Blood and Salt (6 page)

Snowflakes begin to drift through the windless air, so many he gets dizzy looking at them. They land on his face and hair, each with its small cold burden. He opens his mouth to let them fall on his tongue and feels a howl building in his gut. How long must he stay in this place?

He knows where the mountains are even if he can’t see them, and at times like this he hates them. They are too massive to understand, and every day they cut off hours of the waning light. It seems to him as if this small white space is the entire world, and there is nothing but these men, this moment. They tell time by the slow ebb of light. Small pockets of breath leave their lips like scraps of soul.

The priest back home once tried to help him grasp the idea of eternity. What did he care about eternity then? Here in the mountains, he’s starting to understand.

He lets his axe fall to the ground and considers the forest. If he tried to run away, could he find his way out of this valley? No, but it might be good just to disappear for a little while. It’s the coming back that would be dangerous. The guards would think he was escaping, and shoot him.

A hundred yards away,
another work gang raises and swings axes; beyond them, another, ever smaller images fading into white. Some people say hell is a place where men toil in pain, burned by endless fire. Here ice and snow replace flame.

Not even hard work gets him warm; and there’s never enough food. They still don’t have winter jackets, only the heavy sweaters they were given in August. In the old country they had sheepskin coats. In Canada Ukrainians are known for these coats. Some people, that’s all they see. Walking sheepskin coats. Well, not every Ukrainian owned such a coat. Or a warm coat of any kind.

Back in the village, Taras was reckoned a strong man, but his strength seems to evaporate like water in this dry, frozen air. Along with any clear idea of what’s going on in the world.

The guards try to keep war news from them, but it gets around anyway. There’s always a guard who lets something slip, or a page of newspaper left behind in the canteen. So the internees know that soldiers still huddle in cold, muddy trenches on the Western Front as they did even before Taras came here. Still die by the thousands and tens of thousands to capture small ribbons of land; a field here, a hill there. He compares this to camp life – where you will be shot and possibly killed only if you try to escape.

Yesterday he heard a guard screaming that it was all the prisoners’ fault – the
goddamn hunkies
was how he put it – as if Ukrainians had anything to do with starting or running the war.

The guards still haven’t noticed he’s not working.

As always, they pace up and down, trying to keep warm. Resettle rifles on shoulders. Wrap scarves more securely. Stare at snow. Taras is getting to know them a little. Not that he likes them, but it helps to know what they might do in certain situations.

Taras doesn’t see a thin figure creep up beside him until a swift, hard blow strikes his shins and he collapses in the snow. Pain comes in waves, floods his body, his brain, worse than the time a horse kicked his knee. He can’t scream, hasn’t the breath for it. If only he could faint and not come back till it was better. A gaunt red-faced man with hair like pale straw grins down at him, runs his fingers over the handle of his axe. It’s the one who watches. Zmiya, Taras and his friends call him. Snake.

Blood fills his mouth and he spits into the snow. He must have bitten his tongue when the wooden handle hit. More blood pools and runs down his throat. He spits again and rinses his mouth with snow. Zmiya walks away. For reasons Taras expects never to learn, Zmiya has spied on him since the camp moved to Banff and he ended up in their bunkhouse. Or maybe it wasn’t by chance. Maybe Zmiya made sure he got into the same bunkhouse in order to spy on him. Taras sees that he should have confronted the man. Why didn’t he? So many things he can’t be bothered with in this place.

The guards have seen nothing. The nearest, Bud Andrews, is turned slightly away. In his forties and out of shape, he looks bored almost to despair. His blue eyes and plump, rosy cheeks give him a look of good humour, and he isn’t mean like some of the others. But like the internees, he can’t leave. He paces the snow with a faraway, almost wistful look. Finally sees Taras on the ground holding his shins.

“Cramp?” Andrews comes a few steps closer. “Just give it a good rub, it’ll come round.” He smiles helpfully and moves on, utterly failing to see blood. Or to figure out that you don’t get cramps in your shins.

Bent over a felled pine, Zmiya laughs soundlessly. Mimes rubbing his shin as if it’s the most comical thing in the world.

A second guard, Jim Taveley, stares into the distance as snow glazes his cap and greatcoat. If he’s seen what happened, he doesn’t let on. Veiled in white, he must think he’s invisible. Sometimes when Taveley looks at the internees a pinched look comes over his face, nostrils flared, thin lips turned down. “They’re not like us,”
Taras heard him say once.

The pain is like an acute form of cold. Terrible but also interesting. Taras looks around for the third guard, who was off taking a crap in the trees a while ago. As if Taras’s glance has conjured him from snow and air, Jackie Bullard, a stocky man in his mid-thirties, steps out of the forest, red-faced and angry looking. It’s no fun trying to pass hard stools while your balls are freezing off. Taras knows.

“Hey!” He spots Taras on the ground. “What the hell are you playing at?” Bullard must see the red blotches in the snow but pretends not to. “Get up! Get back to work.”

Taras staggers to his feet, hoping nothing’s broken; almost faints with pain. A wash of red spreads over the sky, the snow. He’s never seen that before.

“Bloody slackers.” Spit flies from Bullard’s lips. “Get a move on.” He says these words, or something similar, at least once every hour. Maybe it’s how he remembers who he is. The prisoners sweep hard eyes over him. Bullard moves closer to Andrews, who doesn’t even notice.

“Asshole,” Taras says under his breath.

He stumbles to where Yuriy and Ihor are cutting tree trunks into logs.

Yuriy sees blood at the corners of Taras’s mouth. “What’s wrong?”

“Bit my tongue. Zmiya hit me with an axe handle. Across the shins.”

“What the hell?” Ihor puts out an arm to steady him.

“Damn that Zmiya,” Yuriy says. “I’m gonna take care of him. Soon.”
Yuriy doesn’t smile as much as he used to.

“Not if I take care of him first.” Ihor’s black eyes glow, his curling hair and moustache almost invisible under a lattice of snowflakes. He and Yuriy exchange a look. “He won’t know what hit him. But he’ll get the idea.”

“Always some rotten bastard in every village,”
Yuriy says, as if the camp is a kind of village. “Don’t know why that is.”

“No,”
Taras says, “not in my village.”
Then he thinks of Viktor, Halya’s father, who hated him.

Was that how things worked? There had to be one rotten bastard? He’d always thought it was just Viktor, but Yuriy seems to be saying it happens everywhere. No, couldn’t be that simple. It
was
just Viktor.

But if Zmiya is the usual rotten bastard, the fact that he picks on Taras may be just a matter of bad luck. Rotten bastards would have to pick on somebody.

He shrugs. He could deal with Zmiya himself, but he just doesn’t care enough. Let Ihor take care of it if he wants. Or Yuriy.

At the end of the afternoon each man balances a log, ten or fifteen feet long, on one shoulder and they walk back to camp like soldiers with enormous wooden rifles. Somehow Taras stays on his feet.

After supper
he lies on the hard, lumpy bunk, pillow at his back, shins throbbing. When he and his friends got back to the bunkhouse after supper, Yuriy scooped snow into his hankie and Taras has been holding it against the bruises.

Internees sit on bunks built in tiers along the walls or on wooden chairs around tables playing cards. Ihor blew some money he was saving for cigarettes on a new deck but now they don’t feel like playing.

Yuriy and Ihor get up and walk slowly to the end of the building where Zmiya sleeps, or feigns sleep. They don’t say or do anything, just let him know they’re thinking about him.

Close to Taras’s bunk, a serious looking young man with a jackknife
whittles a round slab of wood. Bohdan Koroluk finds deadwood in the
forest, trims it, and brings it back hidden under his sweater. He
shouldn’t have a knife of any kind. Anything that could be used as a
weapon was taken away when they came to the camp. By now, though,
no one cares, least of all the guards, and he carves every evening.

He carves faces. So far he’s done Yaroslav the Wise, who began to build the great Saint Sofia cathedral in Kyiv in 1037; Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the famous Cossack leader; the poet Taras Shev-chenko; and several saints Taras has never heard of. In the daytime Bohdan hides the carvings under his bunk. At night he sets them on top of his blanket and people come to look. The faces pull you in, make you long for something you can’t name. They are the most interesting thing in the bunkhouse. No, the only interesting thing. There are three other bunkhouses, but only this one has Bohdan Koroluk.

Wind howls and spits snow against the dark windows, knifes a chill gust through the building. Bohdan has begun a new carving, of a woman this time, and Taras watches as her face slowly appears in the wood. She reminds Taras of Halya. Her direct, almost challenging look. The hint of a smile around her lips and eyes. He lets the pain go, lets thought go, and watches work roughened fingers transform the wood. For a while there’s only that face, and it eases his sadness.

He’s aware in a distant way of marled grey eyes staring at him through hair like thin, matted straw from Zmiya’s dark corner. Zmiya looks like a half-starved rat. Or a scarecrow.
Strakhopud.

After a while he begins to hear the voices around him, swirling through the cavernous room like wind-driven snow. Voices loud or soft, high or low, all speaking Ukrainian. At the table near Taras’s bunk, Yuriy’s arguing with Myroslav, a schoolteacher in his late twenties, about
hetman
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the last strong leader of the independent Ukrainian Cossack communities in the seventeenth century. They must have been looking at Bohdan’s carving.

Myroslav has straight black hair combed back from a long, pale face. Thick black eyebrows and moustache. Long thin hands and a serious look. In fact at first Taras thought he was far too serious. But his rare smiles transform him. Then he looks like the icon of a saint. His manner is restrained. No harsh or careless word leaves his lips. And yet, Taras thinks, if he were to get really angry, he might be fearsome.

Myroslav says Khmelnytsky made a mistake in allying himself with the Russians.

Yuriy grins. “Maybe so. Anyway, my favourite hero is the one I grew up hearing about. Ustym Karmaliuk.”

Myroslav looks puzzled. Taras has never heard of him either.

“Ha! You don’t know him, do you!” For a moment Yuriy himself looks like some hero of old, with a vitality drawn from the black soil of
Ukraïna. “
And you a teacher!”

“I teach arithmetic.” Myroslav runs a hand through the thick hair. “I don’t claim to know all the Ukrainian heroes.”

“So I see. Well, our Karmaliuk was a peasant rebel. He had thousands of followers. The Polish and Russian landlords were afraid to take a crap at night.”

Ihor comes closer and sits down on Yuriy’s bunk. “Don’t forget
our
Oleksa Dovbush, the Hutsul hero. Stole from the Polish landlords and helped the peasants.”

“Dovbush I know about,” Myroslav says. “He’s like the famous English bandit, Robin Hood. Stole from the rich, gave to the poor. Yuriy’s Karmaliuk also sounds a lot like him.”

“Karmaliuk wanted us to have our own country,” Yuriy says. “And some day we will.”

“I hope we will,” Myroslav says.

Yuriy came to Canada as a young man, Myroslav as a boy who’d just finished high school.
They both think of themselves as Canadian now, but they don’t forget where they came from either. A part of their identity will always be Ukrainian, and until Ukraine is a free country, there will always be a sadness in each of them.

The outer door opens and cold air blasts into the room. Bullard and Andrews come in, followed by Taveley and a new guard, Private Randall. A stocky man of medium height leans heavily on Andrews. His coat is open, his hair blown across his forehead. A bulge inside his torn shirt front must be a bandage. Blood has seeped through to the shirt. Even surrounded by guards, you’d have to say he looks dangerous.

As the small group nears the centre of the bunkhouse, Taras happens to gaze right at the man, into intense dark eyes below peaked black brows. He looks like an infuriated owl; or a dissolute priest. Or a madman. His bright eyes, full of demands, seem to laugh at everything around him. Black hair, salted with silver, hangs in tendrils around his face. A deep cleft marks his chin.

He must have tried to escape. Why isn’t he in the guardhouse, then? Must be full already. Or maybe they wanted to keep him away from the men he ran off with.

Taveley and Randall prod the prisoner with their rifle butts, in the direction of an empty bunk, near Taras’s. The man stumbles, then turns on them, wild as a summer storm.