s because I painted it with you in mind.”
Paula sipped her jasmine tea and stared into the swirls and bursts of colour in the painting. She didn’t quite understand how this painting represented her, but she loved it just the same.
“Gramma, I have a school project about immigration. Would you tell me about how you came to Canada?”
Pauline was silent for a moment, and then she sat down on the sofa next to her granddaughter and stared at her tea. “It’s funny you should ask me about it after all this time,” she said. “For years I’ve tried to put the past behind me. But the more I try to forget, the more I seem remember.” Pauline set her teacup down, and stared at the carpet at their feet. Paula followed her gaze. Like the new oil painting, the carpet was of a colourful sunburst design. The more you stared at it, the more it changed. Gramma Pauline seemed to be totally absorbed.
“If it’s painful for you, we don’t have to talk about it...”
“Actually, it’s okay, honey. I’d like to tell you the story, but I seem to only remember flashes of things. I don’t know exactly how it happened.”
“What do you remember?”
“I can remember arriving at the Georgetown Boys’ Farm when I was a girl. My parents had accompanied the first fifty orphaned boys from Armenia. I was the only girl, and I was also the only child with parents. I remember Union Jacks waving when we got off the train. And I remember being given a sandwich. I didn’t know what a sandwich was back then, because I had never seen one before in my life.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was strange. Canadian bread back then was all white store bought-stuff. It had no taste.”
“Do you remember anything about Armenia?”
“Only bits. There was a war. There was no food. And hundreds of children were huddled together in darkness.” Gramma Pauline sighed. “That’s all I can remember right now.”
“Do you know what year you came over?”
“That I remember well. I was seven years old and it was 1923.”
Monday, September 13
Paula stopped in to the school library during her spare. If she could find something here about Armenians coming to Canada, she wouldn’t have to go downtown.
Her first stop was the computer card catalogue. The system at her school library was not as sophisticated as the one at the public library, but she figured it was worth a try. First, she punched in “Armenia.” No hits. She tried “Armenians.” Again, no hits. She tried “immigrants” and came up with three books: one on German and Polish Canadians; one called Strangers at Our Gates; and one called Canada: Land of Immigrants. Noting the dewey decimal numbers, Paula decided to take a look at the books. None of them mentioned Armenians. Not in the chapter list in the front, nor in the index at the back.
She walked over to the reference desk and asked Mrs. MacPherson for some help. “Armenian immigration?” the librarian repeated. “I don’t believe we have anything on Armenians.” The librarian walked over to her desk and opened a drawer. “Maybe there is something in this, though.” She handed Paula a booklet called The Fiction Fit.
“What is this?” Paula asked.
“It lists works of fiction on all different subjects,” explained Mrs. MacPherson. “Sometimes, it’s a good place to start.”
Paula took the booklet over to a study carrel and flipped through it. It was a listing put together by the board of education in 1992 of suggested novels for a huge variety of subjects. Scanning down the list, she found a subject heading for “Immigrants.” She checked out the reading suggestions, and found The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Joy Luck Club, Ragtime, and other good novels, but there were none about Armenians. This was going to be harder than she thought.
Before heading home, she decided to see if she could find her history teacher and see if he had any suggestions for her. She found Mr. Brown still sitting at his desk in the history room, going over some papers. She tapped gently on the door and walked in when he looked up and nodded at her.
“What’s the problem, Paula?” he asked, setting down his pen.
“I’m trying to find information on Armenians immigrating to Canada for my project,” she explained, “but I can’t find anything in the school library.”
“Armenians?” asked Mr. Brown. “Are you part Armenian?”
“Yes,” said Paula, “I just found out that my maternal grandmother came to Canada from Armenia when she was a child.”
“That should make a very interesting project,” said Mr. Brown. “Have you interviewed her about her experiences? That would be the logical place to start.”
“I tried,” explained Paula, “but she was so young when she came over that she doesn’t remember much. Just that there was a war and that she came over with a group of orphans in 1923 and stayed at an orphanage called the Georgetown Boys’ Farm.”
Mr. Brown shook his head. “Georgetown is just an hour away from here, but I don’t remember ever hearing about a Georgetown orphanage. I also don’t recall a mass immigration of Armenians.”
> “Well, I don’t think my grandmother would get this completely wrong.”
“Neither do I. It’s just that I don’t know what to suggest. Have you tried looking in the public library?”
“Not yet.”
“That might be a place to start. Also, try the Internet.”
“Okay,” said Paula. “Thanks.”
When Paula got home after school, she made a beeline up to her brother’s bedroom. She knew that she would find him in front of the computer screen.
“How’s it going?” she asked, plopping down on Erik’s unmade bed.
“I think I’m going to die,” he answered.
Paula looked at the computer screen and tried to make sense out of the game her brother was playing. “What do you mean?”
“I should never have started on the ‘king’ level,” said Erik. “It’s impossible for me to win. I started out with ‘despotism’ as the type of government, but moved into a ‘republic’ too quickly, and now all the citizens are revolting.”
The Hunger Page 2