Blood and Salt (57 page)

“Tell the story, Myro.”

“Dobre.”
Myro sits up a little straighter. “You’ll forgive me if I make some of it up.”

“Make up all you like. I’m used to that now. I just want a story. Truer than life.”

“The time is 1848 in St. Petersburg. Taras and his new friend Ira Aldridge have been invited to the Kalnikovs because the old man is curious about this great American actor. And because Tatiana speaks English, learned in childhood from a governess, and can translate for them. I see it all so clearly.”

“Tse dobre,”
Tymko says softly.

“Well, then...” Myro takes a deep breath. “You won’t mind if I just tell it as if I’m there? As if I can see into the poet’s heart?”

“I not only won’t mind,”
Tymko says firmly, “I insist upon it.”

Myro begins.

Tatiana Alexandrovna
would once have been the perfect model for an angel, thinks our poet Taras Shevchenko. Or the mother of Jesus before she became with child. Now, ten years after he first saw her, she is, although still youthful looking, more guarded, more divided by conflicting loyalties and cares. A married woman paying a visit to her family.

Her small daughter, Yekaterina, runs in and out of the room. She stops at intervals to gaze at a man with a thick moustache and tightly curled hair, whose skin must look to her like melted chocolate. She runs off again to think about it by herself until curiosity draws her back. This last time she runs to her mother and buries her face in her mother’s skirt.

Tatiana kisses the top of her head and sends the small figure in a bright purple dress whirling back to the long corridor beyond the room.
Without being aware of it, she sighs.

Yet at this moment Tatiana seems almost to have returned to her fifteen-year-old self. Her simple dress is deep blue, lovely next to her rosy-peach skin and dark eyes. Her brown hair is braided and wound around her head, giving her the look of an artless country girl. Of course she cannot really be artless.
At times Taras sees tears in old Kalnikov’s eyes when he watches his daughter, but he smiles now as if she’s still his child, safe in his house.

Tatiana sits in a ruby velvet-covered chair between Taras and the American. Translator for a former serf and the descendant of slaves. Thrilled at the chance to help.

Seated on a plain wooden chair, Ira Aldridge holds himself with straight-backed dignity. His warm brown skin glows with light that comes from within. His eyes note every detail of the room and the people in it.

Our poet sings a merry folk tune that has Ira nodding his head to the rhythm and applauding when it’s done. Tatiana tells him the meaning, and as she speaks the foreign words, Taras realizes how little the song accords with his memories of peasant life. No use telling their visitor that. Perhaps he knows without telling.

Ira will sing next.
Tatiana explains that the song is about Moses and the people of Israel, held in bondage by the Egyptians. The song begs God to free the Israelites. Ira stands, a man of medium height and build, and seems to grow larger and more powerful, as he does on stage when he plays Othello the Moor – welcome when he’s of use to Venice but despised for his race. Ira draws a breath and seems to take up life from the room, life the others hadn’t known was there.

“When Israel was in Egypt land,” Ira sings in a deep baritone, “Let my people go. Oppressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go.
”
The notes saturate the room, the bodies of his listeners. Taras is reckoned a fine singer but knows he could never match this.

Yekaterina creeps back into the room and sits on a stool in a corner as Ira’s voice sends waves of emotion toward her.

“Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. And tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go.”

The song flows through Taras like a river. Tatiana begins to explain it, but her words drift away.
Taras has understood.
The song is not about Moses and the Israelites. It’s about Ira’s own people, black people from the west of Africa.

As Ira moves back to his seat,
Taras presses the black man’s hand, marvelling at the intense colour against his own hand. Yekaterina runs to her mother and pushes onto her lap, pulling at the abundant material of her mother’s skirt to make herself a small nest, but keeping her eyes on Taras and Ira.

“Perhaps, my dear Taras Hryhoryvich, you would favour us with one of your poems,” Kalnikov says. “Something about youth, for instance.”

Taras smiles at his old patron. He recites from memory and Tatiana translates line by line, looking apologetic, as if unsure her words will match the original ideas. She doesn’t understand Ukrainian as well as Russian.

She begins with the title, “My thirteenth year was passing,” and Ira nods.

“Watching the lambs one day, I walked far past the village. Perhaps the sun shone, or was my joy without a cause? Joy as if at the throne of God.”
Tatiana sees she can do it and takes the story to heart as if it is her own. Kalnikov watches as if he’s never quite seen her before.

“They called us for our midday meal...but I stayed among the weeds and prayed.
Why a small boy wished so...fervently...to pray I cannot tell, nor how my happiness came about. But around me, the village and God’s sky, the lambs even, all seemed to rejoice. The sun shone warm but did not burn.”

She understands, the poet thinks. She recalls some moment of perfect innocence and wonder.

She continues, translating after he speaks, a phrase or two at a time. “It was not for long the sun kept kind and warm...not for long I prayed, when the sun turned to red fire and...now my heaven burned.
As one awakened from sleep, I
saw the village grow dim...God’s blue sky become dark. I saw the lambs...knew they were not mine. In the village no home awaited me.”

Tatiana is distressed now, wishes perhaps that she hadn’t taken this on. Her arms pull Yekaterina closer as she strains to think of the English words.

“My bitter tears flowed...but by the roadside...a girl was picking hemp and...heard my sorrow. She wiped away my tears, kissed me gently.” Now Tatiana finds her way again.

“It seemed once more the sun shone...as if the world were mine... Fields, groves, orchards. Laughing, we drove the lambs to water. Now when I remember, my heart weeps
.
Why, God, could I not have lived...my short time in that dear place? I would have died knowing nothing else...never knowing an outcast’s life.”

The last line is “never cursed men and God,” but Tatiana can’t bring herself to say it. Kalnikov nods, tears in his eyes.

Ira rises and embraces Taras. Tatiana and her father say nothing to disturb the moment. Yekaterina peers like a small animal from her tangled blue burrow.

Semyon, the butler, stands in the doorway, a silver tray with pastries in his hands. Tears stain his sallow cheeks. Feeling Taras’s eyes upon him, he straightens himself and carries the tray to the table where the samovar awaits.

When Myro stops,
n
either of his listeners can speak for a moment. Then Tymko says, “You should write that down.”

And he weeps as though for all the sorrows of life. His land, his people. His wife and daughter. The exile and death of Shevchenko. The millions killed in the war and afterwards. The Revolution. Myroslav and Taras kneel beside his chair, each with a hand on his shoulder.

“There’s been too much blood,” he says. The younger men nod, but Tymko knows they don’t see the things he sees.

Mrs. Plaskett must have a sixth sense. She brings in a kettle of hot water to refresh the teapot.
Taking care not to look at Tymko.

“He could use a little whiskey in that,” she says as she goes out, and Taras could almost swear she winks at them.

After she shuts the door, Taras takes out his flask and adds whiskey to all their cups.

CHAPTER 46

A man who died

Halya
sits at the typewriter, a pile of neatly typed pages beside it. She has finished writing Zenon’s story and now stares blankly at the wall behind the empty bed. She’s done what she set out to do, and now everything seems to slow down, a little at a time, until she thinks she might turn to stone. She could sit here for a day, two days, more.

Her work at the newspaper has ended. Nestor doesn’t know when, if ever, he can get
The People’s Voice
running again. She has a little money in the bank, mostly saved by Zenon during his years at the paper. Enough to live on for a few months. She could stay on in this suite, eating toast and tea and gradually adding things back into her diet. She could look for a job, although she doesn’t know who’d want a refugee from a newspaper shut down by the government for its seditious views. Or was that revolutionary views? Treasonous views?

And she’s still just a woman who didn’t finish high school, because she couldn’t do it all in eight months. Mind you, she’s a woman who didn’t finish high school who won a prize for an essay on the novels of Dickens. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? No, probably not.

Nestor says they can take her back waiting tables at his uncle’s café. She could make a living.

Or should she try to go back to her father and Natalka? She could write to him, see how he responds. She doesn’t think she could go back to being the dependent daughter, someone he thinks he can control. And yet she must see her
baba.
She can’t understand how she failed to find a way to visit them until now.

Yes, she’s sent letters. But does Viktor even read them to Natalka?

Halya slowly becomes aware of noise outside, coming closer. Then shouting, car horns and what she thinks must be rifle shots. She makes herself get up and look out the window. A wave of people flows down the street. Like lava pouring out of a volcano, she thinks. John Madison at Briarwood taught her the exports of many countries, and about lava, and this is the first time she’s found any of it useful. People flow like lava, coming closer.

Sirens shriek. Far away a train whistle blows, on and on. Men run down the street, leaping, bawling, setting off firecrackers.
Laughing.
It takes her a while to understand. They signal not war or danger but something new.

She walks downstairs and out the door. The cheering crowd surges down the street. Men in working clothes and a few in uniform, eyes wild. Women in housedresses who have run into the street without coats. Nobody wears a white mask.

A young soldier calls to Halya. “Hey sweetheart! The war’s over!” Other people echo his voice: “War’s over! War’s over!” The soldier holds his hand out to her. She lets herself be pulled into the torrent. She knows the November air is cold, but doesn’t seem to feel it.

The soldier whirls her around, kisses her, his lips burning. She feels tears on her face, his or hers she doesn’t know.
She kisses him back and for a few seconds they hold each other close. The crowd jolts forward with its own odd, irregular rhythm, pries her fingers loose from the soldier’s grasp. Another wave deposits her at the edge of the street, like silt.

She sees a man on the other side and he glances her way across the colliding bodies. He looks like someone she once knew. A man who died. The human tide ebbs for a second and they face each other across the street. It can’t be him, but so much has happened to her, she has lost all control of her life, so what if it is? They watch each other, feeling the weight of the years apart, the pain of separation and loss, falling away
.
Taras crosses over to her.

Up close, he sees how thin she looks, how pale. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

She knows she must look like a bag of old sticks. “I had the influenza. My husband too. He died.”

A wave of vertigo passes through her brain and for a moment she thinks she’ll fall, but he reaches out an arm to steady her and it passes. It is him. It is. Taras.

“I’m all right now,” she hears her voice say.

They go up
the stairs to the suite.
Taras can’t believe the power of his desire, all over his body. It blazes through his arms and legs and belly.
They lie down on the bed.

She touches his face, his hair, his chest. She doesn’t want to know yet how he can possibly be here. But he’s real, not some fevered dream, and somehow they’ve found each other. That’s enough. When she was a girl, she loved him, but now she’s a woman. Longing flows through her. She helps him undress, and he helps her.
Their clothes fall to the floor.

When he enters her body, deep shudders shake him and their tears break free. He’s afraid to move in case it will end too soon, but he can’t think about that for long. He feels himself coming closer and closer, feels her moving with him. It seems to go on and on, although there’s no way of knowing how long.
And then he’s still inside her and it begins again.

Afterwards they lie together a long time. For now they don’t need to put anything into words.

Halya hands Taras
a cup of hot tea. He drinks and almost scalds his mouth.
Across the table he looks at a face he both knows and doesn’t know. It must be the same for her. Four and a half years have passed since they came to Canada. They have led separate lives; changed from untried boy and girl to man and woman. Her hair is darker, her face still pinched from fever. He is healthy once more, but he’ll never again be so young, so unknowing.