Blood and Salt (41 page)

That night, huddled in the tent, Taras, Tymko, Yuriy, Myro, Ihor and Bohdan continue to feel like dangerous men.

The light fades
and September begins, and at supper one night Taras meets Nick Boyko, who says he used to live in Edmonton. He asks about a fancy schools for girls. Nick grins. He used to be the janitor at Briarwood Academy. He even remembers the address.

Taras composes a letter. It’s hard to know what to say. Maybe Halya’s not there at all. It was just a guess, after all. But he makes himself concentrate.
Tells Halya how much he misses her. Asks if she’s all right.
Whether it’s true that she’s marrying an Englishman. He waits.

One evening
Myro comes back from the canteen with the latest
Crag and Canyon.
He traded a soldier some cigarettes for it. It has an article by a Banff man who visited the camp. Taras never imagined any one would come here on purpose, but it seems the doctor sometimes invites people. Myro reads the article to his friends.

“Of the many beautiful motor trails radiating out from Banff the one par excellence is that leading to the internment camp at Castle Mountain, and the person who makes the trip with Dr. Harry Brett misses none of the delights of the trail. The road winds, twists and turns in a bewildering manner, each turn disclosing some new scenic beauty until the brain grows dizzy in the endeavour to retain an impress of each.”

“I see it at last. We
are
lucky to be here,” Tymko says. “Look how happy this idiot is after just one visit.”

“Skirting the Vermilion lakes,” Myro continues, “which can only be likened to azure jewels in settings of emerald, crossing innumerable mountain streams which babble stories of the hills from which they flow, passing mountain sheep and lambs which look with inquisitive eyes upon the car and its occupants –”

“Those aren’t sheep and lambs!” Yuriy breaks in. “Those are innocent Ukrainians.”

“The road winds on until Castle station is reached...” Myro skips a paragraph or so to the spot where the writer arrives at the camp, “a veritable white city...ideally located beneath the shadows of Castle Mountain, laid out with all due attention to the laws of hygiene, and cleanliness is one of the watchwords. Pure water is piped down from a stream up the side of Castle Mountain and every attention is given to the health and well-being of the inmates of the camp.” Laughter and shouts of disbelief. Myro skips ahead.

“The officers, from the Commandant down to the non-coms, have a true conception of the meaning of the word hospitality, which they dispense with lavish hands, and a dinner in the officers’ mess tent leaves nothing to be desired by the most fastidious epicurean.

“To reach the limit of enjoyment the night should be spent at the camp, if one is fortunate enough to receive an invitation from the officers.
The evening can be most pleasantly spent in watching the fantastic shadows which play over the heights of Castle Mountain.” He skips ahead again. “And to be awakened in the morning and introduced to a plate of hot buttered toast and a huge cup of steaming coffee with the request or command to partake of it before arising is the acme of hospitality. A substantial breakfast in the officers’ mess, followed by the run to Banff in the fresh, cool air of the morning, makes one think that this old world is a mighty pleasant place to live in.”

They look at their shabby clothing, their coarse, reddened hands. Finally Yuriy asks, “What’s an acme?”

“I’d like to introduce this guy to my fist,” Ihor says. “That’s my idea of mountain hospitality.”

“Maybe he could join us in our dining tent,”
Yuriy says. “I’ll give him hot buttered toast right up the
sraku.”

“Never mind him,” Tymko says. “He’s not even part of the actual ruling class. Just one of its toadies.”

“No,” Myro says, “let’s be honest. He’s an asshole.”

Taras wonders
if he should try to escape before the winter snows arrive. One chilly day he grubs roots. They look exactly like all the others although he’s better at digging them now. He’s sweating, but he’s also cold, with only a button-front sweater over his shirt and pants.

He blows on his bare hands to warm them, looks to the mountain side of the road. Mike Pendziwiater, a man he knows only to say hello to, walks slowly, looking neither right nor left, into the trees! Slowly, that’s the key.
As Ihor says, if you want to escape, don’t look like you’re trying to. Taras goes back to digging. He feels a little warmer, or so it seems.

Mike is missed when they return to camp. Taras tries not to laugh at how outraged the guards look about this latest example of ingratitude
.
A search party gets ready to go out, but a man hails the soldiers at the sentry post. It’s Mike, reporting in. Men lined up at the mess tent rush over to him. Guards yell. Mike doesn’t say anything. Taras watches the guards consider putting Mike in the hoosegow or denying him supper, but after they’ve hollered at him for a while they let him join the others for supper. Mike still doesn’t say a word.

Six days later, he walks out again
.
This time the guards are ready. Bullets fly all around him, but Mike keeps going, untouched, and disappears into the trees. Again the guards can’t find him. Again he walks back to camp in time for supper.
They send him to the guardhouse overnight.

“Is he crazy?”
Tymko rails. “The man was free!”

“I hear they might send him to an insane asylum,”
Yuriy says.

“Then he wouldn’t have to work outside,” Ihor says. “They probably have better food too. Maybe that was his plan.”

Plan? Taras thinks. The most likely outcome would be getting shot by the guards.

“Anyway, what’s insane about wanting out of this place?” Ihor says, as they walk back to their tent. “Maybe he just needed a long walk in the forest.”

As he speaks of forest, Ihor’s eyes soften and he’s back home, warm in a sheepskin coat, a curved pipe clenched between his teeth.

After supper he and Taras stop to smoke, looking up at Castle in the fading light. Sometimes Ihor will stare at it for half an hour. Coming from mountains more rounded and worn, he strives to understand the Rockies. His conclusion pains him.

“I can’t find this mountain’s spirit.”

That evening,
Yuriy sits on his pallet, holding a letter from his wife Nadia, his mind far away, tears in his eyes. Taras approaches quietly so as not to startle him and pats his shoulder, knowing that it doesn’t help. Or maybe it does, but not enough.

Next morning it’s very cold.
Yuriy puts on his woollen pants under his serge overalls and his outdoor sweater over his shirt. Looks like a good idea,
Taras thinks, and does the same.
At breakfast, he misses Yuriy for a moment, then sees him, quick as a weasel, duck out of the cooking area, where a guy he knows works, pockets bulging. Later, on the march to the road bed, he watche
s
Yuriy without seeming to and so notices the moment when
Yuriy looks calmly around him, then drifts slightly off course until he’s in the forest. He doesn’t run, he lies on his belly until the work gang passes. Taras gazes straight ahead.

Yuriy is missed at lunch break. The guards look suspiciously at Taras. He manages to look as puzzled as the rest of them really are. Andrews and Bullard are sent to look for Yuriy, but have no idea where to start.
With them gone, there aren’t enough guards to supervise the work gang and they’re marched back to camp.

Two weeks pass and Yuriy hasn’t been caught. Two and a half weeks.
The men in the tent are surprised
Yuriy didn’t tell them what he was planning. Finally Taras tells Tymko, Ihor and Myroslav about the day
Yuriy calmly walked away on the road to the work site.

The next evening they hear rough voices outside the tent and Yuriy staggers in after being shoved by a guard. For a moment no one speaks.
Then Tymko gives him a huge hug.

“It’s our Yuriy back!” he says. “Our favourite son of the soil! Where in hell have you been?” He looks Yuriy over, sees rounded cheeks and a look of well-fed contentment. Definitely not the
Yuriy they last saw.

Yuriy grins. “If that Mike guy could do it twice, I figured I could do it once. I went to see my wife.”

“And how is Nadia?” Myro says.

“Nadia’s beautiful. The harvest is beautiful. Thirty bushels to the acre.”

“Was she glad to see you?”
Tymko asks, waggling his eyebrows.

“Very glad.”
Yuriy grins.

“Did you walk the whole way?”
Taras asks.

“Walked, got rides with farmers. Sometimes they took me home for a meal. I even stopped once and worked on a threshing crew so I could buy more food.”

“Did you walk back too?” Myro asks.

“No need. My neighbour – a good man, not the one who got me sent here – lent me some money until Nadia can sell the crop. I took the train back. Got off at the Castle siding and walked in.”

“Why’d you come back?”
Tymko asks. “You must be as crazy as that other guy.”

“I didn’t want to get Nadia and her mother in trouble. Or give that other bugger a chance to run to the police again. I did what I had to. Now I’m back. Also, I couldn’t desert all you guys.
You’d be lost without me.”

“That’s true,” Ihor says. “We’d be really short of bullshit.”

“Anyway, I feel like a man again.”

Tymko winks.
Yuriy’s got his swagger back.

“They’re not going to punish me. I guess coming back cancels out leaving.”

The last week
in September Taras’s letter to Halya is returned. Someone has scrawled on i
t
“No longer a student here.”
No longer.
So she was there. Now she could be anywhere. Is she married? Does she still think of him? He can’t answer those questions. A crumb of hope has kept him going, but now it’s gone, or nearly gone. Snow covers everything and temperatures have dropped below freezing; the camp is truly a white city
.
Soon they’ll go back to Banff for another winter of aching cold, poor food and clothing and lost freedom.
Who said serfdom was abolished?

CHAPTER 29

Ways of leaving

Thanksgiving
is a holiday, with a not bad meal. But at night the temperature falls to ten below.
Taras’s sweater is worn thin.
They all need winter clothing but no one can say when it will come. That’s the thing about this place. No way to learn anything about your own imprisonment. When it might end. What your crime was.

The last day of October heavy snow falls. The commandant’s tent is given to the prisoners for a dining tent.
The prisoners’ dining tent, which has a stove, is turned into sleeping quarters. Two of the smaller tents are still needed to accommodate all the men, and small stoves are found for each of them. One of them is the commandant’s stove, a guard tells Taras and Yuriy.

“The commandant’s
own stove,
” he says in wonder. He must expect joy and gratitude. Maybe tears. That’s the acme of hospitality, Taras doesn’t say.

He and his friends end up in the former dining tent. Oleksa and Kyrylo and their group are there too, still playing cards and denouncing the government.

They find that having a stove doesn’t quite make up for their boots and socks falling apart. But in the evening, lying with their feet toward it, it’s an improvement.

They’ll move to Banff in another week. In a couple of days they’ll start dismantling the camp.
Already it gives off a faint odour of abandonment. By the last night only the tents are left to strike. For next year, no doubt. And the year after that? Taras can’t let himself think about it.

A week into November, the prisoners huddle in the tent after supper. In one corner, Oleksa and Kyrylo and Toma play cards in the dying light.
The deck is grubbier than ever.

“They can’t keep us here forever,” Kyrylo says, chewing on his droopy moustache.

Oleksa snorts, continues arranging his cards. His red-brown moustache seems to glow in the lamplight. As usual, there’s the impression that it doesn’t match his white-flecked dark hair. He spits a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt.

“No, really, people will start to question this.
You’ll see.”

“Maybe when the road to Laggan is finished.” Oleksa throws a card into the middle of their circle and takes the trick.

Kyrylo picks up the filthy cards and shuffles.

Taras becomes aware of a sound like a giant breathing. Maybe it’s Castle Mountain, finally showing its spirit. Seconds later he smells smoke.

Outside someone shouts. “Christ! It’s the hoosegow!”

“Fire! Fire!”

The noise grows to a roar as Taras and his friends run to the tent door, sure the fire is upon them.
They come back when they see that the hoosegow sits far enough outside the fence to be no danger to the camp.