Blood and Salt (28 page)

Halya and Natalka sit at the table mending clothes one evening, chatting comfortably in Ukrainian.

Viktor reads a newspaper, straining to wring meaning from the foreign words, the unfamiliar letters. He gets the weekly paper from Mr. Hamilton when he’s done with it, and the occasional Moose Jaw paper whenever his employer goes to town. For
Viktor
is
working for another man, despite what people in the village would have predicted. He’s feeling out the new world on the road to being an important man.

“Give me the white thread, Halychka.”

Halya passes the thread. “There you are,
babusya.
”
They laugh.

“You should try to speak English,”
Viktor says, very grumpy.

“I’m old,” Natalka says. “Let me speak my own language.”

“Yes, you’re an old woman. But Halya needs to learn.”

“Pah! English hurts my tongue.”

“I work for Mr. Hamilton. He helps me learn. So I can help you and Halya.” Halya peers at her sewing as if it’s the most fascinating thing she’s ever seen.

“This is a good place,”
Viktor says. “The land is good too.”

“Oh yes,” Natalka says. “That must be why the owner was so eager to get rid of it.” Viktor takes a deep breath to keep from rising to the bait.

“I’ve explained that to you. He bought a bigger farm closer to town. This is a good place and I’ve got us this house, bigger than in the old country.”

“But not nearly as nice.
There’s no
peech.
And you won’t let us put up the icons.”

Viktor tastes hot words in his mouth, but again holds them back. He waves his hand as if to say that he can’t be bothered trying. He turns to his daughter.

“Time to look around, Halya. Time to stop mooning over that boy.” Halya stares out the window. “He’ll be in Bosnia by now and will have forgotten all about you. He could even have been killed.”

“He’d never forget me.
And he hasn’t been killed. I’d know.”

Viktor ignores this claim. “There is something in this paper I want you to hear. He reads haltingly, translating as he goes.
“
‘Lady...desires...companion and...home helper.
’
You understand? A
pahna
wants someone to come live in her house. Talk to her, help around the house. ‘Must be well spoken and clean. Apply by letter to Shawcross Ranch, Spring Creek.
’
”

He tears out a neat square of typed words framed in an important-looking black box. A happy smile spreads over his face.

Halya looks horrified. “I couldn’t do that, Batko. Honestly, I couldn’t.”

“Nonsense.
You would be perfect.”

“I don’t know their language!”

“You’ll learn. In the meantime, I’ll write to her. Mr. Hamilton will help me.”

Halya continues to protest, but Viktor only smiles. He sees it all in his mind. His girl, in the
pahna’s
house.

“Now, I will teach you how to greet these people. They don’t say
‘dobre dehn’
as we do, they say ‘good day.’ It means the same thing! Say after me, ‘good day.
’
”

Halya picks up her sewing and runs out of the room. Viktor shrugs. He begins the letter.

When Viktor goes
to see his employer, Halya picks up the newspaper. She pays more attention to Viktor’s English lessons than she lets on, reads the newspaper when he’s not around. She, too, needs to know how this place works. She’s learned that the best thing to be is British. Everyone else is judged by how close they come to Britishness. Other peoples who speak their own languages are considered quaint, a bit embarrassing, as if they must be trying to speak English and failing.

From advertisements she’s learned what things cost. What a hired girl can earn working long hours in a farmhouse or a house in town. If she had to leave, she could be a hired girl, but how could she leave Natalka? For now she waits, works in the house and yard, and sometimes in the fields. Here luck is with her. English women don’t work in the fields, as far as she knows.
And Viktor wants them to be as English as possible. Luckily the crop was planted when he bought the place.

She’d never imagined
Viktor would consider sending her to a place where he didn’t have daily control over her. Only the sweet, succulent promise of a daughter learning to be like an English
pahna
could have tempted him to this.

When Viktor returns from Mr. Hamilton’s farm in time for supper, he’s still smiling. Back home no one could have imagined Viktor Dubrovsky smiling. Mr. Hamilton will post the letter in town. Halya prays there will never be an answer.

Viktor and Halya
sit on upholstered chairs in the parlour of Louisa Shawcross, a well-dressed, bored-looking
pahna
in her fifties. Halya wears an attractive cotton dress, dark blue printed with white flowers. Wishes she were somewhere else.
Viktor puffs himself up in a black suit.

“My daughter very clean, strong. She work hard. No trouble.”

Halya sees a slight smile of contempt behind Mrs. Shawcross’s
pahna
manners. “I see, Mr., um...Dobson?”

“Yes,”
Viktor says. “I change name so we more English. I want learn her...to be lady. Like you, madam.”

Mrs. Shawcross smiles. “Does Helena speak English, Mr. Dobson?”

Halya shakes her head, but no one notices. She’s Helena now, is she?

“She speak a little now. She learn fast, lady.
Very smart girl.”

“Can she read and write?”

Halya understands the question and feels annoyed by it. “Yes,” she says in English. “My language. I read and I write. Read poetry.” She straightens her back and holds her head higher.

The
pahna
gives her a closer look. Oh no. Now the woman seems to find her interesting.

“I like to read poetry too. All kinds of literature. Perhaps we might get on.”

Halya tries not to look horrified. She’d never have spoken if she’d thought the
pahna
would
approve
of her reading. She sees that Viktor can hardly believe his luck. He’s never imagined any good could come of reading poetry.
Well, what he thinks of as good.

“We have a woman in twice a week to do all the cleaning and wash clothes. But I assume you are capable of preparing meals.” Halya looks puzzled. “You know how to cook?” she asks slowly. Halya nods.

“Well, then, I think Helena might as well begin at once,” Louisa Shawcross says. “Then, tomorrow, perhaps, you can bring the rest of her things.”

What’s she saying? Has the woman hired her? Just like that?

“Thank you, madam.” Viktor looks as if he’s afraid to say another word in case the
pahna
changes her mind. Afraid of seeming
too pleased. Besides, he probably can’t think of any more English words.

Don’t leave me here, Halya thinks. Please don’t. But Viktor is going to. She realizes they don’t expect her to say a thing.

Halya’s room
is definitely a lady’s room: soft blue walls, a fancy brass bedstead and a polished walnut dresser. White organdy curtains. A framed print of a lady in a tight striped satin dress hangs over the dresser. The lady looks around her nervously, her small mouth pursed. She is outdoors, in a forest or garden, about to slip a folded letter into a crack in the bark of a tree. A note to some forbidden lover? It looks like some things are the same even for English women.

Halya hangs her flower-print dress in the closet.
The
pahna
has asked her to put on one of her old dresses. She said it would fit perfectly and it does. It’s deep green and beautifully made. Halya knows at a glance that some poor woman spent long days on its cutting and sewing, especially on the vertical pleats across the bodice. She has to take shallower breaths because the waist is so snug. Apparently, though, it should be tighter, because Mrs. Shawcross tried to make her put on a corset that laced up the back. Halya couldn’t hold back a small shriek and that made the bossy old crow give up on corsets.

Of course a
pahna
would be bossy.
What’s the good of servants if you can’t make them do things they don’t want to do? she probably thinks.

The lady in the picture must be wearing one. Nobody’s waist could be that small naturally. Halya wonders how women in such garments are expected to breathe. She wonders why looking so thin is considered attractive.

The
pahna’s
given her shoes to wear, too, black leather lace-ups with small, raised heels. They make her carry herself more stiffly. She has to think before she moves.

Halya looks at herself in the mirror.
The green dress flatters her, seems to make her brass-coloured hair shinier. “Helena Dobson,” she says to her image.

Another reflection appears in the mirror. Mrs. Shawcross watches from the doorway.

A few days later,
her chores done until it’s time to make supper, Halya sits in the dining room with pen and paper, bathed in light from the double windows, practising writing. The
pahna
actually
wants
her to do this. In fact she taught Halya the English alphabet herself.
Halya still finds this alphabet confusing, because some letters are the same and others totally different. And some are just missing.

She can’t believe she lives here now. It’s the first time in her life that she’s slept anywhere other than in her father’s house. She doesn’t miss him. She does miss Natalka.
Wonders what she’d think of Mrs. Shawcross.

The
pahna
is like no person she’s ever met. Interfering. Rich. Thinks other people are here for her entertainment. And she’s crazy for reading books; novels, she calls them. And for teaching Halya to read them. In English. Halya has no idea how long she’ll be able to stand it, but has to admit it’s interesting. She wishes she could tell Natalka all about it. Well, sooner or later the old lady will have to let her go home for a visit. Won’t she?

She pulls a paper from her pocket with words written in Ukrainian.

Don’t say my love is gone from the earth.

If he were, I would know.

His voice comes to me on the wind.

One day he’ll find me, or me him.

Yesterday I saw a swallow burn

a dark shadow on the sun.

As warm rain turns to bitter snow,

oh, swallow, ride the bright sky

across this wide land

and bring him home.

She stares at it, trying then crossing out different combinations of words. She wishes she could talk to Shevchenko. He would help her find the words and rhythms she needs.

Halya hears the
pahna
coming and hides the poem. Mrs. Shawcross enters, a little drunk, a glass of sherry cradled in her long fingers. “Hard at work, I see. Would you like a glass of sherry?”

Halya shakes her head. Louisa gave her a glass yesterday and she thought it was disgusting.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Shawcross.” Halya is sure that no reaction of any kind, let alone disap
proval, gets into her voice, but the lady must hear something. Her face flushes and she leaves the room.

That evening,
from the kitchen window, Halya sees the
pahna’s
son ride up to the barn. Mrs. Shawcross says that he stays in town most of the time, in a room at the hotel, but sleeps at the ranch a couple of nights a week. He dismounts, and a hired hand leads the horse into the barn as Ronald Shawcross walks up to the house. He’s a tall man with smoothly brushed brown hair, and he’s what people would call handsome, although there’s a self-important look about him she doesn’t really care for.

Halya hurries to her room.
The
pahna
has said that she “must meet Ronnie,” so Halya changes into the green dress Mrs. Shawcross likes and goes down the hall toward the parlour and stops in the doorway. Louisa Shawcross and her son are drinking sherry and haven’t seen her yet.

“So you’ve hired one of those Galicians, Mother.” Ronnie lights a cigarette from a leather case. “Plenty of English girls who’d love to come here.”

“Oh yes,
English
girls. Can’t cook anything but roast beef and canned peas. But Helena... Well, you’ll see. She’s interesting.”

“You haven’t time to turn bohunks into ladies, you know. Don’t see why you’d want to.”

“You wouldn’t.
And don’t say bohunks. It’s vulgar.”

Bohunks.
Is that what this man calls Ukrainians? Halya comes in to get the introduction over with. In the green dress she must look a bit like an Englishwoman.
Well, she’s not an Englishwoman. She looks at the
pahna’s
son defiantly.