Blood and Salt (31 page)

“I’ve never heard of any of this!” Ihor exclaims. “You don’t hear so much up in the mountains.
What happened to them?”

“There was a spy in the next apartment, listening through a hole drilled in the wall.”

“You’re making that up!” Yuriy says with a goofy grin. “Aren’t you?”

“No
,
I’m not, truly. Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s what happened.
This spy denounced the Brotherhood, and they were arrested.”

“No!” Ihor says, as if he sees it all before him. “Was that the end of them?”

“They were tried in St. Petersburg.
Taras received the harshest sentence – because of his poems.
Ten years exile in military service, at Orenberg in eastern Russia. ‘Forbidden to write or draw’ was added to this sentence – in the tsar’s own hand.”

“The almighty tsar went to all that trouble?”
Tymko asks.

So, Taras thinks, something even Tymko didn’t know.
Dobre.

“For ten years he couldn’t draw?” This is from Bohdan, who has moved closer. He must be remembering when his knife was taken away.

“Not exactly.
You see, Orenberg is a long way from Moscow or St. Petersburg.
And Taras was a very engaging fellow. He made friends with the man who ran the camp, visited his family. And after a while, he acquired the things he needed.”

A smile creeps over Bohdan’s face. It’s like Sergeant Lake giving him a knife.

“He still had to live in the barracks,” Myro goes on, “and he had to learn to march like any other conscript. He was no good at it, and the sergeant in charge made his life as miserable as possible, because he hated seeing Taras given privileges he didn’t have.

“The next year there was a military expedition to the Aral Sea, and they needed an artist to draw maps of the areas they charted. Taras got to be that person, although this fact was carefully kept from the tsar and his officials.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,”
Yuriy says.

“It was better than life in crowded, unclean barracks, but it wasn’t a healthy place, either.
Travel to the Aral Sea took weeks crossing a desert. Scorpions and huge poisonous spiders could crawl under your blanket at night. And the extreme heat wore him out.”

He stops to answer a question about what scorpions are, then continues.

“All told, he spent ten years in exile. He made many friends and painted many pictures.
Yes, even though the tsar had forbidden it, he continued to sketch and paint, and to write letters and poems. He was such a spirited, sympathetic fellow.
Almost everyone liked him. Many loved him. Even, for a time, the governor general’s wife in Orenberg.”

The others can’t believe it. “How could he spend time with these people?”

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Myro says. “But you see, the empire wasn’t quite as solid as it looked. New, more liberal ideas were finding their way in from France and elsewhere. And through his friendships and his art, Taras Shevchenko had joined a small but important element of Russian society. Tsarism was starting to come apart. Not fast enough for people who wanted change, but still, it was starting.”

“Yes, but what about Shevchenko?” Ihor asks. “Did he die at this Orenberg?”

“No, he was finally released, the last of the Cyril-Methodius group to be freed. But his health was gone. He was like an old man. He died in 1861. He missed seeing the end of serfdom in Russia by months.”

“That’s a sad thing,” Ihor says.

Taras thinks of the poet’s humiliation in the army in Orenberg. The army doesn’t want a bunch of unruly people, all different, all going their own ways, he thinks. It wants people who can be parts of a machine.
The army tells the machine where to go and what to do, and it goes there and does it.

He hopes the poet wasn’t hurt too much by the army. Shevchenko is their heart. Ardent, striving, damaged, but in some way still free.

Between the potato wine and the professor’s lecture, it’s been a good evening.

Taras wakes
to stunning silence. His body tells him he’s overslept, but the light’s dimmer than it should be; whiter. The windows must be caked in snow.
The bunkhouse feels like the hold of a ship frozen in ice, the air so still he’s aware of every breath. What if they’re running out of air? Good thing the stoves have long since gone out, or they’d be breathing smoke.

It’s not as cold as he’d have expected. It’s like someone draped a huge quilt over the building. He has no desire to go outside, not even to find out what kind of thin gruel the kitchen will dish up. If anyone’s in the kitchen. He wonders how long they’ll be left alone.
What if there’s no one else out there?
What if the rest of the camp suffocated in their beds? They’re locked inside this place. How could they get out?

They’ve got Bohdan’s knife.
That would be a start.

He sees Yuriy sit up and look around.
What the hell?
his face says. A few other men start to move.

Shovels scrape outside, thump against the door. After a while this stops and the door opens, spilling fresh air and light into the room. Andrews and Bullard come in, red-faced and panting. Taras tries not to smile. For once guards are doing the peasant work.

They pick Taras and
Yuriy to come out and shovel snow. They shouldn’t have let on they were awake. Luckily they already have on their sweaters and coats. “The rest of you Sleeping Beauties get moving too,” Bullard says. Taras reminds himself to find out what Sleeping Beauties are. It’s clearly something every Canadian is supposed to know.

Outside the world is silent except for a peculiar ringing.
The snow is broken only by narrow paths the guards have dug to the bunkhouses
and the spindly tracings of bird feet. He and Yuriy have to widen the paths so several men can walk abreast.
Without any talk they set to it. It’s not very cold and the work soon makes them almost hot.

Except for the shovelling
of snow, no prisoners will work today. Many of the guards are leaving to join the Canadian Expedition-ary Force in Europe, and until new ones come there won’t be enough left to guard work gangs. Maybe these volunteers still see war as a chance for honour and glory, even though everyone, including the prisoners, has heard what it’s like – months or years in trenches with very little to show for it.

But the soldiers who guard Taras’s bunkhouse and work gang aren’t going anywhere. One way or another they’re unfit for active service – through limps, bad lungs, age or other difficulties. This saves the internees having to get used to new ones.

In an hour Yuriy and Taras reach the dining hall, along with the diggers from the other bunkhouses. They can actually smell something cooking. Smells like bacon. Impossible. They turn to see guards herding the rest of the men down the paths. Soon they’re all sitting at the long wooden tables. With the sloppy cornmeal mush, each man has a piece of bacon. A single rasher of bacon, as one of the guards put it.

How can this be? Maybe it’s a reward for shovelling, but everybody’s getting it, not just the men who shovelled. In the time it takes to consider such questions, all the bacon has disappeared from the room. Maddened by the aroma, Taras decides to eat his last candy bar when he gets back to the bunkhouse.

The feeling of snowy stillness
remains and some of them wander up and down the aisle with faraway looks on their faces. Some lie down and look ready to fall asleep. Tymko gives Taras a forceful look from under his eyebrows:
Get on with the story.
But Taras is coming to the moment where he loses his freedom. Worse, he’s losing control of the story. He’d like to leave it for a while. Or just leave it.

The carver watches him, waits for an answer. Since he got Sergeant Lake’s knife, he’s done a bluejay, a whiskey-jack and a chickadee on a branch. He’s going to sell them to Lake. Bohdan Koroluk seems prepared to wait until he gets what he wants.

All right.
Dobre.
He’ll tell it and be done.

CHAPTER 21

Talking union

August, 1914

The day after
Shawcross’s coyote hunt, Moses drives to the construction site to deliver bricks. Taras and Frank Elder help him unload.

“Some of the men are talking about starting a union,” Frank says quietly.

“Could be dangerous.” Moses has heard the talk for a while now but kept out of it. As a black man, he’d find it even harder than the others would to get another job.

Taras and Frank move over a stack of the newly arrived bricks and Taras begins laying them. Frank slips behind the stack to pick up a few fallen bricks.

They hear the jingle of harness and Stover drives up with the boss for the ritual handing out of pay packets. But first Shawcross strolls around the site examining the progress of the work, and Stover saunters by and shoves Taras into the stack. He doesn’t see Frank.

Frank screams as the bricks fall on him. Stover runs to the other side where Frank writhes on the ground, clutching his wrist. Shawcross rushes over.

“Bloody bohunk! Watch what you’re doing!” Stover says, his face turning redder.

Jimmy Burns has seen everything. “You pushed him, Stover. I saw you.”

Shawcross doesn’t seem to hear. “Stover,” he says, “take Mr. Elder to the doctor.”

Jimmy helps Stover lead Frank outside. Shawcross speaks to all the men but looks particularly at Taras. “We must all work very hard to prevent accidents.” As he speaks, he sees the pendant around Taras’s neck, like the one Halya wears.

“Where’d you get that thing around your neck?”

“I made it,”
Taras says, wondering why the boss would care.

Shawcross keeps gazing at the pendant until he realizes the men are watching him, looking puzzled. “All right then, we’ll all try to be careful.” He actually bends, picks up a few bricks and helps rebuild the stack.

Shawcross watches
Halya across the table. When Louisa goes to her room with a headache, he actually dries the dishes for her, although knowing where to put them away is beyond him. Later they sit in the parlour with cups of tea made by Halya, and she takes up a book, Jane Austen’s
Persuasion.
She identifies with the heroine, Anne Elliot, whose foolish and vain father reminds her in some ways of
Viktor.

After a moment Ronnie goes to the piano and leafs through his songbooks until he finds one he likes. He sings, in quite a pleasant tenor,
“A wandering minstrel, I, a thing of rags and patches, of songs and snatches, And lovely lu-ull-abies...” She hears the rhymes, the light and playful tone and forgets to look away.

“What is
minstrel,
Mr. Shawcross?” she asks when he’s done.

“Ah well, a minstrel is a man who wanders the countryside
singing and hoping to earn a little silver to buy his bread. He doesn’t
make a lot and so he has to wear rags and patches.”

Halya can’t believe her ears.
“Kobzar,”
she says. “In my country we have this also.”

A couple of weeks later,
Natalka sees that English
pahn
fellow ride up to the house on his fancy horse.
Viktor sees him a moment later, leaps from his chair and twists himself into a poor imitation of a soldier standing to attention. Natalka can’t help a snort.
Viktor asks her to bring tea and the English biscuits he bought in town. Runs out to shake the fellow’s hand. Manages not to salute. By the time Natalka gets back with the tea and biscuits, Viktor sits on the couch, Shawcross on one of the upholstered chairs. Natalka pours tea and Viktor passes the plate of biscuits to Shawcross, his face radiating an almost childlike pride.

Natalka picks up her sewing and sits in the furthest corner, invisible as only a woman can make herself, but watching as hard as she can.

“Yes, Mr. Dobson,
”
the
pahn
begins, “my mother is well pleased with Helena. And I must say that I too...am growing fond of her.”

Hah! Natalka thinks. First it’s Helen and now it’s Helena! My-my-my.

Viktor isn’t sure he understands. “Thank you, sir. I happy my daughter with your mother. She fine lady.”

“Yes, Mother is certainly a lady.”

“My daughter must learn this.
To be lady.”

Ronnie looks thoughtful.
“Yes, you’re right. That’s very important. But I was wondering...has Helena ever had a sweetheart? Maybe in the old country?”

“Yes...I forbid her to see him.”

“You don’t think he could be here in Spring Creek?”

“Before we left he is taken for army. I tell her maybe he already dead.”

“You’re helping her to forget him. Good.
You see, Mr. Dobson, I think I would like...” he stops to take a deep breath, “to marry Helena.”

Shawcross looks a little surprised, hearing himself say this.

Natalka knows the word “marry.” Her eyes shoot poison, but no one notices.