Blood and Salt (36 page)

She jerks her hand away. “No! I don’t see. My language is as real as yours. Do you think English didn’t sound strange to me at first?”

At the tables around them people turn to stare. Eyebrows rise. Lips curl. Ronnie tries to keep things quiet.

“Halya,” he pleads, “I wasn’t thinking. Of course your language is just fine.”

“Mr. Shawcross, I can’t marry you.” Ronnie sees she means it, moves in an instant from disbelief to anger. He leaps to his feet. The other diners don’t matter now.

“I don’t understand.
After all we’ve done for you. Sending you to school –”

“I’ll pay you back. I don’t know how, but I will.”

“Pay us back with what?” he sneers. “It’s that damned peasant, isn’t it?”

Halya looks astounded. “What? What did you say?”

Ronnie is taken aback. He’s almost revealed that he knows Taras. But Halya doesn’t even know he’s in Canada.

“That peasant.
Your father told me about him.
Always hanging around you.”

“What do you know about Taras?” Does this spoiled brat know where he is?

“Viktor told me about him, but I couldn’t believe you’d prefer someone like that. His family didn’t even have a proper house, just some peasant shack.” Ronnie’s dredging up every ignorant comment he’s ever heard about Ukrainians. “They barely had clothes to cover their backs or potatoes to put in the pot.
That’s what you want, is it?”

Halya sees everyone in the room is either watching them or pretending not to.
A pair of waiters huddles, clearly trying to think of something, anything, they can do to stop it.

“You’d turn me down for some buffoon...some
nobody?”

“Don’t call him that, you skunk! He’s a better man than you!” The words pour out before Halya knows they’re coming. She feels like an actor on a very large stage.

In some part of her mind, she hears Lizzy Bennet’s reply to Mr. Darcy: “In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned.” She wishes she could have said something more like that. Oh well,
skunk
was good too.

For a few seconds Ronnie looks devastated by the ruin of his fairy tale, but then the self-satisfied smirk he carries with him like a talisman comes creeping back.
A piece of his heart may be breaking, but that leaves the rest of it to carry on life.
After all, he’s still the richest man in the district. He can have any woman he wants. Well, except Halya.

The waiters move toward them, determined to do something, when Louisa returns, hair smoothed, lip and cheek rouge renewed, her smile just beginning to fade.

“Helena? Ronnie? What’s happened?”

“I’m sorry. I must go.” Halya gets up from the table and moves toward the door.

“Ronnie, what have you done?”

“What have
I
done?” He tosses the necklace to the floor.
The string breaks and Halya, turning, sees glowing pearls stream across the dark carpet.

The waiters leap to pick them up.

“I’ll go after her. Shall I do that, Ronnie?”

“I never want to see the bitch again.” Halya hears this, along with everyone else. “I’m going to
my room.” She moves behind a pillar as he marches to the elevators and stabs the button.
As if he’s forgotten his mother exists. He steps into the elevator and is gone.

A moment later their waiter helps Louisa out of the dining room into the foyer.
The second waiter wraps the loose pearls in a linen napkin and hands them to her as she reaches the elevator. As soon the elevator door closes on her, they hurry back to the dining room.

Halya gets her coat from the cloakroom and sets out for the school. She loses her way a couple of times, curses the flimsy dress, but eventually makes it back, cheeks red, and panting from exercise and fury. She feels sorry for Louisa, but that’s her only regret.

The next morning,
she packs her clothes. At first she keeps only her own things and folds everything Louisa gave her in neat piles on the bed, but a voice in her head says, You don’t think she’s going to want them now, do you? Halya realizes she can’t afford such high-flown ideas.
They’re for ladies in novels.
And she actually said she’d pay them back!

She can’t go back to the farm.
Viktor will never speak to her again, anyway.
Then how can she see Natalka? What if Natalka’s sick? How would she even hear about it?

But she’s free. She never has to spend another minute with Ronnie or Louisa. But she does have to leave school, just when she’s learning so much. What’s she going to do?

Find work, find a place to live. The voice in her head again. She knows nothing about how to do either of those things.

Yes she does. She grabs a newspaper, a few days old. Searches the advertisements.
What on earth can she do that anyone would pay her for? Women in Jane Austen novels don’t have jobs, except for servants and governesses. Oh. She’s been a companion. Is that a job? Well, it’s one she never wants to do again.

You know typing, the voice says. Maybe you could work in an office. Or in a restaurant. The voice doesn’t seem to know how you go about this, though. Maybe you just go in the door and ask. No, she can’t do that! She sees a heavy door slamming in her face.

Yes she can, if she has to.
She does have to.

My name is Halya Dubrovsky. I can speak Ukrainian and English. I can work hard.

She spots a notice about a place for rent. “Light housekeeping room near train station.
Very clean.” She tries to remember where the station is. My God, she’ll get lost, she’ll have to sleep on the street. How can she rent a light housekeeping room when she has no money? She has to find a job really fast. And what? Sleep on the street till they start to pay her?

She reads the notices for jobs. A couple of dozen of them are in offices. Most of them ask for several years of experience. She starts to cry.

The voice: Quit blubbering. Make some plans. She remembers walking past a small café with Miss Greeley.
A sign in the window said:
“Help wanted.
Apply within.” Ah...you do just go in and ask.

Halya realizes she can’t just run away. She has to say goodbye to Miss Greeley. And ask for some advice. It will be hard. The teacher will try to give her money, she knows that. To help the only student in decades of teaching who’s ever quoted Jane Austen.

Miss Greeley
notices Halya in the corridor by the Common Room and comes out to see her. She sees there’s something wrong and asks Halya up to her suite. Halya sits on a chair with a rose-coloured needlepoint cover and looks at the bookcases for what she knows is the last time. She explains that she’s leaving school.
And why.

“Surely your fees have been paid until the end of June,” Miss Greeley says. “Why not stay and finish your year?”

“I can’t. Not now. Maybe they can get some of their money back.”

Nothing the teacher can say will keep Halya from leaving, but the older woman does convince her to accept a loan of twenty dollars and to take a slip of paper with her name on it: “Letitia Greeley,
The Briarwood Academy, Edmonton.” She writes down the phone number. Halya promises to call if she gets in trouble.

Halya also refuses to leave until Miss Greeley agrees to keep her brass pendant until she can come and pay her back.

Everything
in the rented room is shabby. Grime lurks in all the corners. Lighting is a low wattage bulb hanging from the ceiling. The soiled bedspread would probably fall to pieces if it were ever washed.
The linoleum, worn through to the backing in places, smells sour. On the lumpy bed, the newspaper is open to the employment section. Halya has circled the possible jobs. Almost all have a pencilled line drawn through to show she’s already been turned down.

She reads a letter from her father, hears his angry voice. “You ask for money to come home, but I have no money for you.
You could have married Shawcross.
You could have been one of them. I suppose you were thinking of that bastard Kuzyk’s son.
You can stop worrying about him. I have heard from Lubomyr Heshka from our old village. He emigrated just before the war. He assures me that Taras Kuzyk died in a skirmish in Bosnia in the summer of 1914. You wasted your chance for nothing. You are no longer my daughter.”

Halya weeps in the filthy room. Sees Taras lying in the dirt, a bullet deep in his chest. All winter long, thoughts of him have sustained her. Now that’s over.

She wonders for a second if her father’s lying – just to hurt her. He couldn’t be that cruel, could he? And yet, she’s given him his worst disappointment,
just as he saw the road to his dreams open before him. But the name of Lubomyr Heshka convinces her.
She heard before they left Shevchana that he was talking of coming to Canada.

She can’t know that
Viktor
has
heard from Lubomyr, but that the man who died in Bosnia was Taras’s friend Ruslan.

She closes the newspaper and sees the headline: “FRENCH SOLDIERS GASSED AT YPRES.” She reads it before she can stop herself. The Germans opened canisters of chlorine gas and let the wind blow yellow-green clouds to the opposing trenches. The French commanders thought it must be a smokescreen, and that, hidden in mist, the Germans would suddenly attack. As the gas entered the trenches, the soldiers remarked on the smell of pineapple and pepper, a not unpleasant mixture. In moments they felt sharp chest pains; their throats burned. Someone realized it was gas and everyone fled. Afterwards, the chlorine slowly destroyed their respiratory organs and they suffocated, often over days or weeks.

How can this be happening?
Surely not even the worst person in the old village could have imagined something like this.

Why keep trying? There’s nothing here for her, nothing anywhere. After a long time, head aching from weeping, she remembers Miss Greeley. Letitia Greeley wants her to be safe. And Natalka, her darling
baba,
will be thinking of her, hoping she’s all right. Unless she’s ready to die and disappoint these people, she has to keep knocking on doors.

She picks up the loaf of bread she bought earlier; tears off a chunk and eats it. It tastes like dust but she chews until it’s moist enough to swallow. Keeps going until her stomach feels not full but less empty.

Miss Greeley’s money is almost gone. The room is paid up for a month, but in a few days she won’t be able to buy bread.

CHAPTER 24

Hope

April, 1916

By the end of April,
there’s more sunshine and Taras feels something warm slip inside him. It takes him a while to name it, but at last he realizes it’s hope. He sees it in the others as well,
Yuriy especially, but he’d expect that.
Tymko shows it by a desire to wash his clothes. Taras, Myro, Bohdan, Yuriy and Ihor also believe they’ll feel better with clean clothes.

In the wash house they sort garments, light a fire in the stove and set water to boil. Bohdan has carved a wooden shim, and he wedges it under the door to make sure no one comes in unexpectedly. Definitely a prohibited use of the knife Sergeant Lake gave him.
And over several weeks, each man has stolen a cup from the dining hall. Each dips into the potato wine and drinks.

“Dobre,”
Taras says, his throat burning. “It’s not that bad.”

“Well, it is,”
Yuriy says, eyes watering. “But it’s better than you’d expect.”

Taras sips again. Feels the alcohol hit his brain, his muscles. He hasn’t had a drink for such a long time. He wants to laugh. Everyone drinks.

Myro and
Yuriy dump the clothes in the tubs and pour in soap, humming to themselves.
They drink and wait.
The room is getting warm. The water bubbles and they pour it on the clothes and set more to heat.

The first cups of wine are gone.
These are their first real drinks, beyond quick tastes to see how it was developing. Now that it’s not too bad,
Taras thinks it would be foolish not to drink it down before someone else finds it. He looks at the others.

Tymko’s eyebrows rise to their highest peaks.
One by one each man nods. Yuriy grins and leads the way to the closet. Each fills his cup again.

“A toast to the humble potato, boys.”
Tymko raises his cup.

“Barabolya!”
Yuriy cries. “You’ll always have a place on my farm.”

“Kartopliya!”
Bohdan says. “Oh, if we only had some
varenyky
. Then we’d be set.” He tosses back half his drink and so do the others.

“If only we had some beautiful women to make them for us,” Tymko says. “Warm, shapely women with breasts like soft pillows, and hips –”

“Beautiful women with black eyes and curly black hair, yes,” Ihor says. “But with breasts a little smaller than pillows...” He stops when he sees the longing on the faces of the other men.