Blood and Salt (15 page)

“What do you expect?”
Tymko says. “These are the guys even the army can’t use.” The guards frown, especially Barkley. They don’t understand the words, but they do recognize the sound of sarcasm.

Myro nods. “Makes the Austrians look like princes.”

“I wouldn’t say that,”
Yuriy says.

“You’re right. That’s going too far.”
They laugh.

Barkley moves on,
giving Tymko another evil look. The guards head for the door.

“What’s wrong with him?”
Yuriy wonders. “He can’t possibly speak Ukrainian.”

“Don’t you see?” Tymko grins. “They know I’m a radical socialist. So now they’ve decided you’re all socialists.” He plays a card. “They see you
consorting
with me.”

“Oh shit, just our luck,
”
Yuriy says to Myro. “Now I’m a socialist
farmer and you’re a revolutionary professor.” He plays a card.

Myro plays a card and takes the trick. “I’m not a professor.”

“Okay, Myroslav the revolutionary arithmetic teacher.” They all laugh.

“Nothing more dangerous,” Tymko says. “Socialists who can add and subtract.”

They laugh again but the momentum soon fades. Taras throws in his hand and, after a quick look around, the rest follow. Before he was sent here, each man had things he wanted to do. People he cared about. Maybe even that sneaky bastard Zmiya, who’s been watching them all afternoon, had someone. Well, that’s hard to imagine.

Months, maybe years, are being stolen. Who among them can know how many days his life still holds? Or what is happening to parents, sweethearts, children, while they wait in this cavern of chilled, indifferent air? Canada has never seemed so foreign and yet so frighteningly like the old country.

Taras hasn’t taken up his story again. He hasn’t got the heart for it.

“So why do the guards
think you’re a radical?”

Taras and Tymko are felling trees but have managed to edge a few steps into the forest, away from the eyes of the guards, especially red-faced Jackie Bullard. They are consorting, as Tymko called it, about politics.

“Oh, a lucky guess, I suppose.”
Tymko fixes Taras with his black eyes
.
“And because that’s what I am.” His wild hair sticks out under his winter cap. If he didn’t know him, Taras might think
:
This man could be dangerous. And maybe he could be. But nobody’s funnier, either, when the mood takes him. Or kinder when he sees the need.

“Oh. But Viktor Dubrovsky called my father a socialist, and Batko only wanted our village to have a co-operative flour mill. Viktor thought anybody who wanted to change anything was a socialist revolutionary. But that’s not really radical, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. Lots of people think like that, though,”
Tymko says. “The important thing to remember is, people in every class are governed by the interests of their class.”

“Not my father. He cared about all the people.”

“It just seemed that way. He was an oppressed peasant, so he cared about other oppressed peasants.”

“I suppose so,”
Taras says. “But he was also a blacksmith. With his own shop. So we weren’t only peasants.”

“Oh, all right then, he was a peasant and a
petit bourgeois.
”

“You have a name for everything, don’t you? But my father wasn’t like the landlord. If people couldn’t pay, he waited till they could. Sometimes they never did pay.”

“Okay, he was a peasant and a compassionate
petit bourgeois.
”

“If you say so,”
Taras says, tired of the discussion. His eyes sweep the work site, as men fell trees and guards watch them. Amazingly, no one’s noticed they aren’t working.

“But what does a revolutionary socialist think? What do you want to see happen?”

“I’m glad to hear you ask that.” Tymko pulls at the tips of his bushy moustache. “Curiosity is a good sign in a young man. It leads to change.”

“What? What do you want?”

“I want an end to aristocracy and authoritarian rule. I want land for the people. Education for every child. Good food and clothing and shelter for every family.” Tymko sees Taras about to break in and forestalls him. “Yes, landlords too, but only their fair share. They’d have to work for it like everyone else.”

Taras briefly enjoys a vision of Radoski working behind a plough. Radoski cleaning cowshit out of a stable. Radoski serving beer in the tavern. Of course, he knows how to do none of these things, so he’d do them all badly.

“Oh, and democratic government. Every man voting.”

“Every man only?”
Taras thinks of his mother, of Halya.

“Sorry. Every man and woman, of course. And every man and woman could be a candidate in the elections.”

“Sounds fair. How would you get to this new way of doing things?”

“Any way we have to,”
Tymko says. “We have to fight.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Peasants and workers. Sympathetic clergy. Ordinary soldiers who join us.”

“Who do we have to fight?”

“The government, the landlords, the
bourgeoisie,
the officer class of the army, the rest of the clergy.
Anyone who opposes us.”

“This sounds to me like a lot of fighting and most likely a lot of people dead. A lot of peasants dead! I suppose I’d have to fight Batko if he’s a
petit bourgeois.
Or am I one too, since I’m his son? I guess you’d have to fight me.”

Tymko starts to object, but Taras cuts him off. “I suppose you think it would be worth it. Scientifically, I mean. People would have better lives. But how do you know you’ll succeed? What if a lot of peasants and workers get killed and nothing changes?”
Taras suddenly realizes his voice has been getting louder. But it seems no one’s even noticed. Or maybe they have, and they don’t give a damn any more.

At first Tymko doesn’t answer. Taras sees he’s pondered this question before. “It has to change. The forces of history decree it. Natural law decrees it.”

“That’s almost the same as what Myro said:
‘My heart tells me...’ You said the heart doesn’t enter into it.” Taras is proud to have thought of this on his own.

Tymko doesn’t waver. “Men will not stay forever in chains. We will seize our destiny.”

“Here in Canada too?”

“Everywhere. Nothing can stop it. The Revolution is coming.”

“I see. Thanks for explaining. What about the guards? Will we have to kill them?”

Tymko grins. This question’s easy. “No point. Wouldn’t get us anywhere. We don’t move until the time is right. Oh-oh, they’ve spotted us. Better take a leak.”

They unbutton their flies and pee gently into the snow.

Taras wonders if peeing on your hand would be enough to warm it up. Probably not. It would freeze too quickly. And you’d get pee in your mitts. A small laugh shakes his belly.

“Tonight,” Tymko says, “it’s time for you to go on with your story.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it.”

“All right.” Taras is actually relieved. Learning how to tell his story keeps him from sliding into darkness and forgetting. He’s ready to take it up again.

Jackie Bullard, or
Bullshit
as Taras and his friends have started calling him, appears behind them as they take their time fastening their trousers. He gives a quick look at the two splashes of yellow in a great field of white. “Okay, slackers, back to work.”

But in fact
it isn’t Taras who tells a story around the card table that night. Myro turns to Taras. “So do you know about this man whose name you bear?”

“Taras Shevchenko? Of course. Who doesn’t? We had his picture on the wall, even a book of poems.
The Kobzar.
Everyone in the village had the same.”

“I don’t mean what everyone knows. I mean, do you know about his life?
”
Tymko, Yuriy, Ihor all put down their cards. Several others draw close, sensing some interesting talk.

“I know he was also an artist. A great artist.”

“He was a very fine artist,” Myro says. “He could have been great if he’d been able to do his work in peace. But he couldn’t.”

“Because he was always getting into trouble,”
Tymko says. “He talked too much about Ukrainians. Sometimes he trusted the wrong people. People who didn’t like his ideas.”

“What ideas?” asks Ivan, a young man with soulful dark eyes and soft brown hair and a moustache. He’s sitting on a bunk near the card players.

“He thought Ukraine should be a country,” Myro says. Taras has always known this, of course, although he can’t remember when he first learned about it.

“If he was a painter,” Ivan says, “how did he have time for ideas?”

“Interesting question. Most people don’t see that a picture has ideas.”

“Oh no,”
Yuriy says, “you’re making the professor lecture us.”

“So don’t listen,” Ivan says, “but I’m interested.”

“Well. First of all...Shevchenko lived in lands ruled by the Russians. To be an artist in those times, probably now even, you needed to study in Russia. Right away that tells you something. He had to paint what Russians liked. Rich Russians, that is.”

Taras can’t keep from asking, “What did they like?” It’s like being back in school, only the village teacher was never this intriguing.

Myro smiles. “They liked portraits of tsars and tsarinas, nobles, famous generals and occasionally high-ranking priests. Portraits of beautiful women and girls. Idealized pictures of children, innocent as angels. Famous battles. Extravagant country houses and the life that went on there. Nature, especially with blue sky and swaying birch trees.”

Myro has them in his hand. They’ve never heard anyone speak Ukrainian the way he does. Even when he uses unfamiliar words, he fits them together in a way that helps them understand. He weaves bright pictures, and patterns that shimmer in their minds like
tsymbali
music.

“I see,” says Ivan. “They liked pictures that told them everything was going well.”

“Yes.” Myro beams at Ivan. “They wanted to be shown how wonderful their world was and what a lot of great fellows they were.”

“Was that really all they painted?”
Yuriy asks.

“People also liked to see bowls of fruit. And icons. And once in a while a painting of peasants labouring, or dancing. Just to remind themselves how things worked. Often peasants would be portrayed with a sort of coarseness about them, to reassure the masters that these must be the people God meant to be doing the hard work.”

Tymko laughs. “What was the problem, then? Why couldn’t Shevchenko just paint these things, get rich, be respected, marry a beautiful girl?”
Tara
s sees that Tymko knows the answer. He’s just trying to feed Myro the next question. They make a good team.

“He couldn’t because of who he was. A Ukrainian. A patriot. He couldn’t just make idealized paintings for wealthy people. He painted Ukrainians as one who knew them. People with a tangle of thoughts and feelings. People with ideas.”

“Hold on, though,” Ivan says. “He was a serf. Serfs didn’t get into art schools as far as I’ve heard.”

“No. But our Taras had an unusual life. He was orphaned quite young and was raised by his sister.
The village priest, who was the local schoolmaster, taught him to read.
Yes, Tymko, priests sometimes did things like that.”

“Probably expected Taras to cut his firewood for the rest of his life.”

Myro smiles but refuses to be diverted. “Perhaps through this priest, Taras came to the attention of his master, Lord Englehardt, who took the boy into his house as a servant. Over time, Englehardt discovered this servant had artistic talent. He found a teacher to help Taras learn, and when the landlord moved to St. Petersburg, he apprenticed Taras, now a young man, to an engraver.”

“Wait, that’s too much. Why would a landlord help a serf?” Yuriy asks.

“Maybe ‘help’ isn’t quite the word. Englehardt was probably only doing what many masters did – improving the value of his assets. There’s a passage in
War and Peace –”

“In what?”
Taras asks.

“War and Peace –
a great novel by the Russian count, Leo Tolstoy. In it a wealthy man who loves to give lavish parties buys a cook from a friend for a thousand roubles – for his skill at cooking French delicacies.”

“Buys
him?”
Taras asks, jaw tense. The others look upset as well. They’ve always known about serfdom, of course, the bondage of working for someone from birth to death, limited in every action, your life going on at the landlord’s whim, but the thought of buying or selling people has never been put to them quite so baldly. Now the teacher’s lesson isn’t so pleasant and they’d almost like to forget the whole thing.