Blood and Salt (43 page)

“She’s...?”

Yuriy nods, sobbing so hard
Taras is afraid he’ll choke.
Tymko gives him a couple of hard whacks to the back.

“Tymko,
”
Yuriy says when he can speak, “we should make some home brew
.
You could all drink to my beautiful Nadia.”

After supper
they lounge around the bunkhouse.
Andrews and Bullard, who have been on leave, walk through and come up to Taras and Tymko.

“So it’s Christmas for you guys today,”
Andrews says.

“What’s it to you?”
Tymko takes a half step toward Andrews.

Andrews holds his ground. “Just wanted to say Happy Christmas.”

“We’re sorry you’re not with your families,” Bullard adds.

Tymko looks hard at Bullard, decides he probably means it. Actually, Bullshit has improved a lot.
They’ll have to stop calling him that.

Later Taras
watches
Bohdan, who has almost finished carving a Madonna in a Ukrainian headdress.

“Did you...know someone like that?
”
Taras asks.

“No, she’s just a face that comes into my dreams. Pretty, isn’t she?”

Taras nods. Like the woman Bohdan carved before, she looks like Halya.

Somehow the bunkhouse feels peaceful. A single voice – Myroslav’s – begins a
kolyiadka,
an old Ukrainian carol. “Sleep, Jesus, Sleep.”

Others join in, find harmonies, until the building hums. It sounds stronger, more confident, than last year. Suddenly a deep bass anchors the song. Taras looks at Tymko, eyebrows raised. Tymko the radical. Tymko the big atheist. Tymko smiles a bit sheepishly and shrugs. Christmas is Christmas.

When the
kolyiadka
comes to the end, they hear men singing in the next bunkhouse, and then the others take it up, until the whole camp is singing. When they’ve all reached the end, Myro uses the moment of silence to begin a new carol:
“Khrystos narodyvsia”
– “Christ is born.”

Jackie Bullard
stops by Taras’s table at breakfast the next morning. Says he was walking around the camp the night before and was amazed to hear the singing

“They probably heard you in Banff,” he says, and adds after a moment, “you Austrians really can sing.”

For once Taras doesn’t bother correcting him.

Sergeant Lake
often comes in the evening to see Bohdan. The carver has been working on something new, hollowing short, straight pieces of poplar into tubes, designed to fit together using notches and grooves. One evening he asks Arthur Lake to take these tubes home and glue them together into a single long tube. He has marked places where he wants Lake to drill holes and given him a carved mouthpiece to fit into the end of the tube.

Near the end of January, Arthur brings back the result.

The carver holds the object as though it might shatter in his hands. Lifts it to his lips and blows a note. It sounds to Lake like a clarinet, or some other kind of flute. Bohdan moves his hands over the holes and produces a series of notes that gradually resolve themselves into a scale. He couldn’t have been sure until he tried it whether the holes were in exactly the right place, but they are. The men realize it too, and a sigh wafts through the bunkhouse.

Bohdan begins to play a mournful tune that seems to have ridden the wind down from mountains, although not these mountains. The men gather round and in moments most are in tears. Although at first Arthur Lake thinks the song is sad, he soon realizes it has an underlying joy to it. He can almost see those ancient mountains, hear the streams flinging themselves against the rocks that line their beds. It gives him an idea.

The violin
belonged
to Minnie’s brother Edwin, who was killed in the Boer War. She kept it, thinking a child of hers might one day want to play. Their daughter was never interested, and it sits in its worn case, on a shelf at the top of their closet. When he takes it in his hands, Arthur thinks the finish looks too dark and feels tacky to the touch. He moistens a cloth with linseed oil and gives the deeply scored wood a polish, which brings up a depth of grain he couldn’t see before. Minnie says the bottom and sides are made of maple and the top of something called Cremona spruce.
These woods must have some peculiar affinity for assisting the creation of music. The same for the “solid rosewood pegs” which he supposes must keep the strings from slipping out of tune more efficiently than lesser woods. He picks up the bow and draws it across the strings with an awful wail. No wonder people compare violins to cats screeching.

Minnie smiles at the look on Arthur’s face – as if someone was sticking needles in his bones, she says. She tells him he can have the violin. He puts it down and throws his arms around her;
gives her a long, warm kiss on the lips. She laughs and squirms a bit, but kisses him back. He’s always liked to hug and kiss her, but he’s noticed himself doing it more since he’s worked in the camp. Probably a result of seeing all those men without women. Thinking how they’d like to have someone like Minnie with them. He’s only managed to marry the perfect woman.
That means she can do things well, practical, useful things; she likes him under the covers; and she doesn’t take any bollocks from anybody. Including him.

After his two-day leave is up and Arthur is back in the soldiers’ quarters, he goes one evening to the carver’s bunkhouse. He strides down the central aisle. Stops at a table and chairs roughly in the middle of the room.
Sets the case on the table and sees many pairs of eyes watching. He takes out the fiddle and bow, waits for someone to approach. Several do, but the man who comes closest is Ihor the Hutsul. His eyes glitter in the soft light. His hands tremble and his lips move without sound. Arthur hands him the fiddle.

Ihor draws the bow across the strings.
Although they’re still out of tune, they already sound better than when Arthur did it. Ihor begins to tune the violin.
The carver grabs his flute and gives Ihor notes, and he tunes the fiddle to the clarinet.
At last Ihor’s satisfied. He picks up the fiddle, tucks it under his chin and plays.

Oh, Arthur’s never heard anything like it. Back home it was music halls and prom concerts and gramophone recordings of famous singers – everything from opera songs to saucy ditties he’d heard at the London Hippodrome. This music gets right down to it, no introduction, it just flows. Dead serious, kind of melancholy, he thinks, imagining how he’ll describe it to Minnie. Before he can come up with any other adjectives, the music has him around the throat and doesn’t let go. Plunging rivers, dark forests, remote mountains, deep snow, fierce sunshine. People who’ve lived hundreds of generations in the same place.

The carver joins in with the flute, a descant Arthur thinks you’d call it, another melody that wanders around the strong line of the Hutsul’s song. Already Arthur has lost track of how long they’ve been playing. He doesn’t want it to end. Maybe it won’t, maybe it’ll go on and on like a river. He’s wind-driven snow, a fish deep in a river, a star wheeling across the sky.

Just when Arthur thinks it never will end, it does, suddenly.
The bunkhouse is so quiet he hears himself breathing. The men have drawn closer during the song. It seems they all inhale as one. He’s always loved wondrous, magical
things. Other people don’t always see what he sees, but maybe they don’t have the desire to see them. Or is it a knack?

Ihor nods to the carver and begins again, a much livelier piece with a bounding, dancing rhythm that has Arthur’s head bobbing in time. After a moment, Yuriy moves toward the musicians and begins to dance.
The others move away until there’s a circle around Yuriy as he whirls, leaps, kicks his legs high in the air. Someone shouts and then many others, and Arthur sees this is part of the music. As if they said, “Oh, well done!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!”

Others form a circle, hands joined, and dance around him – similar patterns to Yuriy’s but not so difficult. The music speeds up and another man joins
Yuriy in the middle. Tymko, who must be nearly fifty, dances up to Yuriy in a way that even Arthur sees is the throwing of a challenge. Tymko leaps higher and
Yuriy has to copy him. He whirls longer and faster, and
Yuriy must try to better him. And then he drops out of sight so that Arthur has to climb on the end of a bunk to see him.
Tymko squats on his heels. One leg shoots forward and comes back, then the other follows, faster and faster, until it’s almost a blur.
Yuriy tries to keep up with him, but looks stiff and slow in comparison.
Tymko throws his hands behind him, fingers touching the floor, and again kicks out his right leg, his left, and so on, and makes his way around the circle in the centre of the room. The men shout wildly. Clearly this is a test of a man’s skill and heart. Arthur shouts too and sees the young man Taras break into a grin.

In a flash, Yuriy holds out his hand to Tymko and they dance together a moment to even louder cheers, then melt back into the circle of men.
Two others take their place in the middle, then two others, and so on; but none matches Tymko or even Yuriy. Tymko is king of the dance. But it’s all exciting to Arthur. He sees that no two men do things quite the same.
The dances must vary between regions. Together they make a new dance and all the while they shout until finally the music stops and the room fills with cheers. Tymko collapses, gasping, on a bunk.

Time to go.
Arthur Lake makes his way to the door. Ihor nods, then the carver.
As he reaches the door, another cheer bursts from the men and follows him out into the night.

A moment later the music begins again.

CHAPTER 31

Simple justice

January, 1917

The newspaper
office
is still decorated from Christmas. Halya is working with Zenon on an article called “Simple Justice, An Independent Ukraine.” She sits at the typewriter; he leans over her, dictating. It’s the most exciting work she’s done since she came to the paper almost a year ago.

“Can’t wait to see this in print. Nestor’s putting it on the front page.” Zenon’s eyes blaze, he digs his hands through his hair from forehead to nape as if pulling out invisible tangles. He can hardly keep still. Halya’s never seen him like this. It’s how some men look if they’ve had a drink or two.

“Just the last paragraph to go,” she says. “Starting from ‘Ukrainians have waited too long to be free...’”

“Right.” He takes a deep breath. “Ukrainians have waited too long to be free...” he nods his head a couple of times and the next phrase comes to him
:
“always confined and deprived of liberty by foreign empires.
We are a nation, and we know...we know...”

Halya types the words. Zenon begins to pace, but Halya has an idea and she can’t wait. “We know that no people is born to be ruled by another.”

He smiles. “Good.” She types the words and he continues. “When this terrible war ends, we will find a way to build our future. The time must soon come when...when we will cast off our... No, that’s no good. When we will...”

“The time must soon come when Ukrainians will be together in their own country,” Halya says. Zenon nods and grins. She types.

“A free and independent Ukraine,” he adds, and she types the last few words.

“It’s going to be splendid!” Halya says. Her eyes meet his and she can’t help a little clap of her hands.

“Couldn’t have done it without you.” For a moment it looks like he’ll kiss her, but he doesn’t quite.

Nestor watches them, enjoying their camaraderie, wondering if it’s going to move into something more.

When the story comes out at the end of the week, Halya and Zenon are thrilled, although Nestor suddenly feels a nagging worry.

A week later
Halya comes to work and sees the glass in the door broken, the door ajar. The office has been ransacked. Zenon sits at his desk, stunned.

“What happened?” she asks.

Zenon hands her the local newspaper, displaying the front-page headline, and she reads, “Ruthenians Preach Treason.” Her brain tries to take in the words, the strange reasoning that says wanting a free Ukraine is a crime.

A policeman enters and comes over to the desk. “Are you Zenon Andrychuk?”

Zenon turns to face him. “How may I help you?”

“We want to ask you some questions about your recent newspaper article, which we have reason to believe constitutes an act of treason.”

“For saying Ukraine should be free?” Zenon asks, still in shock.

“Canada is at war. You advocate taking territory away from our ally, Russia,” the policeman says.

“Only by peaceful means!” Zenon says. “As an act of common decency and justice.”

Nestor has appeared in the doorway.
“An independent Ukraine would also take territory from Austria, Canada’s enemy,” he says. “Is that also treason?”

“Just come with me, please, Mr. Andrychuk.” Zenon gets his hat and coat and goes with the policeman, who manages to look both triumphant and bored.