Blood and Salt (3 page)

Ihor comes out of the tent. “Big bastard, isn’t it? Not like the mountains at home.”

Out in the yard,
staring at barbed wire, the prisoners stand through roll call. At first Taras misses his name, then realizes he’s become
Tay
-ris, instead of Ta-
ras
. Ihor has become
Eye
-hor, instead of
Ee
-hor. And
Yuriy is
You
-rye, instead of
You
-ree with a soft “yi” on the end.

There must be three or maybe four hundred men here. He wonders how the guards keep track of them all. They shuffle into the prisoners’ mess tent to eat bowls of gluey white porridge. A story passes from table to table. Three men escaped during the storm after cutting a hole in the fence. Grins break over the prisoners’ faces as word works its way through the tent.

How could they cut through the fence? Or did someone on the outside use wire cutters? Prisoners would have no way of arranging something like that, would they?

Taras saves the last few mouthfuls of porridge, hoping the food won’t be so scanty and poor every day. Yuriy catches his eye.

“Pokydky.
Same old crap.” So. Taras would rather not have known that yet.

“What happens next?” he asks.

“It’s very simple,” Yuriy says. “You won’t have to think for yourself at all. You’ll eat when the guards tell you to eat, usually some sort of
pokydky.
Work when they tell you to work. Go to your tent after supper. Sleep if you can.”

A soldier stops at the table. Taras won’t be going out with a work crew this morning. He has to be registered first.

Later he sits at a battered wooden table across from Private Amberly, a skinny yellow-haired boy about eighteen years old. The boy says prisoners have to surrender all personal property, but they’ll get everything back when they leave. Taras could snap the kid’s arm if he wanted to, but even this boy makes him feel afraid. What’ll they do if he refuses? Take it by force. What does it matter any more? But he feels ashamed.

Amberly sees him hesitate. “I’m sorry. You have to turn everything over.”

Taras reaches into his pocket and pulls out a watch on a chain, its silver-plated case cool in his fingers, and places it on the table. Moses lent it to him so he could get to work on time. The case is engraved with an elk’s head with huge spreading antlers. He loves this watch, more than ever now that he must give it up.

“My friend lend it to me. Comes from his
batko.
His father. I promise I look after it.” Taras was wearing the watch when the Mounties came.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be safe.” This guard does look him in the eye. He still believes his story, he’s that young. He writes a note in a ledger so that the watch can be returned some day.

Taras feels lighter without the watch. He thinks he’ll never see it again.

What is it about a watch? The government doesn’t want them to know the time of day? Perhaps knowing the time is
subversive.
Or do they imagine he could turn the case into a weapon? Well, he could if he had the tools from his father’s shop. He can make almost anything from metal.

Amberly points him to the lineup for haircuts and shaves. A cheerful man with black hair and a rakish moustache – The Turk,
the guards call him – cuts his hair very short, the back and sides clipped smooth. For some reason Taras is allowed to shave himself –
with a straight razor. But it could be used as a weapon, couldn’t it? As he thinks this, he manages to cut his cheek. Drops of blood red as
kalyna
berries fall on the towel the Turk gave him.

He’s told to strip down
for a bath. The tub looks like a big metal horse trough. Cold water. Scraps of grimy soap. He wonders if they ever change the water. Afterwards their old clothes are gone and each man gets two shirts, a pair of overalls, socks, underwear, boots and a button-up sweater jacket for cooler weather. Taras’s shirt is too tight, his boots are too loose, his socks scratchy. The clothes make him feel off balance, a slightly different version of himself. So does the mountain looming over the camp – watching them, or so it seems.

At noon in the mess tent a bored looking guard hands each new prisoner a sandwich made of shredded burnt meat mixed with lumps of lard – more
pokydky
– and a cup of tea with a skin of black sludge on top. Yaroslav sits beside him in a shirt with sleeves that end several inches above his wrists. Taras hardly knows him without the straggly hair. The Turk has shaved his beard off, but left his moustache, trimmed so that it turns up at the ends. It looks almost dashing, fanning out over his skinny cheeks.

Taras considers growing a moustache. He’s beginning to realize there aren’t going to be many choices for a man to make in this place.

Yaroslav pretends to gag on the sandwich, but he eats it.

With the other new prisoners, he and Taras slog through what feels like a couple of miles of muck under blistering sun. Nobody talks. They reach a work site where trees have been cut in a wide swath to form a road bed, leaving behind a tangle of roots, some thick as a man’s arm, others thin as wire. Taras is given a spade and told to dig them up. When he forces the spade into the earth, clods of mud stick to it. He digs, hacks and pulls roots until his arms ache.

After an hour or so, his head pounds. His eyes lose focus. He remembers making horseshoes in the smithy. The hot fire, the glowing iron. The moment when he knows a shoe is ready.

“Pick up the pace, slacker!”

How did the guard get so close without him noticing? He moves a little bit faster. After a few minutes he looks past the gnarled roots to the great trees on either side of the road bed, their shapes repeated as far as he can see. Even if he managed to sneak away, how would he find a way through them? Just as he thinks this, an enormous animal darts through these same trees, grunting and crashing into branches. It leaps onto the road bed and tears across, hooves spraying mud into the air, as if it can’t even see the prisoners.

Yaroslav, standing near by, says it’s a bull elk. Taras already knows this; it’s like the one on the watch.

The elk seems to know where it’s going.

Beside the roadbed a tree has been taken down by the storm, its roots spreading to the sky in a great circle twice Taras’s height. He wishes he could stop and look at it for a while.

In the middle of the afternoon, the sergeant in charge calls, “Okay! Take a break.” Taras limps into the shade and sits; lets the muscles in his shoulders, back and legs go slack. The feeling of being roasted and rendered falls away, a little. He drinks water from a canteen that’s passed around and eats a small ration of bread that vanishes almost without chewing or swallowing.

He thinks of his parents, Daria and Mykola, trying to farm a quarter section of dry grassland near the town of Spring Creek. Winter is coming. Harvest, poor as it will be, must be done without
him. They came to Canada because
he
had to leave. Now they don’t even know where he is. He’ll write to them; the skinny boy, Amberly, said they’re allowed to do that. They need to know he’s safe.

He doesn’t feel safe.

He looks up at the mountain and wonders if his parents have heard anything about Halya.

The evening meal
is thin stew with shreds of stringy beef floating on top, and chunks of rubbery cabbage. And a slice of dry bread with coffee that tastes like charred wood. If he could keep completely still, most of the pain from the work would go away. But every time he shifts in his chair, every time he so much as lifts a forkful of the wretched stuff to his lips, it feels like barbed wire ripples and writhes under his skin. He considers just sitting there but knows he’d faint without food. After the beef and bread comes a dense yellow pudding in which Taras finds three rock-hard raisins that look like small, charred beetles. He eats it all; still hunger gnaws his stomach.

“I see why people want to escape,” he says to Ihor as they drink the burnt coffee.

“Food is a good reason. But remember, escaping is dangerous.”

“Why? What are they going to do to me?”

The black eyes gleam. “They are going to shoot you.”

“Shoot
me? Just like that?”

“Tak.
Just like that. And then bring you back.”

Taras imagines a bullet slamming into his chest. The pain, the blood. “Do some people get away?”

“Many do. Those who know someone outside. Like the coal miners from the Crowsnest Pass. Their old workmates help them.” Ihor explains that although he isn’t a coal miner himself, he worked on a ranch in southern Alberta before he came here, and he’s met a lot of miners.

Taras’s old workmates are far away in Saskatchewan. Moses and some others would help him if he asked. But at least one of those workmates would run straight to the Mounties.

The blanket’s dry now,
the pallet almost so, but his muscles scream from all the digging and a thin layer of damp straw doesn’t do much against hard earth. Doesn’t let him forget his nearly empty stomach either. He remembers laying bricks in Spring Creek and can hardly believe he thought that was work. And in those days he got enough to eat. He turns and turns. As the light fails, the mountain breathes out cold. Men snore, cough, groan. Murmur prayers; curse bitterly; converse in low, intense tones. Can’t you shut up, he wants to say, I’m trying to sleep.

One raspy voice catches his attention. It belongs to a man called Oleksa, one of the card players from the first night, who must be about forty-five. Oleksa doesn’t seem pleased to have one more man in the tent. He’s given Taras a few hard stares, although mostly he looks right through him. You’d think he’d be glad to have a little more body heat in the air, Taras thinks.

“...no damn business putting us here,” Oleksa is saying. “We’ve done nothing wrong.” An echo of the voice on the train: “No bloody right.”

Oleksa sits cross-legged on his blanket, staring straight ahead, as if he can see through the canvas wall. There’s a streak of white in his dark brown, close-cropped hair. His moustache, also clipped short, is a lighter red-brown, the colour of a sorrel horse, that seems to belong on some other face.

“Nothing wrong,” he repeats. Taras pays attention. Maybe they’re going to explain why they’ve all been imprisoned.

“Sure we have,” says his friend Kyrylo. “We’re Ukrainian.” Kyrylo’s thin lips almost disappear under a thick black moustache turned down at the corners that gives him a permanently gloomy look. A scar runs down his forehead and into one of his bushy dark eyebrows. Saloon fight? Taras wonders. Whatever happened, the thick brow must have saved his eye.

“You can do what you like to Ukrainians,” says Toma, a short, stocky man with a quiet voice. “Just ask the Poles, the Austrians and the Russians.”
Three peoples, as Taras knows, who have fought over, carved up and ruled Ukrainian territories for a very long time. But the other two aren’t listening to Toma.

“The government likes having somebody close by for Canadians to hate.” Something in Oleksa’s voice tells Taras he’s said these words many times before.

“Why do they want someone to hate?” he asks, forgetting he’s not part of their group.

Oleksa looks pained, runs his hand through his stiff hair. “Canada’s at war with Austria and Germany. Wars cost money. Men die. The government wants people to keep supporting the war. So it gives them someone to blame. We’re what they call the enemy within.”

“You mean they think we’re Austrians?” Taras asks. “Don’t they know the difference?”

“We came here with Austrian passports. That’s enough for them.”

“The Austrians ruled us, so we’re Austrians,” Toma says.

Kyrylo pipes up. “I don’t know – is that really it? I think it’s because there’s so much unemployment. They want us off the streets.”

“They’re afraid of strikes, that’s for sure,” Toma adds. For no obvious reason, Oleksa looks irritated by this comment. Toma smiles ingratiatingly. Maybe it was something Oleksa was planning to say himself.

“Not like we invented unions,” Kyrylo says. His scar seems to crawl across his forehead when he speaks.

“No, but we caught on to them pretty quick.” Oleksa laughs, strokes the sorrel moustache. “Besides, there’s a lot of radical leaders in Canada, and the government’s afraid there could be a revolution.”

What’s a revolution? Taras wants to ask.

“Well, all I ever wanted was a decent bloody job. Now I’m foreign scum.” Kyrylo says.

“Take it easy. Wait till tomorrow. We’ll see what we can do,” Oleksa says.

“Yeah, yeah.” Kyrylo pulls his blanket up around his neck and turns to the outer wall of the tent.

Close by in another tent a man weeps. A gentle voice asks what’s wrong.

“It’s my little Nasta,” the weeping man says. “She’s all alone. There’s no money. What’s to become of her?”

The other man tries to reassure him. Someone will look after Nasta. The Canadians won’t let anything bad happen to her. Taras hears uncertainty in the man’s voice.

The next day
is much like the first, except that it’s hotter and the mud has almost dried up. As the long day limps along, Taras thinks about the things Oleksa and his friends said.