The Singing Forest

by Judith McCormack

  Yes.

  Drozd has an earache, a throbbing pain, something that makes it hard to concentrate on the questions.

  Tell me what you did again.

  Bottles. Flasks. Glasses. Vials.

  He has picked up pieces of English on the run, and patched them together in broken phrases. And he has rehearsed, anticipating some of these questions, watching his reflection in windows.

  Bottles for what?

  Wine, cooking oil, anything.

  The official — lanky, short-haired — has the face of a man surprised to find he is on another continent, but determined to reassemble himself here. New to the job, barely grasping all the regulations, but filled with fresh authority to move people around the globe. To sift out the rabble, to gather the promising ones, to move them from here to there like pieces on a game board. You may advance three spaces to the Port of Montreal. You must remain where you are and lose a turn.

  He writes down the answers with a fountain pen, scratching on a pad of foolscap, his arm and hand crooked awkwardly, the writing pinched. The clack of the typewriters, the zing of their carriages comes through from the outer room.

  Any other duties?

  Driving.

  What kind of driving?

  Deliveries.

  He has been using half an onion wrapped in a cloth as a compress for his ear, but left it behind, so as not to show any sign of weakness or ill-health. Worthless, anyway — it was suggested by a man in a pharmacy, when it became apparent he had no money for any other medicine.

  Any security or military activity?

  No.

  Are you a Communist?

  No, he says tentatively. He can see from the man’s face this is the right answer. No, he says more firmly. But he has to restrain himself from looking around to see if someone can overhear him, if someone is listening to this heresy.

  Any dependants?

  No.

  Why do you want to emigrate?

  To make the new beginning.

  The pen scratches on the foolscap.

  He looks around while the man writes. A fly dying on the sill, buzzing listlessly. A slatted blind, half rolled up. From the other room, more sounds of activity. Clack, clack, zing.

  Are you a member of the Communist Party?

  No. A Party member? If only this had been possible. Although the disappearance rate was high there as well.

  Have you recruited others to Communism?

  No. Why would he? It was all encompassing.

  Did you fight for any country in the war?

  No.

  Why not?

  Night blindness.

  Scratch, scratch. Clack, clack.

  Do you subscribe to the Soviet system?

  No, he says, restraining himself again from looking around.

  Are you a Stalinist?

  No.

  Why did you leave Russia?

  Belarus.

  To escape Communism, he says in a moment of inspiration.

  The man writes down the answer, underlines it, then puts down his pen as if he is suddenly tired of this game. He is satisfied, satisfied enough; if this man does not fit every one of the criteria, he is worthy enough, he will move forward three spaces on the board. He tears the notes off the pad and shuffles the pages together, tapping the bottom edges against the desk.

  ···

  A question, she says.

  Shredded, says Owen regretfully. I asked about that. Government storage protocols. The only thing left in the file is his landing card.

  Then how do you know he lied?

  Because the truth would have barred his admission.

  ···

  The first year — sleeping on the floor of a basement apartment, taking turns on the sprung bed or piles of blankets with two other men. Displaced persons — a Ukrainian, a Russian, as disoriented as he was. Watching bedbugs crawl across the curling linoleum, the room filled with the smell of the coal stove, the borax soap they use to wash clothes in the sink. Eating zharkoye the Russian makes from the cheapest cuts of meat — tongue, liver, shank — combining the stamps from their ration books.

  What is this city, this improbable place? This spot where they have landed, like a handful of pebbles flung across the ocean?

  Toronto, he says scornfully, rolling the word around his mouth.

  But he is largely oblivious to it, this place split by ravines full of red oak, buckthorn, and hickory — a place of reckless storms, eerily lovely dawns. Where icy streets stretch out, dotted with Sweet Caporal signs, milk truck drivers, trolley lines. And below them, below the pavement and dirt, underground creeks run their muddy courses.

  A rumbling, muttering place, shaped by factory fires, reigned over by the Lord’s Day Act — it is not lawful to tipple, revel, or use profane language in the open air. And always the old, deep lake behind it, a swallower of wrecks, of hapless men, of all the debris of the people roosting on its edge — the water rising and sighing, over and over, edging the city in reflected light.

  Now he is making the rounds again, factories, stores — a brickworks, a sugar refinery, a hardware store, anywhere that might be hiring. But this is even harder here; at least in Minsk he could speak the language, he understood how people thought. If they looked down on him, it was because of his old clothes, his rough haircut, the holes in his boots. Here, they look at him as if he were something outlandish, as if he had three arms. They seem surprised that he might even want a job at all.

  The cold crawls down his back, the wind stings his eyes, his boots make squeaking noises on the snow. Sometimes his ear still hurts, a dim ache, his hearing muted on that side. Two weeks of dishwashing at a nightclub, scouring out pots with steel wool, where he can hear faint strains of music, where he eats the rinds of the smoked hams. A month as a parking lot attendant in a plywood booth, chilblains on his fingers. Two months as a furniture mover with an easygoing supervisor, three weeks washing abattoir trucks.

  Then, abruptly, the air turns mild. The ice crusts on the ground hollow out, creating thin ledges over the pavement before breaking into pieces. Bare tree branches drip water, and winter aconite sends up green shoots. Warm winds rustle up the street, traces of spring little more than a rumour, but people — hungry for hope — sniff the air expectantly. It smells only of cinders and mud, but from this they conclude, entirely without reason, that some unnamed good thing is about to happen, that some chance at gladness is about to come their way — if not next week, then the week after that.

  These people, he says to the other two men. Fools.

  Fools, they agree.

  But they are wrong. These people are no fools. Oddly shy, perhaps, but tough, patient, clever-fingered, with a deadpan wit. Above all, practical, convinced they can devise solutions to almost anything — handy, they say — but with a store of tiny, incurable dreams hidden in the crannies of their bodies. They ask questions — insular and kind at the same time — about the war in Europe, his country, his family. He is asked so often about the last that he creates one for their consumption — an ailing mother, a young wife, both killed by Communists, a brother forced into the army.

  Oh, say the women dishing out relief food at the church, calmly generous. They say it a little skeptically, but they give him an extra ladle of chili to be on the safe side.

  No one wants to hire him, though, for the handful of jobs that come up. They hesitate for a minute, then say: can’t have a Russky here.

  ···

  Early summer, cottonwood seeds floating down, drifting onto his clothes as he dozes in the morning sun on a park bench. The park is covered in the downy fluff, sticking to the grass, the bushes, as if some strange summer blizzard had been through. Black squirrels race around, bounding up tree trunks, and the grackles ruffle their iridescent wings, calling skreak from the branches. A small
cardinal lands nearby, a flash of red and black.

  The air is warm, thick, and a bee is hovering around his face. He slaps at it ineffectually, then rouses himself, a little stupefied from the sun. Sleeping will not get him a job. He will have to begin searching farther away, the factories around the edges of the city, along the river valley.

  The first one, a paper mill. A man down with diphtheria, a large order to get out. A temporary job, then, tending the line, watching a river of slurry feed through the rollers and the drying drums. Checking as it wraps onto an enormous roll at the end of the line, another man swinging the roll away at intervals, giving it a pat as if it were the flank of a horse, shifting an empty reel in. Three hundred miles of paper a day, says the man. Three hundred miles? The distance from Minsk to Warsaw, from Prague to Trieste.

  In a week, he has learned the different grades of runs, the tricks and twists of the cylinders, he is accustomed to the rotten egg smell, the heat. He still has to look away from the line from time to time to avoid being hypnotized, to avoid falling into a white trance. And then it is over, the sick man is well and back. But the supervisor pulls him aside, tells him he will provide a reference for him, this hard worker, this fast learner. A step forward, small but useful.

  A week later.

  Potluck, they call it, says the Russian, his tongue awkward. Perhaps other people at the settlement house will have better food, they can trade the zharkoye for something more edible. The three of them go with the pot of stew, wrapped in a dishcloth to stay warm.

  When they arrive, a group of people are milling around, these dinners grouped by region. This one is for immigrants from eastern Europe, fifteen or twenty countries lumped together, as if sun-spiked Greece and northern Latvia were parts of the same territory. But the food is at least different, briny yellow cheese, spinach pastries, cracked wheat pilaf, walnut custard.

  Afterwards, he brings his plate to the kitchen where a small woman is washing dishes — narrow-waisted, her cheekbones flat, a high-bridged nose. Sofija — Lithuanian, but they both speak enough Russian, even enough English to understand each other. She moves sleepily, her heavy-lidded eyes set a little too close together, lips dry, dark hair in a bun on her neck.

  A wife. A wife would increase his respectability, would help to separate him from the single men, the drifters. But the right wife — someone who understands the way things should be between a man and a woman.

  One night: a lakefront pavilion, the sounds of big band music drifting out from the dance floor. The evening sky is grey-blue, and the light from the windows pools on the ground.

  See, she says, showing him some of the dance steps.

  Now together.

  She keeps the two of them upright in a rough likeness of the dance, but he is too stiff, too wooden, and she gives up.

  Another time: they take bread and cheese out on a rocky point on the lake, where they watch the kingfishers diving and fighting over the water. He tells her about getting butter coupons under the table, and slowly, timidly, she talks about her bickering sisters, her dying father in Vilnius. No, no family here.

  She is happy to get away from her cramped quarters, a tiny flat with two other women — they take in piecework, sewing collars, basting sleeves, her eyes often aching from the strain. They bully her, he thinks, and stores this thought away.

  She allows their hands to touch, but no more than that. If she understands some things only vaguely, if she is meek about many things, she is remarkably clear on how to handle herself as a property.

  And then, finally, a job. Something for more than a week or two.

  The heat hits him when he opens the door. A flood of recognition — the men feeding the annealers, opening the moulds, cracking the glass off the pipes. The blowers lording it over the workshop floor, swinging their pontils back and forth. The glowing furnaces, the snick and hiss of the hot glass against the damp wood of the shapers. Suddenly, in this city where every possible thing is relentlessly, exhaustingly foreign — the rusty tap water, the taste of the cigarettes, the yowling cats stuck in elms — here is something familiar, something he knows.

  He lies about his experience, and they hire him as an apprentice. Glass blowers are scarce, even now. What do they produce? Glass beakers, tubes, vials for laboratories, flasks and bottles for distilleries.

  The first day, the warehouse area in the back of the plant. He pauses at the door.

  Rows and rows of finished bottles are lined up, regiments of green and amber. Silent, this army, ready for packing. In fact, the whole room is quiet, away from the hubbub on the shop floor. The sound of the furnaces, the shouts of the men are distant, muffled by a heavy wall. The only light here is a shaft of watery sun from the window on one side. Dust particles drift slowly through it, high over the bottles.

  So hard, so dense, this glass. Solid now, but shaped by something as fleeting as breath — the form of the air caught forever in these bottles.

  Or perhaps not forever. Perhaps only until they are dropped by a careless hand, splintering into shards.

  ···

  Let us pass to another curious feature of glass, the fact that it may be made from such a number of different ingredients. One notable example is forest glass or waldglas, which is constructed of sand together with the ash from burnt bracken and trees. The properties of such glass are markedly inferior to those of other compositions, but it is valued now for its very coarseness.

  ···

  The first time he hits her, the expression on her face is stunned, hurt. She puts her hand to her cheek, and it comes away with a streak of blood, blood from where the cheap wedding ring has grazed her skin. She looks at it uncomprehendingly for a second, and then begins wailing, clutching herself.

  This is your fault, he says.

  What was her sin? She bought a dress without asking him first. Without his permission. A bleak rage overwhelms him.

  He hits her again, and she screams.

  But he has calculated how far he can go, measuring her reactions — so far and no further, a gamble on the chances of her leaving. He knows she has no money, no people here. And he has convinced her that staying here, her status in this country, is now dependent on him. Still, he brings her a gift the next day, a small bird he has made out of the ends of glass rods. She is sulky, reproachful, she refuses to take it. Later that evening, though, he sees her looking at the little figure, picking it up, stroking its tail, its green eye.

  She will have to learn.

  When he does it again, she is less shocked, her wailing lower in pitch. This time, he brings her a fistful of tulips taken from someone’s garden. She is cold, scornful, she pushes them away. He puts them in water, puts them on the table on her side of the bed. She moves them away, and he puts them back. Then she lets them stay there.

  They all have their faults, says an older woman at the settlement house, shaking her head, pursing her lips. They all have their failings. Some of them drink, some of them cannot hold a job. Some of them hit their wives, this is the way of things. You will get used to it. You must learn how to avoid making him angry. For a woman, it is better to be married. Besides, what would you do if you left, where would you go? Especially now, in your condition.

  In her condition.

  He is pleased.

  This is a good life, he says to her. You are lucky. Look what a lucky woman you are. A flat of our own. An electric stove. Hot water. A bed with pillows, a quilt. In a few years, I will be a journeyman. In a few months, I will buy a car.

  Gradually, he sees the little fight that was in her begin to drain away, bit by bit, her face becoming duller. She seems increasingly grateful for any solicitude he shows her, increasingly passive. When he raises his arm, she cowers.

  She will have to learn. And there is no shortage of chances to teach her.

  But he buys her a ring with paste diamonds, later a washing mac
hine with a wringer on top.

  Look what a good husband you have, he says. Say it: I have a good husband.

  I have a good husband, she says listlessly.

  And some days she almost believes it.

  ···

  She is showing him a small bundle, wrapped in a blue hospital blanket. Her face is blurred with happiness. The baby has mossy black hair, dark eyes sealed shut. The man looks at the two of them blankly.

  You should be proud, she says.

  The same thing the men at work say, slapping him on the back when they hear. A boy, they say. Good work, they say. They raise their mugs to him at lunch, even though they are not particularly fond of him.

  But now he knows how to get along with them, how to talk with them, to behave the way they behave, to keep his contempt hidden. And he is more like them than before, his English is better, he has a wife, this child. After he becomes a journeyman, he will become the manager — he is forming his plans even now. He has already begun making little comments about the current manager, about a mistake here or there, and he makes a point of flattering the owner whenever he is around. Once he is in charge, he will increase production, he knows the system now, where the snags are. He knows the men, too, the ones who are quick, the ones who are slow, each one’s weak point.

  At the moment, though, Sofija is showing him the baby’s wrinkled hands, a beaded wristband around one of them. The tiny feet, a smear of blood from the birth still on a toe. Proud. Is this what he feels?

  No. He feels only empty, hollow. His stomach heaves, and then heaves again, and he vomits into the sink.

  ···

  Then:

  Another baby on the way, her small body ballooned out again. Now she is a manufacturer of human beings, creating muscles, fat, veins. Her belly sways in front of her, the skin twitching when the child twists and kicks.

  The first one is — all at once — a small boy, brown-eyed, long-lashed, the soft skin of a child. Running around, a stick in his hand, chanting something, he bumps into his father. The man swats him, swats him hard, swats him again.