Blood and Salt (55 page)

It can’t only be my friends – and even they sometimes can’t resist patronizing me. Oh, they don’t mean it, really, but they think, If only Taras could behave more prudently, if only he could restrain his talk of Ukrainian independence. If only he could concentrate on those objectives which might be achieved. If only he could hang onto money. If only he could moderate his singing, dancing, shouting, drinking and declaiming of poetry. Well, perhaps not entirely. He’s
great fun to be with. But he doesn’t know how to take care of himself. Doesn’t know how to look about him.

I do, though, too well. Ever since Englehardt had me beaten because I took his painting and copied it. I don’t say Englehardt beat me, perhaps I could understand that he might do so in a flare of rage. No, he had me beaten, by others. I don’t know why it didn’t break my spirit. I suppose that even then I was able to escape into a world of my own imagining.
A world where it meant something to be a man.

“Enough,”
Tymko says, suddenly weary. “That’s enough for one day.
Thank you, Professor.”

“I told you it was a sad time,” Myro says. “But we do remember him. We’ll never forget if I can help it.”

“He was a glimpse of what we could be without our chains,” Tymko says.

“Man was born free and is everywhere in chains,” Myro says.

“Who said that?” Taras asks.

“I don’t know any more,”
Tymko admits.

“A French philosopher,” Myro says. “I forget the name.”

Tymko looks very tired. “Hide the whiskey now,” he says. “Mrs. Plaskett will be bringing my supper any minute and she hates liquor. The clothes cupboard will do.”

Taras hides the whiskey and rinses out the glasses in the small corner sink, dries them and puts them away in the cupboard. Myro helps Tymko sit up straighter.

The landlady taps at the door and enters without waiting for an answer. She leaves a large tray with a dish of boiled beef and beans and a pot of hot tea with three cups. When Tymko begins to eat, Taras and Myro see how weak he’s grown.

Taras is relieved to find that Tymko can make it to the toilet down the hall on his own, using crutches. When he comes back, Myro settles him in bed, propped up with pillows.

“Hey,” Tymko says, “what’re you looking at? I’m not dead yet.”

“Of course not. Nobody said that.”
Taras realizes he should’ve just laughed it off.

“Teach me some arithmetic, Professor. I need to figure out how long I’ve got.”

“You don’t need arithmetic.
You need cheering up. Taras, tell us how your family is.
And how Moses the black Ukrainian is faring.”

Tymko’s eyes brighten during the telling, but soon his eyelids droop and he falls asleep. They tuck in his blankets, turn out the lights and creep from the room. At the bottom of the stairs, they meet Mrs. Plaskett and she watches them out the door.
Taras hears a tiny sniff and is sure she smells the whiskey.
When they’re almost out of earshot, they hear her voice from the dim hallway before she closes the door.

“Come again. He’s glad for a bit of company.”

“We’ll do that,” Myro calls back. “Thank you.”

Myro insists Taras come home with him. His suite is small but very tidy and it has two bookcases full of worn books, some in English and some in Ukrainian.
Taras leafs through them and Myro makes scrambled eggs and toast, taken with more cups of tea. Afterwards Taras feels tired to his bones. Myro makes a bed for him out of lumpy sofa cushions, but the room is warm and Taras is with a friend, who sleeps just beyond the doorway in a room barely large enough to hold the single bed and dresser.

Taras has known Myro as a serious, trustworthy person without realizing, until now, how rare that is. Without Myro and Tymko, and Yuriy and Ihor, and Bohdan, how could he have endured the camp? In the old country only Ruslan was as close to him. But he and Ruslan were only boys. In Canada he’s known the friendship of men.

CHAPTER 43

Zenon’s story

October, 1918

Zenon,
Nestor and Halya are at work in the newspaper office, drinking coffee from an enamelled pot keeping warm on a hotplate. They’ve just finished proofreading the November edition and sent it to the printer. Halya’s contribution was an article on Canadian internment camps. Not the kind of piece she could be arrested for, at least they hope not, but quietly describing and questioning the entire project.

Zenon and Nestor are using the slight lull to go through old files, getting them in chronological order, chucking out duplicate copies of some old issues. Ordering the files is easier now than it used to be, because when Zenon was arrested, the government seized huge swathes of material, boxes and boxes of it, and most of it never came back.

Halya is working on a story they can’t publish. Not yet, anyway. As Joel Greenberg said after the police came for Zenon, this isn’t a country where you can say what you want.

The story she’s writing is Zenon’s story, about not only his arrest and imprisonment, but starting back in his childhood. She works away at it whenever there’s a bit of time. His family were farmers near Vegreville, Alberta, and when Zenon contracted tuberculosis at the age of four, there wasn’t much the local doctor could do for him. Eventually he got better, but the bacillus had by then worked its way into his bones and given him one leg that was shorter than the other. Not the best thing for a farm boy, but it didn’t really hinder him.

He went to a small country school, but one with an extraordinary teacher, a man who spoke Ukrainian and English with great fluency and made sure his students did the same. In those days most people thought that finishing elementary school was more than adequate for a farmer’s son, but Mr. Dubnyk didn’t think that way.
And by the time he’d finished grade eight, Zenon didn’t think that way either.

He had to spend most of his day doing chores on the farm, especially during harvest, but there was less to do in winter. Afternoons, and in the evenings by the light of a coal oil lamp, he worked his way through high school by correspondence. Mr. Dubnyk would come over once or twice a week to help him with his homework, but mostly Zenon breezed through everything until grade eleven, when Mr. Dubnyk was very useful in explaining Algebra.

He also brought books. Halya was amazed to learn that Zenon had read the same Dickens novels Miss Greeley had lent her. Zenon is the second person she’s been able to talk with about Dickens, and it’s like being back in school; a really good school.

This is the moment Halya has written up to.
The next part will be about how he managed to work his way through university and how, after writing for the local paper in Vegreville, he met Nestor and came to work for him.

She’s read through everything she’s written a couple of times this morning, but she’s having trouble concentrating. A headache started just after breakfast and it’s getting worse. She can see the letters on the page, recognizes the words they make up, but sentences are trying to crawl away across the page. Pages are blurring.

Reaching for a cup of tea, Halya misses the handle and spills tea over her tidy stack of papers. She groans and searches in her pockets for a hankie. Zenon looks up, puzzled. Halya doesn’t spill things. He comes over to her desk and sees her unfocused eyes. He feels her forehead and is shocked at the heat. Nestor notices and comes over. He and Nestor look at each other and nod.

“What is it?” Halya says a little crossly. “I’m fine. I’m nearly finished this part. I’m...” She looks puzzled. I’m what? she seems to be thinking.

Zenon grabs Halya’s coat and Nestor telephones for a taxi. As soon as Halya and Zenon are out the door, he calls a doctor he knows.

Zenon and Nestor have heard a rumour that Spanish flu has appeared in Edmonton, travelling up the rail line from Calgary. If it gets bad, there could be hundreds of people affected, maybe thousands, and many of them could die. They’re dying in Calgary, where no one goes out much if they can help it. Schools are closed, and theatres, even churches.

By the time Zenon has settled her into bed in their one-room suite, Halya can’t even answer his questions. He brings water she can’t drink and bathes her forehead with cloths that he’s soaked in cool water and wrung out. Her body is blazing hot, as if she has a small furnace inside her.

If only there were something useful he could do. If only she’d open her eyes.

The doctor arrives two hours later.
As soon as he steps into the room, he sees Halya on the bed and pulls a cotton mask from his pocket.
When Zenon sees him put it on, he feels terror pushing aside the common sense he always tries to live by.

The doctor takes Halya’s pulse and listens to her chest. Wherever he touches her, she moans but doesn’t seem to know she’s doing it. Zenon watches his every move, as if this will tell him what to do for her.
The doctor is a middle-aged man named Houghton. Zenon can’t say it right because the letters don’t match the sound. It’s hard not being able to say it.
The serious professional person Zenon’s made himself into is reduced to a poor immigrant who can’t speak properly.

“Is it the Spanish flu, doctor?” he asks.

The doctor moves away from the bed. “Yes, I’m afraid it is. She must stay in bed and drink lots of water.” His voice is muffled but the meaning is clear.

How could he and Nestor have been so stupid? They should have closed the paper down as soon as they heard the rumours. Who cares about a newspaper at a time like this?

“Will she be all right?” Zenon knows how lame his words sound, but he has to ask.

“I can’t answer that,” the doctor says gently. “Try to bring the fever down. Bathe her with cloths wrung out in cool water.”

“I’ve been doing that already.” Zenon feels panic in his chest and throat, a thick, stupid feeling in his head. He sees the doctor won’t stay much longer. He has to learn everything he can. “Is that all I can do?”

“I’m afraid so. Oh, and wear this.” He hands Zenon a mask.

Zenon holds the mask as if he doesn’t understand what it is. “I feel helpless.”

“I know,” the doctor says.

Zenon sits
by Halya all evening and long into the night, the curtains open to the light from the streetlamps. It paints exaggerated shapes on the walls, on the bed. In the shadows he feels older, weaker. He came out of prison starved and sickly.
The thought of her helped keep him going then; what will happen if he loses her?

He strokes her hair, her cheek. Keeps trying to get her to drink water. He has to dribble it into her mouth a few drops at a time.

“It’s all right, darling. It’s all right.” He has to say it, but knows it isn’t so.

He keeps applying the wet cloths. Simple things are hard to do. He can’t think for the fear in him
.
Tries to control it by talking to her.

“Halya, darling, please be well.
You can’t know how much I need you.” He wonders if she can possibly hear him, from some place deep inside her fever. “I love the way you look at me, with that tough little smile. When you’re going to say something sarcastic about the government. I
love the colour of your eyes
.
Your hair.
You’ve made me so happy.”

He takes her hand and feels fresh terror at its heat. She’s delirious, moaning or whimpering with pain.

He would pray, but he isn’t a believer. Rationality has ruled his life. He wonders what he can do to help her, to make her fight the disease. Wonders how to be rational when everything is suddenly irrational.

His parents are dead. Halya and Nestor are the people he cares for.

“Halya,
liubov,
please listen. You are my darling, my wife, my truest friend.
You saved me when I came back from prison. I don’t know how I could have survived without you.” He needs her to know these things.

Needs her to know she has to come back.

She doesn’t answer, but he begins to think she seems calmer, quieter.
When this goes on for an hour or so, he allows himself to lie down beside her, takes her hand and absorbs its heat into his own. And falls into sleep.

CHAPTER 44

Pampushkas

Sunshine streams
in the window. Halya doesn’t want to wake up but there’s a noise and it’s been getting louder. Not a constant noise. It comes and goes, but there’s never time to fall back to sleep in between. No choice but to swim up into the light. She realizes her fever’s gone down. She turns to look at Zenon, lying beside her – sweat-soaked, eyes shut. The noise is his breathing, it makes a hoarse rattle each time he breathes out.

“Zenon!” His eyes open but he seems not to see her. She’s never felt such terror. She knows it’s him, but already he’s gone somewhere far away from her. She remembers that he was looking after her. She thinks she remembers a doctor.

Now he’s much sicker than she was.

“Cold...so cold,” he murmurs. But his skin burns. He coughs a sudden spate of hard, wet coughs and his chest shakes with their force. She rummages in a drawer for a handkerchief.
When she holds it to his mouth, bright blood stains the cloth.