Blood and Salt (44 page)

“Can’t you do something?” Halya asks Nestor. He looks almost as panicky as she feels.

“I better go along,” he says, and rushes out the door.

Halya starts tidying the office – sweeping up glass, picking up and sorting the papers strewn about the room. Placing a piece of cardboard over the cracked window. By quitting time, Nestor hasn’t returned, so she closes up – she has her own key now – and goes home.

That night she sits in her furnished room trying to read when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Nestor, and she’s never seen him so upset.

“Zenon...?” she asks.

“They’ve charged him and taken him to jail.”

“My God! What can we do?”

Nestor shakes his head. Usually things bounce off him pretty quickly, but not this.

“And the paper? Are they shutting us down?”

“Not at the moment. But they can do it any time they want.”

Halya looks scared. She should ask him in. Give him a cup of tea. But he’s still hovering in the doorway.

“So I guess you just became my star reporter.”

“Nestor, I’m afraid for him.”

“Me too.” Nestor looks haggard. “But we’ll do everything we can for him. Right? Now I’m gonna get him a lawyer.” In a moment his footsteps echo on the stairs.

Next morning
Nestor is in the hall replacing the glass in the office window when a tall, middle-aged person in a long overcoat and fur hat appears at the top of the stairs and nods to him, then goes into the office and introduces himself to Halya. Zenon’s lawyer is Joel Greenberg, a Jewish man whose parents came from Chernowitz and whose grandparents came from various points in eastern Europe. He speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, German and English, all with an edge of long-suffering humour.
Joel Greenberg knows what it’s like to wish you had your own country, although his expectations are lower than Zenon’s.
He makes his living working for some big companies but also donates time to helping immigrants and their families. Everyone in his family has been an immigrant at one time or another.

The hat and coat go on the wooden coat tree. Greenberg sits at Nestor’s desk. Nestor proceeds to pound a nail in the wall and Halya pulls up a chair.

“So,” Greenberg says.
“I’ve seen him. He says to tell you he’s fine.”

“Is he fine?” Halya asks.

“He says to tell you he is.”

“I feel responsible,” Halya says. “Some of those words were mine.
The very ones the police got upset about. I suggested them.”

“This is the last time I want to hear you say that. Ever. I’ve already got a client, I don’t need another one. And I’m sure Mr. Andrychuk has a better idea than you do about what upsets the police. So does Nestor here.”

“That’s true.” Nestor sighs and puts down the hammer.
“Halya and Zenon are such idealists. I should have known better.”

“Of course.
We should all know you can’t say what you want in this country.
We should only say nice, inoffensive things. Keep pictures of the king on the wall.” He looks up to where Nestor is putting up just such a picture, beside the one of Shevchenko. Halya can’t help laughing.

“Now Zenon is, of course, from Galicia,” Greenberg goes on. “So when he said he wanted Ukraine to be free, he was referring to freedom from the Austrian Empire.”

“No,” Halya says, “he wanted all Ukrainians to be free, as far east as Kharkiv and south to Odessa.”

“That’s the last time I want to hear you say that, too.
And by the way, there are more Jews in Odessa than there are Ukrainians.”

“How do you know that?”

“My mother’s father came from there, that’s how.”

“Was he Ukrainian, then?” Halya asks.

Greenberg laughs. “People from Odessa didn’t think that way. They thought of themselves as citizens of the city.
My grandfather was a Jew of Odessa.”

The picture is up. Nestor straightens it and gives it a mock salute.
“Good thing I never let him put
The Communist Manifesto
on the bookshelf.
Of course, he was only interested in it as a historical document.”

“Not even funny, Nestor,” Greenberg says. “If you’d had that up when the police came, I’d never get your boy off. It’s going to be hard enough as it is.”

“You mean you’re going to get him off?” Halya’s been too consumed with guilt and worry to consider the possibility.

“I’m going to put up one helluva fight. If I can’t do it, I don’t know who can.”

Nestor looks worried. Maybe nobody can.
And until the preliminary hearing, which won’t be for another month, Zenon will sit in jail.

Halya feels an icy stab of guilt. She
is
responsible. If only she hadn’t egged him on. If only she’d shut up.

In the end,
after a quick trial in which a bored judge seems deaf to all his arguments, Greenberg loses, but does win Zenon a shorter sentence than he expected.
Three months hard labour. The newspaper is put on notice: watch what you write. We can close you any time we want.

A few days later,
Halya sits at her desk, scanning long lists of names of internees in concentration camps that Nestor obtained from the Canadian government. Lately she’s been wondering again if her father lied about Taras’s death. What if he really did follow her to Canada, only to be interned? She’s been through the lists of men in the Brandon camp in Manitoba and the Spirit Lake and Kapuskasing camps in Ontario, and is now working her way through the many camps in British Columbia and Alberta.

Looking through the list from the Banff camp, she sees the name Taras first and then the initial “K” and can’t hold back a small shriek. Nestor rushes over to look, in time to see her disappointment. Kalyna, not Kuzyk. He pats her on the arm and it’s too much. She starts to cry, and Nestor puts his arm around her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You shouldn’t have patted my arm. Sometimes sympathy is harder to take than indifference.”
She manages a small smile and goes on searching.

CHAPTER 32

They’re not like us

January, 1917

The days
are viciously cold.
Taras is tired before work even begins. The chill clutches at his heart, his gut.

One morning he’s felling and trimming trees when all at once he feels he can’t do it any more.
Just can’t do it. He throws down the axe. Let them send him to the guardhouse.

Close by, a prisoner shoves someone who got in his way.
The second man shoves back, and they fight. So cold and hungry they can barely stand, still they thump each other. A couple of scarecrows, thrashing around in the snow.
There are bloody noses before Andrews and Bullard can stop it. Barkley fires his rifle in the air. Just what an asshole like Barkley
would
do.
What good is a gun if you can’t scare people with it?

The two men sit stunned, their blood a scarlet code written on the snow.
The other prisoners watch them. Some flop down on the ground.
The man who started it begins to weep.
The other one crawls over and pats his back.

After a while the guards decide to call it a day, and the prisoners carry the tree trunks back to camp.

That evening
an officer they’ve never seen before comes into the bunkhouse with Andrews and Bullard. He looks briskly around and glares at the men.
What the hell do
you
want here? their faces give back. We have done our day’s work. Eaten food that leaves our stomachs aching with hunger. Food so poor and sparse that our muscles have shrunk and the cheap, worn clothing hangs on our bodies. Our gums bleed.

“I’m Captain Workman,” says the tall, angular young man with close-clipped black hair and moustache and a back held unnaturally straight.
“I am in charge of camp arrangements now, and I’m going to run a very tight ship. Captain Roderick Workman. Remember that name.”

Why?
Taras wonders.
We aren’t going to be friends.

He tries to understand what lies behind the harsh manner. What this man believes or guesses about the people he’s in charge of.
And who he thinks
he
is
.
That part’s easy: he appears to think of himself as a very important kind of person; skilled, intelligent, upright. Part of the natural ruling class.

“You people have had it pretty good here.”
The men stare in disbelief.
“Your maintenance is costing the Canadian government a great deal of money. From now on things will be different.
There will be an end to all waste and unnecessary expense.”

So. He seems to think they’ve all come here for a holiday in the mountains. It’s an Austrian custom, isn’t it? See the beautiful scenery and bathe in the mineral waters? And they’ve actually been expecting the government to pay for this. How selfish.

Andrews and Bullard watch uneasily.

At first Workman doesn’t notice their discomfort, so intent is he on his message. He looks more closely at the prisoners and sees hatred in their eyes.

“Very well,” he says crisply, “that’s all.”
Taras thinks he meant to say much more, that he’d had a long speech prepared.
But he turns and walks out, followed by the guards.
Angry voices rise like a sudden gale.
Yesterday Taras wouldn’t have dreamt he could want to kill a man five minutes after first seeing him.

Hating’s not worth the trouble, he knows that, but for a moment it feels good.

Still, he wonders what in hell goes on in the man’s mind. Workman reminds Taras of some Austrian officers he crossed paths with when he was looking after horses for the army.
Their posture, their way of speaking, made it clear that they came from the better class of people, and he didn’t.

Here in the camp
Taras has seen hostile and surly guards before, but Workman has something extra. He must come from a very well-off family. You can hear it in the way he speaks – his words clipped and ringing with authority.
Almost as if he speaks for the Canadian government and the king and the Duke of Connaught all rolled into one.

Something must be keeping him in Canada, something that would have made it impossible for him to fight.
Like the bad lungs or consumptive limps of some of the soldiers in this camp.

Or is just that the well-off family has pulled some strings to keep him out of the war?

Or is he not the top product of the well-off family? Maybe the older, smarter sons are already off in the trenches. Maybe Roderick has just failed at something else, and is here to make his name in an unexciting posting in an internment camp. If ordinary soldiers hate it here, how must this fancy captain feel?

The next morning
Taras wakes chilled, from his belly to his toenails. His cheeks feel frostbitten. His brain, however, seems to have been working briskly all night, reviewing everything he’s learned since he came here, and the moment it thinks he’s awake enough to take it in, it starts telling him what it’s figured out.

He is an Austrian. Austrians are not as good or intelligent as people who originated in Britain.
They don’t think or plan as well. They don’t feel pain or cold as much; or hunger.
They are suited to hard, physical work.
There is a good reason why they’re here.

They’re Austrians. The enemy.

Dobre.
He can almost believe it himself, despite a lifetime of thinking he’s Ukrainian. Except that he’s actually seen
real
Austrians. Colonel Krentz, for example, but he’s just one of many. And aside from the German Prisoners of
War who were around when the camp first began, Taras never sees anything like real Austrians
here.

Haven’t any
real
Austrians ever come to Canada as immigrants? Why aren’t any of
them
interned?
They’d be even more dangerous. More Austrian.

So where are they?
There seems to be only one possible answer: they must be out blowing up bridges. He wonders how many bridges it’s been so far during the war. If only the government realized that there are people in Canada who are
more
Austrian than the internees, they would probably do something about it. Save lots of bridges.

Taras is completely certain, and has been for some time, that there haven’t actually been any bridges blown up since the war started. By Austrians or anybody else. Despite the withholding of newspapers and other sources of information, he thinks they’d have heard about it if bridges were exploding at regular intervals.

He himself would have had a hard time blowing up bridges around Spring Creek, for the simple reason that there aren’t any.

“Christ, it’s freezing,”
Yuriy says from his bunk.

“There’s frost all over the goddamn walls!” Myro doesn’t swear, or didn’t till now.