Blood and Salt (23 page)

“I don’t know,” Mykola said. “They were speaking German.” Mykola spoke German quite well himself
,
but he wasn’t going to say that.

The conductor examined their tickets. Considered what to do. Have the train crawling with soldiers and getting off schedule? Or...

“Now that I look more closely, I see these tickets aren’t quite correct. They won’t take you all the way you’re going.”
The conductor’s voice had a sharp edge to it.

Mykola looked at the tickets, “Chernowitz to Lemberg” printed clearly on them.
Did the man think they couldn’t read? It didn’t matter. He wanted a bribe. Mykola pulled out his purse. Hoped the conductor wouldn’t sell them out anyway.

Later, Mykola looked out the window,
eyes losing focus. Daria dozed with her head on his shoulder. Taras slept slumped across the seat opposite. Time to wake Daria so she could keep watch. They’d agreed they shouldn’t all sleep at once. He touched her arm and she was instantly awake, checking to see that Taras was still there. She listened to the
tik-tik, tik-tik,
as the train ran along the rails. If the conductor put them off the train, what could they do? They must be over a hundred miles from home. No going back.

Nothing to go back to.

Inside Mykola’s bag was the last loaf of bread she would ever bake in Bukovyna. She realized how hungry she was. She found it and tore off a chunk.

“Tonight,” she said, “I’ve travelled further than I ever did in my life. I know I will never see our village again.” But Mykola was already asleep.

Thirty or so men
exhale as one.
The rail car fades and they’re back in the cold, gloomy bunkhouse. But for the moment at least, Taras has escaped and taken them along.

“Yeah,” Tymko says after a while, “but did Krentz really let him go? I mean, this big important officer suddenly cares what happens to a common foot soldier? Maybe he’s just stupider than you think.”

“Tymko, shut up.”
With slight variations this bursts out of Yuriy, Ihor, Myro and about a dozen others. Tymko grins and shuts up. They know it won’t be for long.

CHAPTER 14

A world of grass

Taras runs
through towering beeches that grow so close together it’s hard to see where to step. The beeches turn into a thick stand of pine with no path through it; and still he runs, and every tree
is exactly like the last. There is no place to hide. A single thundering
shot echoes in his skull. Something grazes his scalp.

His heart pounds and he begins to be aware of the feeling of dreaming. A bugle sounds, clear and surprisingly loud, and he leaps to his feet. It’s the dark of night, icy cold. He thinks he sees a hunched shadow creeping away from him, but the image is gone in a moment.

Guards burst into the bunkhouse, scruffy and bleary-eyed, coats unbuttoned and carrying lanterns, and begin counting prisoners. Most of the men, drugged with sleep, don’t even know they’re there. When you fall asleep in this place, cold and weary, it’s not always easy to wake up.

No one missing. Taras runs his hand through his hair. Did someone touch him as he slept? He shivers. He’ll never get back to sleep now. He watches for a long time, but no one moves.

At breakfast a story trickles through the mess hall.
In the night a guard thought he saw a prisoner outside the compound, and fired.
The bugle sounded, it was no dream. In the morning when soldiers went out to look, they found deer tracks.

Taras has no plans for escape.

Before they leave
the mess hall, each man is given a pair of woollen pants. Fingering the coarse material, Taras considers its warmth over long underwear. On the worst days he can add his old overalls on top of the new pants.

Then for nearly a week, it’s too cold to go outside at all.
Taras wears his woollen pants in the bunkhouse. They are the best thing about the week.

One evening
the carver begins work on a fresh piece of pine. Taras and his friends watch with a glimmer of interest, wondering who his next subject will be. Maybe that’s what catches the attention of the new guard who’s on duty because Andrews is sick. Too late the carver looks up, and in a half second the guard takes away the knife. He also captures the piece of wood – just in case Bohdan Koroluk might try to carve it with his bare hands.

He sits on the edge of his bunk.
Taras watches him, wondering what’ll happen now. Bohdan working was a constant presence; something they could depend on. He was carving things that made them feel better. Tymko and Myroslav exchange glances. Something has to be done. A cold, heavy mist seems to be settling on the bunkhouse.

“Taras,” Myro says, “it’s time we heard more of your story. It was like a good book I didn’t want to put down.”

“Oh, I don’t know –” Taras begins. He doesn’t really feel like it. The guard’s stupid action has depressed him. The guards have so much power over them, and he hates the moments when that becomes too obvious. When his nose gets rubbed in it.

He’s decided that the guards can’t help being slightly insane, as he defines insanity. He figures they know two contradictory things at once. One, that the men in the camp are here for good reasons, and that the rest of Canada must be protected from them. And two, that the men aren’t dangerous and are being punished for no reason at all.

“Now where did he leave off?”
Tymko is asking, as though Taras hadn’t spoken.

“Something about his mother,”
Yuriy says. “How she’d travelled so far...”

“I’ve travelled further than I ever did in my life,” Myro quotes from memory. What storyteller could resist the flattery of a listener’s remembering his favourite moments?

They’re waiting. Myro beckons Bohdan to come and listen. He comes. He’s never done that before. That tips the balance.
Taras tries to think where he left off.
Ah, the train out of the old country.

Taras makes short work of the voyage, on a ship like a swaying wooden tower – or maybe like the stave church in the village – set in the middle of more water than he ever wanted to see or even know about.
At night deep in the ship’s belly the air reeks of sweat, vomit, urine, shit. Storms drive waves across the deck. The hold is a wild, rocking cradle.

Water tastes rank. There isn’t enough of it for washing.

The long journey west on the Colonist train is an improvement in many ways. He remembers things he thinks his friends might enjoy.
And he’s thought of something Bohdan will like.

So far
the train feels
safer than the one that rolled them out of Bukovyna. The conductor has not asked for bribes. No soldiers watch the station platforms. The Kalynas no longer keep watch at night. There’s a stove at the end of the car if people want to cook. The Kalynas don’t want to. They eat bread and hunks of cheese wrapped in brown paper that Batko bought at the last stop. If and when they reach a new place that might some day be home, that will be time enough to resume the business of daily life.

The swaying and the click of the rails is soothing. It asks nothing of them.

The newly created Kalynas struggle to understand their lives. Mykola wanted to make things better in the village, but has become an immigrant.
Taras wanted to marry Halya. Daria wanted to keep doing the things that helped her family. She hasn’t talked much since the days on the ship. Maybe she can’t see any point in it.
They’re here now, what is there to say?

Before he had to leave, his parents had a place they knew, that felt right and good to them. They sheltered in a house, a village, a landscape. Now they’re naked, or good as. They eat bread baked by strangers.

But their eyes never accuse him. It’s done, that’s all.

He can’t hold this country in his mind, there’s too much of it. Outside the window, rocks and pines and lakes crawl by, soon to be replaced by prairie. Even further west – if that’s possible, and their tickets say it is – a farm awaits them. But he doesn’t really believe in it, especially at night.
Who gives away land, anyway?

At night a gentle rocking lulls them to sleep on a landlocked ship.
They dream.
They let time slip through their fingers. For now. That will have to change soon.

As they near the city of
Winnipeg, the people and things in the car, which they’d been too detached to notice, become clearer. Last night a baby started to cry and now it cries all the time. The parents and some of the other passengers have tried to soothe the baby.
Walking it up and down the car, singing songs in Ukrainian, German, Romanian. By now everyone understands that the mother hasn’t got enough milk.

Daria fears the baby will die. She hadn’t wanted to know about the other people, but this fear ties her to them.

Older children run up and down the car and sometimes into adjoining cars until the conductor chases them back.
An old man carves small objects of wood – square blocks, rough shapes of dolls, tops that spin in the aisle then fall drunkenly on their sides. He gives them to the children, who play with them for hours at a time.

At Winnipeg a man gets on who seems to have more energy, more colour to him, than the train people. Marko Kupiak talks to everyone, learns all the children’s names, seems to know all the languages of eastern Europe. He has black hair and sparkling dark eyes. He knows songs beyond counting, sings them to whoever will listen. And he has a talent even more wonderful than his singing.

“Kupiak!”
says Ihor
.
“I know people with that name. In the village next to mine.”

“That’s right,”
Taras says. “Kupiak is a Hutsul.”

“I don’t know a Marko. But he must be related.”

“Yes, he must be. So as I was saying, Marko Kupiak has a talent even more wonderful than singing.
The baby starts to cry. He walks up to the mother and offers to hold him.
The mother is worn out with all the crying. She hands the baby over and Kupiak holds him with great care. He asks the baby’s name: Oleksandr. He sings a song about a baby called Oleksandr, and the baby still cries. And then... He whistles the songs of birds. Real bird songs and ones he’s made up himself.”
Taras feels them warming to the story, senses the slight pause he needs to leave to increase their interest.

“Soon all the children gather close and the adults, too. Some of the birds sing soft and low, some scrap and chirp like old men arguing. Others sound like a
baba
scolding you for something. All the time he cradles the baby in his strong arms. The baby stops crying. Smiles and laughs at the new sounds.”

Taras’s listeners also smile.
The simple story reminds them who they are. Kupiak isn’t a rich man, but he has gifts. Taras builds the picture. Kupiak’s been visiting his brother Panas in Winnipeg. He’s travelling to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and then going home to a sheep ranch in the hills south of town, owned by a man named McLean. McLean is letting Kupiak buy the place bit by bit out of his share of lambs. In ten or fifteen years he’ll own it. Everyone sighs. This is how it should go.
Work hard, life will be good.

Before they reach
the Saskatchewan border, Kupiak hears the stories of everyone in the car. He listens to what the Kalynas tell him and understands that some things have been left untold. He might even guess, considering their son’s age, that Taras has run from the army. He tells them the place they’re headed, Spring Creek, isn’t far from Moose Jaw.

“You’ll visit my house,” he says. “Enjoy some mountain hospitality.” For Kupiak, like Ihor, is from the Carpathians. They’ve never met a Hutsul before, but they’re charmed. When he whistles, their spirits lift. Maybe the baby won’t die. Maybe a farm is really waiting.

Kupiak pulls a small package out of his pocket and offers each of them a dried fruit, shaped, or so Taras thinks, like a testicle. When he bites into it he finds masses of seeds – nearly as small as poppyseeds – with unexpected sweetness. After the fig, he offers them dates, so sweet their teeth ache; but their stomachs feel fuller than before.

The baby starts to cry again. Plaintively, desperately. Kupiak talks to the conductor. Both of them head to the next car. Ten minutes later they return with a woman holding a very young baby. Kupiak speaks in a low voice to the woman who hasn’t enough milk. After a moment, the two women share a smile and the babies are temporarily exchanged. The men in that part of the train move off a little, and the woman from the other car, Marusia is her name, nurses Oleksandr.

They reach Spring Creek
the next morning. It’s small, a town of maybe a thousand people, with different kinds of stores clustered on a few streets near the train station. They step down onto a packed dirt main street, clutching the wooden chest and the homespun bag. A couple of women walk past them, holding children by the hand. A man drives by in a wagon loaded with lumber. Another in a suit and hat disappears into a door marked “Royal Bank.”

No one seems to notice them.
They might as well be invisible.