Blood and Salt Read online

  The next day is much like the first, except that it’s hotter and the mud has almost dried up. As the long day limps along, Taras thinks about the things Oleksa and his friends said.

  They think Ukrainians got sent here for two – or is it three? – reasons. All of them related to the war. Canada is at war with Austria, so the government decides that anyone who was ruled by Austria is an Austrian and therefore an enemy. But can they truly not tell the difference? He remembers a poster in the village tavern in the old country, encouraging people to come to Canada. It was written in Ukrainian, not German. By people who ran Canadian steamship lines and railroads. It seems they could tell the difference.

  The other two reasons are about unions and radical politics. This puzzles him, because although he was in fact arrested at a meeting to start a union at the brick plant, he was nothing more than a bystander. The people who ran the meeting weren’t arrested. And he’s never belonged to any kind of political group or talked about radical politics.

  Maybe he should have. At least then he’d have been arrested for something.

  Well, there was one other reason, according to Oleksa. To make people support the war it was helpful to show them the face of the enemy. He is now an enemy alien. The name sounds cold and cruel. An enemy you can’t understand, who could do any brutal or barbaric thing.

  Taras gets back to camp in the evening with his crew, wondering what slop they’ll get in the mess tent. But nobody’s there, they’re all in their tents. Yuriy explains why. A work gang marched back to camp early after its members, led by Oleksa and Kyrylo, refused to work until they got better food. Their guards tried to stop them, but the park foreman supervising the work supported the men and the guards couldn’t just start shooting people.

  People not even trying to escape.

  Then the commandant, the one in charge of the whole camp, ordered that the men who refused to work would get no supper. Word flashed through the dinner line, and the other prisoners decided they had to support Oleksa and his crew. So Taras is taking part in a hunger strike.

  As if he hadn’t been hungry enough before.

  Next day at the work site, Yaroslav collapses as he tries to dig out a thick root. His spade drops like a very small tree. The park foreman tells the internees to quit work and go back to camp. Again the guards protest, but he doesn’t listen. Neither do the men. They help Yaroslav up, a man supporting him on each side, almost carrying him. Someone says, loudly, in English, that the commandant is an idiot. The soldiers don’t even pretend to care.

  Later the prisoners hear that the foreman explained to the commandant that men can’t work without something to eat. Supper, pokydky as it is, is restored. The brief flare of revolt fades, work starts up again: clear trees and brush, grub roots, shift rocks, dig dirt. Some day they’ll reach Laggan, whatever that is. Taras doesn’t believe it. Still a supper and a breakfast short, he’s more famished than before.

  “Well, it was something different,” Oleksa says in the tent that night. No one bothers to answer.

  Taras asks Yuriy and Ihor whether the road they’re building is just something to keep them busy or will actually serve a worthwhile purpose.

  Yuriy explains that the road will take visitors to a beautiful turquoise lake encircled by mountains. Businesses will grow. Life will be better.

  “So, it’s not all for nothing. Does that help?”

  Taras thinks for a moment. “No.”

  “When I first came,” Ihor says, “the commandant spoke to us one morning. He said, ‘This is important work you’re doing. You have fresh air to breathe. Beautiful scenery all around.’ I think he was expecting us to cheer. He looked disappointed when nobody did, but he didn’t give up that easily. ‘You are lucky to be in such a fine place,’ he said. No one actually spat on the ground until he turned to leave.”

  “The strange thing about him,” Yuriy says, “is how ordinary he seems. You’d never look at him twice. Sandy hair and moustache, pale face with pale eyes. Sometimes he gets this puzzled look, as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing here.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Well, a potato

  September passes into October. Darkness creeps into the tent a little earlier each night. People snap at each other, and they’re cold all the time.

  One night he walks back to the tent after supper – fried turnips and chicken wings in greasy gravy. He hates turnips, their bitter tang in his belly. Even so, there weren’t enough of them. The men from his tent and a few others tried to stay near the mess tent stove a little longer than usual but the guards kicked them out.

  In the fading light, Taras lags behind Yuriy and Ihor, staring at the barbed-wire fence. He’s grown used to not seeing beyond it, although the big bastard of a mountain is always there. He focuses on the wire itself, wondering if he could make something that would cut through it.

  As he puts his mind to the problem, someone bumps his shoulder, hard. He turns and sees that he’s wandered into the middle of the twenty or thirty German prisoners of war in the camp. Real prisoners of war, captured in various parts of Europe. Kyrylo, or Scarman as Taras now thinks of him, says the POWs shouldn’t be in the same camp with the Ukrainians, who are all non-combatants. But Taras has also heard the guards refer to the Ukrainians as prisoners of war. In this place a lot of things don’t mean what you think they mean.

  He has no idea who bashed into him. Maybe someone thought he was walking too close to them. Fine. He steps aside.

  What the hell? Scarman pops up beside him and smacks into one of the Germans, Eickl. Eickl shoves right back.

  “Get out of my way!” Scarman shouts. “Stupid bloody German.” Scarman says all this in German. He speaks quite good German, Taras thinks. Better than he himself could manage. The “stupid bloody German” part was really clear.

  Taras tries to edge away from them.

  Then Eickl says, loudly, in fluent Ukrainian, that a Ukrainian must be an expert on stupidity because he does stupid things all the time; and it’s as if a shell explodes between them. Punches fly and suddenly other men join the fight, hammering and flailing until bodies plummet to the earth like heavy birds.

  Eickl thumps Scarman on the nose and blood sprays like black rain in the failing light. For a second Scarman can’t believe it. Then he kicks Eickl in the knee. Eickl screams.

  Guards rush in shouting and shoving, bayonets jabbing the air. In seconds everyone is sick of the fight and it stops cold. At that moment a fist crashes into Taras’s left cheek and jaw and he goes down hard. Christ, it hurts. Who did that, for God’s sake? He wasn’t even fighting. Of course the guards didn’t notice a thing. Complete useless tits.

  Scarman, bloody but grinning wildly, helps him up, and Taras thinks he could maybe become part of Oleksa and Scarman’s group if he wanted to. But he doesn’t want to, doesn’t even want to get up yet. Somebody might hit him again. In the sudden quiet, the prisoners walk off, some with pulpy lips and bruises blooming on eyes or cheeks. Scarman isn’t the only one who looks pleased.

  Yuriy and Ihor have stopped to see what’s going on. Taras stumbles up to them. “I wasn’t even fighting,” he says. Yuriy’s hand- kerchief comes out again, wipes away blood where Taras’s cheek is cut. Ihor shakes his head like a parent with a foolish child.

  Once again Oleksa, Scarman and Toma sit cross-legged on the dirt floor of the tent playing a game Taras doesn’t even want to understand. Their eyes track each card that falls as if it matters. Oleksa with his mismatched hair. Scarman with his bushy eyebrows. Toma with his round, almost gentle face.

  Scarman started the game in a good mood, but now looks ready to hit somebody. His nose has stopped bleeding, although it still has a mashed look. Like a boiled potato flattened with a wooden spoon.

  Taras thinks about a whole boiled potato. Whether he’ll ever see one again.

  The other card players from the first night stare at the walls, smoking each cigarette until their fingers start to burn, tired of Scarman tel
ling them what to do. Scarman wanted to play for a penny a hand, but Toma, who usually does everything he’s told, led a revolt. He said he’d die if he lost all his money and couldn’t get cigarettes. Taras was surprised when this worked, but by then the other men didn’t want to play any more.

  Each man earns twenty-five pennies a day from his work. It doesn’t get you much at the camp canteen, but if you’re careful you can have, over a week, several candy bars and plenty of smokes.

  Taras watches Yuriy read an old copy of the Banff newspaper he found outside. A soldier must have dropped it. He notices Taras watching and reads out loud – a story that explains how the town benefits by selling provisions to the internment camp.

  “Good to know we’re helping someone,” Toma says.

  Ihor sits beside Taras, fingers drumming on the ground, and hums a tune that leaps and dips and whirls. A song from another place, of rocks and streams and a life spent on the shoulders of mountains. Oleksa keeps giving him dirty looks, but doesn’t say anything. Taras sees that he doesn’t quite want to take Ihor on. Doesn’t know what might happen.

  Taras worries that a fight will start in the tent. Just for something to do. Or to get warm. It probably won’t; Yuriy and Ihor are always so calm. Also, Oleksa and even Scarman don’t want fights that aren’t their idea. Still, you never want to take another man’s cigarettes or candy bar. It seems that the less you have, the more you don’t want anyone to touch it.

  Taras lights a cigarette, but the left side of his face burns and the teeth on that side feel loose. It hurts even to smoke. He throws down the cigarette, watches it glow a moment and sputter out in the dirt. What a waste. His hands and feet ache with cold, even though he’s wearing everything he has, in layers. It makes his clothes feel stiff and tight.

  He pulls his one blanket closer around his shoulders and looks toward the glowing oil lamp in the centre of the tent. But what he sees is the big clay stove, the peech, in his family’s house back in Shevchana, that radiated heat all through the night. He tries to call up that warmth.

  From the corner of his eye, he sees the card players lay down their hands without a word. Toma gathers them into a deck and ties them with a bit of dirty string. Blows out the lamp. Each man tries some slightly different way to settle against the cold earth.

  Taras runs his tongue over his sore teeth. At least he can’t taste any more blood, but his left cheek throbs and not even cold drives out the pain.

  Tomorrow the guards will look at his face and know him for a troublemaker.

  In the mess tent a week later, Taras takes a seat beside Yuriy. Ihor sits across the table. Too late Taras sees Oleksa sit down on his other side, next to Franz Redl, one of the Germans.

  Redl and Oleksa hated each other on sight, which was well before Taras came to the camp. Oleksa loudly blames all Germans for starting the war and landing the internees in this place. Redl, a short, swarthy man who doesn’t fit the common idea of a German, says the Ukrainians in Canada should have gone back to the old country as soon as the war began and fought in the Austrian army.

  Neither man is shy about saying these things.

  Redl tries to get up and find a different place to sit, just as Scarman settles himself down on his other side, pushing Redl back onto the bench.

  Taras becomes interested in the contents of his plate. A whole potato. Not a very big potato, but still... Meat, who knows what kind, clotted with gristle. Watery gravy. Peas boiled almost grey. Crap, maybe, but he’s going to eat every speck.

  “Pig,” says a low voice. “Filthy, shit-eating sow.” Oleksa.

  Taras and Yuriy exchange looks. “Well, a potato,” Yuriy says. “Dobre.”

  “Tak. Tse dobre,” Taras says.

  “Turnip face. Cabbage brain.” Redl. Not up to the standards of “shit-eating sow.”

  Taras sees a blur of movement and Redl’s coffee spills over his plate and onto his lap.

  “Sorry,” Scarman says. “That was clumsy of me.”

  Again Redl tries to get up. Again Scarman holds out his arm. “No need to clean up your mess. Eat. It’ll get cold.”

  For five minutes or so everyone eats silently. It’s more than enough time to finish whatever a man has on his plate. You can have a second burnt coffee if you want, but Redl gets up before Oleksa or Scarman can react. Walks quickly out of the tent.

  Oleksa strolls toward the door looking bored, hands in his pockets. Sidles out the door. Something thuds against something else. Yells and grunts erupt, more thuds. The other German prisoners try to get out of the tent, but a line of Ukrainians blocks the way. Taras and Yuriy run outside. Already Oleksa is winning the fight, if you can call it a fight. Redl’s face looks like a smashed tomato. Blood streams into his eyes. Oleksa has him pinned.

  “Get him off me,” Redl begs. The guards pull Oleksa away and when he still struggles, one of them knocks him down with a rifle butt.

  Redl is taken in an army truck to the hospital in Banff with a broken nose and a swollen eye. Oleksa, whose nose now looks as bad as Scarman’s, is sent to the log guardhouse just outside the compound. The hoosegow, the guards call it. From the way they say it, it must be a humorous word in English. Anyway, it’s the internees’ jail. A small jail beside a big jail.

  After everything settles down, Yuriy tells Taras and Ihor that while it’s often hard to tell what’s lucky and what isn’t, this fight contains two examples of good luck. The coffee is never very hot, so although Redl got his face bashed, his private parts weren’t scalded. And Oleksa only got a few days in the hoosegow, and a log building, even an unheated one, is bound to be warmer than a canvas tent.

  It’s quiet in the tent at night. No one goes near Scarman because he’s mad all the time. When Oleksa comes back, after getting only bread and water for several days, he doesn’t talk either. At night, he sits on his blanket, his back turned to the others, including Scarman.

  Shortly after this, the Germans ride out of the camp in the back of a big truck, on their way to an all-German camp in British Columbia. Except for Redl. He’s still in the hospital. Scarman hails their departure as a great victory and talks himself back into some kind of better mood. He claims that he and Oleksa “really showed those Germans.” He feels pleased enough to give Oleksa a couple of candy bars he was saving for some dark day. Even so, it takes Oleksa a little longer to come around, but before long the card games start up again.

  As daylight wanes, the sandy-haired commandant makes another decision, explained to the prisoners by the guards: work days will be shortened by one hour a day. But by now Taras is so miserable that he finds it hard to tell the difference. He and his friends are colder, hungrier. Even Yuriy looks dejected.

  One night Taras says, “We need to make a plan.”

  Ihor shakes his head. “Too cold. I don’t jump out of the frying pan into the fire.” He says the last bit in English.

  “What are you talking about?” Taras asks, confused by the change of language.

  “Just a little expression I learned from my boss at the ranch. It means you don’t leave something bad for something that could be worse.”

  Still, men who hadn’t considered escape before consider it now. Two men do escape. Private Amberly, the kid who took away Taras’s watch, is charged with helping them. Taras can’t understand why he’d do that, since prisoners have no money for bribes. Is it possible, then, that he liked the men he helped? Or that he’s in favour of radical politics and thought the Ukrainians were radicals?

  Taras doesn’t think so. If there’s anybody in Canada who knows even less about politics than he does, it has to be Private Amberly.

  Another soldier, Lieutenant Sales, is charged with being drunk on duty and using profane and obscene language. This is more understandable. Taras wouldn’t mind being a bit drunk himself. But he can use profane and obscene language whenever he wants to, because, as Yuriy points out, the guards don’t know Ukrainian. Another piece of luck. Up until now he hasn’t used a lot of bad langua
ge, but if he stays here much longer he might take it up.

  Taras sits on his blanket and writes a letter. It’s the middle of October but feels more like December. The guards brought them in from the work site early. Too cold for the men to work, they told the commandant. Sure, maybe they felt some concern for the men, but probably a lot more for themselves. But as Yuriy says, you take luck where you find it. Any time you work a shorter day, you have more time to talk or play cards or write a letter before black night takes you down.

  He feels a sob, or maybe it’s a scream, trying to tear its way out of his chest. For two months he’s been sending letters to his parents, asking if they’re all right. Pretending he’s all right. He writes them and hands them over to the guards. And then nothing happens. For two months he’s been asking the guards why he’s not getting mail. No one knows. Or cares, as far as he can see. A few men in the camp get letters; most don’t. Why?

  Taras surprises himself by coming up with an idea. He writes a letter, in English – Yuriy helps him with it – to the commandant. He walks around the mess tent that night and talks to other men who aren’t getting letters. Some just wave him off, but quite a few add their signatures to the letter. It says, “We are promised the right to send and receive letters. We have sent letters to our families, but have never received any letters back. We ask you to help us. We demand to know what has happened to our letters.”

  He gives the letter to Sergeant Andrews, one of the less surly guards, who promises to get it to the commandant. The days drag on until a week goes by. Then a second. He thinks Andrews is avoiding him. Talks to him again.

  “I passed your letter on,” Andrews says. “His aide told me you’ll hear soon.”

  The first day of November, Taras joins the evening lineup for the mess tent. A soldier he hasn’t seen before is talking to Andrews. Taras sees Andrews pointing him out and they come over to the line.

  “Mr. Kuh-leen-uh,” Andrews says, “This is Captain Vernon. He’s found out something about your letters.” Vernon is younger than most of the guards, about twenty-five, tall and thin, and actually looks good in his uniform. Some rich man’s son, Taras thinks. Keeping out of the war in Europe.