The Sky Is Falling (8 page)

I decided to study in the kitchen. With the addition of the bookshelf, my furniture situation had greatly improved, had, in fact, doubled, but I still didn't have a desk. In the kitchen I would have the luxury of a table. They always broke with that song and, as soon as I heard it, I could flee upstairs. I brought down my translation homework and cleared a space among the potluck dishes.

1
. Comrade Popov says that he received a letter every day
from his wife in London.

2
. This author will spend a long time writing and in the end
he'll write a good novel.

3
. Where was Masha going yesterday when we saw her?

I could hear their voices in the other room, the different pitches—when a woman was speaking and when a man was—the melody of assent, the appassionato of disputation, but I couldn't make out the words. Outside, rain drummed impatient fingers against the window. I struggled, brain attempting to convert the English word into its Russian equivalent, hand to write the symbol that corresponded to the Russian sound, all the while feeling that maybe it was English I couldn't understand. When I had got through about half the exercises, the French doors clattered open unexpectedly and Dieter said, “Let's take five.” A man I didn't know, tall and heavy with a head full of sloppy yellow curls, passed by the kitchen without looking in. One of his pant legs was rolled to his knee.

Then Belinda appeared, the only person I'd ever met who made freckles seem glamorous. Without acknowledging me, she headed to the sink where she filled a glass with water and drank from it, her back turned, forcing me to be her audience. She was so dramatic I could see why Pete enjoyed being cast as her leading man, but I didn't want to be in the play about her. Despite how enthusiastic she'd sounded when I was chosen for the house, in all our subsequent encounters her disdain for me was plain. I was finally starting to feel comfortable and knew she could easily ruin things for me by just a few calculated comments. The popular and beautiful have such powers.

Belinda drank a glass of water three feet away from me and, when she finished, she set it on the counter with an attention-getting rap, turned, and swept over, saying, “Hmm. I wonder what Jane studies? Accounting, I bet.”

Instinctively, I covered the page—too late. She hovered above me, hair grazing the table. “Is that Russian?” she asked, dropping the stage voice.

“Yes.”

“You're studying
Russian
?”

“Yes.”

“Say something.”

Of course I couldn't. The stones stuck. I tried to read what I'd written, but I hadn't worked out the pronunciation yet. Then out of my mouth came one of the sentences I'd translated. “
Tovarishch Popov govorit, chto on poluchil pismo.
”

Dieter bellowed for everyone to gather, and Belinda, first hesitating, blinking at me with new respect, swished out again. “Jane knows Russian,” she said to the blond man I'd seen a moment ago with the rolled pant leg who was coming back down the hall.

“Who-who-who's Jane?”

“The other housemate.”

He looked in at me. His cheeks were round and pink, like a baby's. I heard Belinda in the other room: “Pete! Guess what? Jane knows Russian.”

I'd already closed my book and was just waiting for the opportunity to bolt upstairs when Pete strode in. “Do you speak Russian, Zed?”

“A little. I read and write it better.”

“Say something.”

“I don't want to.”

He came over. “Show me the writing then.”

Now Sonia appeared and, behind her, Belinda again, followed by a pale girl I'd never seen with shorn beige hair. Pete held the page in the air. Belinda snatched it and passed it along. “Jane!” Sonia cried. “What does it say?”

I repeated the Masha question. “Where was Masha going when we saw her yesterday?”

Dieter was there now. “Say something.”

Pete: “She doesn't want to.”

Belinda piped up, “She said something to me. It sounded delicious.”

Dieter: “I prefer the Romance languages.”

“You would.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you prefer the Romance languages,” Pete said. “Why are you offended? You said it yourself.”

“It's your tone.”

“Are you the Tone Police?”

“Excuse me,” I said, making a break for the door.

“Let's finish the meeting,” Sonia pleaded and they all followed me out, though I turned right at the stairs and went up where they turned left at the living room. They didn't bother closing the French doors this time and a few minutes later, the song started up.

“Why didn't you tell us?” Sonia asked the next day.

“I said I was in Arts.”

“Arts is anything. Dieter's in Arts.” She added quickly, “Not that there's anything the matter with Dieter.”

“He has a lot of rules,” I said and Sonia cringed. A few days ago he'd tied a grease pencil to a piece of twine and taped it on the fridge door. It was for writing our names on our bread and yogurt and milk. Only supper was communal. But Pete, of course, was drinking from any milk carton he liked. He'd drunk from mine right in front of me.

“Anyway. Can you help me?” she asked.

There was a demonstration at the art gallery. The Americans were trying to deploy more missiles in Europe. At first, the West Germans wouldn't take them, but now that the Soviets had shot down the Korean airliner, it looked like it was going ahead. Sonia wanted her banner to be in Russian.

“What do you want it to say?” I asked.

“End the arms race.”

I suspected this couldn't be directly translated. I could write “weapons” for “arms,” but maybe you couldn't refer to it as a “race” in Russian.
Finish the weapons' athletic competition!
No one would be able to read it anyway. “I need my dictionary,” I said, then did my best up in my room, working out the phrase and bringing it back down to her on a clean sheet of paper.
Ostanovitye
gonku vooryezheniy!
She was in her room, cutting a bedsheet in half lengthwise. Then she laid it, a white runner, in the hall. Pete was on the phone in the kitchen. We could hear him saying, “Why can't I go in through the window?”

“I'm going to write the letters first, then paint them,” Sonia said.

“Do you want help?” I asked.

“Would you? It's chicken scratch to me.”

Pete: “I'll climb.”

Pete: “Well, that's just fucked.”

Then he roared. Hammering—the receiver against the counter, again, again. Sonia and I rushed to the kitchen where Pete was redialling. We heard Belinda's faraway hello. “Did you hang up? You didn't? Are you sure? They cut us off then, the
fuckers
!” He hurled the receiver and charged past us, knocking aside Sonia. She went over, picked the phone out of the sink, and, with the greying dish cloth, wiped some tomatoey stuff off the earpiece. “Belinda?” she said.

Upstairs, a door slammed. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
O-hi-o
.

“He's mad,” Sonia said in the phone. “He went upstairs. Were you really cut off? Jane and I are making the banner. Maybe she will. Anyway, I'm going to ask her to the movie. Are you going? Nobody's going? So? I've seen it before too. I've seen it four times. All right. I'll ask Jane.”

“That was Belinda,” Sonia said, on the way back to the hall. “She asked if you were coming to the demonstration.”

I said no, I had to study. “Is there something the matter with the phone?” I asked.

“It's probably tapped,” she said.

Which was why, apparently, it provoked such awe. I didn't believe it, though I didn't say so. I just nodded and tried not to show how silly I thought that was. Meanwhile, Sonia settled cross-legged to watch me sketch out the Cyrillic letters.

“That's amazing.”

“What?”

“That you can write Russian.”

I shrugged, though I was pleased. I stored the compliment the way my aunt socked everything away in bread bags—the shoes in her closet, her bits of costume jewellery, little pastel shards of soap. My aunt would pick an expired bus transfer off the ground and put it in her pocket, as though it were legal tender. I'd saved the things Pete had said to me, too—that I was funny and intelligent—and a comment Kopanyev once scrawled on the bottom of my paper:
Jane, you are a very sensitive reader
.

After a minute, Sonia asked, “Why are people afraid of the Russians?”

“I don't know.”

“I think it's because they haven't met any. If they knew a few, they wouldn't be so afraid.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“Personally, I'm more afraid of the Americans. They have more bombs. Do you know a lot of Russians?”

“Not that many,” I admitted.

When I was nearly done, she went to her room, walking on the edge of the banner, one tiny foot placed in front of the other, close to the wall. She returned with brushes and a plastic yogurt container half-filled with paint, which she set in the middle of the banner. We each started at an end and worked our way toward the centre, filling in the letters.

“There's a movie playing at the SUB.
If You Love This Planet
with Dr. Helen Caldicott. Have you seen it?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you want to go? You don't have to study on Friday night, do you?”

She extended the invitation to Hector and Dieter too. I thought for sure Dieter would come, but he only pushed up his glasses and sneered. “It's a fundraiser for SPND, isn't it? I wouldn't give them a cent. They're useless.”

“What's SPND?” I asked Sonia as we were putting on our coats.

“Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. I used to be in SPND when I lived in residence. Dieter and Pete were in it too, but we broke away. All they ever do is have bake sales and march in the Walk for Peace.”

Hector was in the living room watching a sitcom. “
Adios
, Hector,” Sonia called. “Are you sure you don't want to come?”

Hector pointed to the TV. “I'm watching this.”

Once we were out the door I asked, “Is Hector living with us now?”

“Oh dear,” said Sonia. “I think we'd better have a meeting about Hector.”

The night was clear and cold, the only clouds formed by our breath. I could even see stars, puncture holes in the night, rare for November. Sonia had put on a funny knitted toque with earflaps and a couple of sweaters, both of which looked like they came from my aunt's stash. Over them she wore an anorak and scarf, yet she still seemed too thin. Her clogs resounded on the wooden steps as we went down them.

“They bring speakers in too.”

“Who?”

“SPND. That's what they're into. Education. And that's why I joined. But education isn't enough if you don't do anything with it.”

It occurred to me then that nothing I studied had any practical application whatsoever.

Sonia: “We've got to do something. Right now.”

The bus was nearly empty and, when we arrived, the campus seemed deserted too. The forested Endowment Lands cut the university off from the city, though in the residences and the frat houses, in the Pit Pub under the Student Union Building, life was undoubtedly going on. We saw scant evidence of it, however, as we walked past the glass wall of the Aquatic Centre; only a few swimmers were clocking laps. The SUB itself felt evacuated, the cafeteria closed, the cookie kiosk too, the couches mostly empty with barely a handful of people milling around before the movie started.

The lobby was down a set of stairs. More people were there, maybe twenty, all of whom Sonia seemed to know well enough to embrace. We bought our tickets from a girl she introduced as Ruth. “This is Jane, my housemate.”

Ruth wore a fringed paisley scarf like a sloppy bandage around her neck. Her long blond hair was divided evenly by the part and her eyes were a very pale blue. Sonia took her ticket and wandered off to talk to someone else. Ruth held on to mine. “You live in Trutch house?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The way she looked at me, so intently, I felt washed in blue light. “But I've never seen you at anything.”

“Here I am.”

“I tried to get in there.”

“In the house?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Move in, you mean?”

She nodded. I only remembered the man with the violin, not the other names on the interview sheet. Yet Belinda had told me I was the only woman to apply. She'd said they needed “gender balance” and that was what I thought she meant. “Are you vegetarian?” I asked Ruth.

“Yes!” She sighed. “It must be great living with Pete and Dieter. They're so committed. Dieter's probably going to Nicaragua next summer. Are you in NAG!?”