Blood and Salt (54 page)

PART 6

CHAPTER 42

The bear or the
monkey

October, 1918

Taras and Moses
walk up the hill behind the Kalyna house after Sunday supper. Smoke grazes beside Batko’s gelding in a new paddock behind the barn. It’s almost a year since Taras came home after his parole in Edmonton, and there’s no snow; but the air has the bite of winter.

“I’ve helped Batko break enough land to prove up,
”
Taras says. “I’m going back to Edmonton for a while.”

“Edmonton.
Where Halya is.”

“I won’t try to see her.” But he avoids looking at Moses. “Tymko’s written. He’s not well.”

“So you’ll go, then.”

Taras knows that Moses wants him to stay.
That there’s nobody else he feels so at ease with.

“Yeah. In a week or so. I’ll see Tymko first. If I decide to stay for a while, I think the railroad will take me back.”

“Your parents –?”

“I’ve told them. Can you come out here sometimes? Take Smoke for a run?”

“Sure. I’ll come.” Moses smiles a little. “I’ll take Smoke out
if
he’ll let me.”

“Thanks.”

“I better get home before it’s dark, get an early night.”
There’s a trace of sadness in his voice. He missed Taras during the two and a half years he was away.
“I always have more trouble waking up in the morning when the light starts to go.”

“I’ll come back, you know,” Taras says. “I just have to do this first.”
They walk down the hill, stopping at the paddock so Moses can give Smoke some oats.

“I’m thinking of making a trip myself,” Moses says. “We get a week’s holiday now, and Shawcross is letting me take an extra week without pay, so I wrote to my aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania, and they asked me to come.”

Taras remember
s
Tymko telling them that some day everyone would have holidays.

“How will you go? It’s a long way.”

“Not so long on the train. I can get on at Moose Jaw and it’ll take me most of the way. I can sleep a lot.” He almost leaves it at that but decides to go on. “I don’t know if they’ll recognize me after such a long time. But I need to see some people who look like me.”

“Have a good journey,”
Taras says. “My brother.”

Taras walks
up to a two-storey boarding house, its shiplap weathered and needing paint. He knocks on the door and a brisk middle-aged woman in a brown print dress opens it, hears what he wants and points up the dark stairs. Taras takes them two at a time, then hesitates a moment before he knocks. A husky voice tells him to come in. In a moment he knows what Tymko didn’t say in his letters.

He sits in a battered easy chair, a plaid blanket over his lower body, his right leg resting on a footstool. He has no right foot, only a stump in a tied-off sock.

Myroslav sits near him on the bed in the small, dark room lit by a single overhead bulb.

“So you’re here,” Tymko says with a lift of his eyebrows. “There’s a chair by the dresser.”

Taras makes no move. “What’s happened to you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was walking a boxcar in the yards. I fell when I tried to jump to the next one.”
Tymko tries to make it sound matter-of-fact.

“Fell?”
Taras can’t believe this.
Tymko was always so sure-footed. “How?”

Tymko grimaces, leaves the answer to Myro. “Another string of cars came up from behind. They shouldn’t have been on that track –”

“I fell,” Tymko interrupts. “Happens all the time.”

“They bumped into Tymko’s string
.
Just hard enough to knock him sideways.”

“A wheel ran over my foot.”
Tymko gestures just beyond the stump. “My one and only perfect, beautiful, misunderstood right foot.”

Taras gets the chair and pulls it near to Tymko. “How was it misunderstood?”

“I never understood how much I needed it.” Tymko’s laugh booms out for a moment and turns to stifled sobs. “I’ve begged its pardon a thousand times since. I don’t hear much back.”

“I guess not. How do you get by?”
Taras tries to be matter-of-fact too.

“The railroad has given me a small pension. Enough to live in this place and pay the landlady to feed me. So that’s that. But what kind of greeting is this? Give me a hug, Taras. Give the professor a hug.
Where are your manners?”

Taras leans over and hugs Tymko. Then Myro. For a few minutes everybody’s crying. Taras pulls a thin flask out of his coat pocket, finds three glasses in a cupboard and pours a generous shot of whiskey into each. What a change from potato wine in the laundry shack.

“Don’t let Mrs. Plaskett see that.” Tymko takes a deep drink and has to pound his chest when he starts to cough and wheeze.

“Sorry. I haven’t got used to drinking since they had us locked up all that time.” Taras isn’t fooled. Tymko’s lungs haven’t really recovered since he was dragged in the river.

Tymko always used to say
,
“The capitalist system will find some way to get you.” He sits in the scruffy chair amply vindicated. Clears his throat. “Don’t worry. I’m oh-kay, as the boys say down at the yard. Ohhhh-kay!”

Taras sees that Tymko doesn’t want to talk about it any more. He turns to Myro. “Professor. Have you found a job worthy of your talents?”

“I have. I teach little kids arithmetic. Just like before. I try to get them to see how easy it is. How much it’s going to help them.”

“And do they agree that it’s easy? And helpful?” Taras hasn’t had the chance to tease Myro for a long time now.

“Not always. But what do they know? They’re kids.”

Everyone laughs. Myro, in tweed pants and a dark jacket looks very respectable, only still too thin, as if his body is holding itself in readiness in case it has to go back to grubbing brush on a wretched diet.

“Myro, if these kids can learn at all, you will teach them.” Tymko looks at Myro as if he’s his best, smartest son. “The angels would stop to listen.”

“I wonder,”
Taras says, “do the angels know arithmetic?”

“Good question,”
Tymko says. “Since angels were never people, maybe not.”

“They were never people?”
Taras realizes he hasn’t given angels much thought.

“I don’t think so,” Tymko says. “I think they were always up there with God. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

“To the best of my knowledge,” Myro says, “angels were never people. But they know all kinds of things, so maybe that includes arithmetic.”

“You’re right,”
Tymko says. “They probably have an instinctive understanding of arithmetic. And socialism.”

He smiles sadly. After a year and a half of reading about the revolution in Russia, he’s not sure where it’s taking people. In fact, he’s not sure it’s actually begun. The real revolution.

Taras remembers his own questions.
What if it doesn’t turn out the way you think? How do you make sure it’s more than just a bunch of people being killed?

He tries not to notic
e
Tymko’s pasty colour, lank hair, diminished
mass. Before, he could lift you in the air and spin you around.

“When I’m feeling better, I can maybe get a wooden foot. I’ll be able to walk a bit and they’ll try to find some job I can do. I can be one of the old buggers who sets out the signals and takes them down again when the train passes.”

Taras can’t imagine Tymko doing this.

“I’ll have time between trains to tell the other old buggers about socialism.
We can start the Edmonton Old Buggers Radical Socialist League.”

“And the old buggers shall lead them,” Myro says.

“Revolution can’t be far away when that happens,
”
Taras adds.

“That’s right, boys. I see I’ve taught you well.”

“I guess you have,” Myro says. “Professor.”
They laugh, but the laughs are getting thinner.

“Tell me about Shevchenko in that army camp he was in,” Tymko asks. “When he was in exile.”

“You don’t want to hear that now. It’s a bit gloomy.”

“I do want to hear it.
Because
it’s gloomy. It helps me feel better.”

“All right. Where to begin? Well, he spent almost ten years in exile, as you know. As ever, he was in trouble because he wasn’t careful enough about what he said. His ideas were an offence to the tsar and his family. And remember, the tsar’s family had once subscribed to the project to free Shevchenko from serfdom. They expected gratitude and found only revolutionary ideas o
f
Ukrainian nationhood. Even though many of the Russian nobility were westernized and full of liberal ideas, you could only push so far.”

Tymko sips whiskey, sighs with pleasure.
This is the Myro he loves.

“So it was that when the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius fell, he fell with them, and he fell harder because he was a better choice of scapegoat, being a former peasant without an influential family. And because they’d wanted to get him for a long time. And because the tsar never forgave him. It was a complex system of imperial control, but at the centre was a real person, the tsar, and he had the means to punish a former serf for his freethinking ways.”

Tymko settles back in his chair, nods his agreement.

“Our Taras never surrendered his spirit, but there were many terrible times for him. As a writer and artist he was true to his vision – he painted what he saw, and he saw with Ukrainian eyes. As a Ukrainian patriot. And that led to his persecution. He had tried to live the life he believed in, of personal liberty and freedom of expression. But he was essentially a poor man, dependent on others. Being only a freed serf, he didn’t have the safety of wealth and position so many of his friends had.”

In the camp, Taras remembers, not even the guards had freedom of expression. They had to pretend to believe in what the government said they were doing. Many of them did believe.

“Shevchenko lived his last months, a time when he was already very ill, in hope of hearing the tsar’s proclamation of the end of serfdom. Everyone knew it was imminent, but he died in February, 1861, before it took place. I know there must have been times when he sometimes lost hope. I have imagined the disillusion and pain that must sometimes have beset him.

I try
to understand how my life has gone. How I have ended up in this place.

If I had not left the countryside, had not escaped serfdom, what could I have done? Next to nothing. But I did escape, and it was like a miracle. I met the most illustrious, the most generous people of my time and joined in their conversations. I wrote poems and stories, and created paintings and engravings that will speak for me when I’m gone.

I have been truly loved by many. But I was not one of these wealthy people. Not even among the Ukrainian nobles. I needed their patronage. Without time and enough to eat, you cannot write poems and paint pictures. I needed them to be generous with what they could spare from their comfortable lives.

I think I was their dancing bear. Their performing monkey. The child who sometimes does something unexpectedly clever. The thing about the bear or the monkey or the child is not only that they may perform well, but that you don’t expect them to be able to do it at all.

A bear on its hind legs makes an amusing parody of a man. A monkey can look into your eyes as if it knew your heart. It pleases you to cosset and reward that monkey. But it is still a monkey.

Unlike the bear or the monkey, I knew what they were doing, somewhere in my mind where I tried not to dwell, because I needed them.

Or am I wrong? Do the dancing bear and the frisking monkey also understand what’s happening to them? Are they simply awaiting
the right moment for revenge?

Perhaps I should be proud to have made such an influential enemy. If the tsar hates me, surely that’s my highest recommendation. I made him almost angry enough to have me killed. But I was only exiled. And during that exile, I have been reviled and shunned and starved of joy. Forbidden to write or paint or sketch.

I have also been befriended by officers and their families. No, I don’t forget the commandant’s wife and our shimmering walks through the arid hills. I have gone on expeditions and been given real employment: recording scientific progress through my drawings. People have taken risks to let me work, for even at this great distance from Moscow and Petersburg, the tsar owns vicious curs who will sooner or later growl in his ear.

So here I am. Peasant. Serf. Freeman. Artist. Defender of ideas. And I have made some difference. The most powerful man in the empire hates me and wishes not to kill me but to destroy what makes me human. Surely I’m strong enough to prevent that. The tsar has many concerns, duties, entertainments in his day. He doesn’t have the time to hate me with perfection or nuance. He sees my talent and wishes to destroy it.
Very well, but I have time to think and to resist. Will people remember that some day? Will they consider it even a little bit brave?