Blood and Salt Read online

  “You see,” the captain says, “the camp has no official interpreter.” Taras looks baffled. “No soldier able to read Ukrainian.” What’s this guy talking about?

  “Perhaps you are unaware, but all letters going out or coming in have to be passed by a military censor.” Vernon looks a bit edgy. Taras probably looks desperate. Dangerous.

  “Why?” Taras tries to keep his voice steady.

  “So no sensitive information is passed on.” He sees Taras has no idea what he means. “No information that could hurt the war effort.”

  “I don’t have information like that. Bring my letters, I show you.”

  “I can’t touch your letters. Nobody can.”

  “I don’t understand. Why my letters are not sent?” Taras steps out of the path of men entering the tent. Yuriy and Ihor stop to listen. And Scarman and Oleksa.

  “You see, they’re written in Ukrainian. So there’s no one to read them. The commandant hopes to get an interpreter soon.”

  “Where are my letters? Where are they?” Taras hears his voice getting louder. None of this makes any sense.

  Vernon looks embarrassed. “Sitting in a bag in the commandant’s office.”

  Taras is afraid his head will explode.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I want my letters!” Now Taras is actually yelling.

  “Letters written in English are getting through,” Vernon says helpfully. “Could you write in English?”

  Taras takes a deep breath. “My parents can’t read English. They can read Ukrainian.”

  “Oh. Too bad.” Vernon’s face flushes; he looks like he’d rather be almost anywhere else.

  Another week passes, it grows colder, and Taras hears nothing of his letters. The internees begin to believe they will die in their sleep in the freezing cold tents. But a day or two later, Captain Vernon comes to the mess tent and talks to them.

  It seems the brass who run this place have decided it’s impossible for the men to winter at Castle Mountain. Taras thinks a sensible person would have figured this out back in the summer. There’s an edge in Vernon’s voice that suggests he might possibly think the same. Oleksa mutters that the commandant would have noticed earlier, except that he has a stove in his private tent.

  So the camp will move to a site at the edge of Banff with four large bunkhouses previously used by construction workers. Each holds a hundred men. The word is, they have stoves. Now that’s revolution.

  Taras’s breath seems to come a little easier as the train glides down the Bow Valley. He’s glad to be done with Castle Mountain hanging over his nights and days. Once again he sits beside Yaroslav, who rode with him on the train to Castle Mountain. Yaroslav is even skinnier now. His thick moustache is the only healthy looking thing about him. At Banff station Taras glances around. There really is a town here, and somebody’s decided the internees aren’t too dangerous – too radical – to be near it. Yaroslav, who used to work on the railroad, names the mountains that circle the town: Norquay, Cascade, Tunnel, Rundle, Sulphur.

  “Used to work.” At Castle Mountain the men tried to remember who they used to be; where they lived, where they worked, what they ate. Who loved them.

  The guards march the men right through town, past comfortable houses built of wood and stone. Many have front porches where a man could sit after a day’s work. It must be a fine thing to live in one of these houses. People stop and watch them go by. Some look angry, others scared.

  One woman looks his way and nods, almost smiles. A woman in a bright green coat that sets off the red and gold mixed in her hair. She holds his gaze, doesn’t turn away with that pinched expression Taras often sees on the faces of some of the guards. After three months in the camp, three months of being foreign scum, it brings tears to his eyes.

  As they approach the Bow River, Taras sees an enormous castle standing above the town like some fantastic mountain. “Zamok,” he says.

  “No,” Yaroslav says, “it’s not a castle, it’s a tourist hotel. People from all over North America and even Europe stay there. At least they did before the war.”

  “From Austria, even?” Taras asks.

  “Sure, probably even Austria. Maybe the emperor himself.” Taras tries to imagine Franz Josef coming to this place. Leaving the castles you own to visit a make-believe castle in Canada. Well, what could be nicer?

  Despite this bitter thought, something about the town feels good. Or maybe just different, a place where there are people who are neither prisoners nor guards, but he finds as they cross the bridge that his pace quickens. Yaroslav gives him a puzzled look. Embarrassed, Taras eases back. For a moment he must have been feeling something like hope.

  Beyond the bridge, they turn right and soon reach a small log building guarded by soldiers. They march on toward a place called the Cave and Basin, a hot springs pool Yaroslav calls it, where tourists come to soak. Below it, bunkhouses huddle against the lower slopes of Sulphur Mountain, which Taras imagines as an immense resting animal.

  Taras sees Yuriy and Ihor close by and when the guards aren’t looking he moves through the mass of men to join them, leaving Yaroslav once again to fend for himself. The guards send the three friends to the same bunkhouse, a long wooden building with one wall higher than the other on the side facing the mountain. A row of small windows near the top lets in light. None of the other men from the tent are sent here and Taras discovers how glad he is to be away from them, especially Oleksa and Scarman. Yuriy smiles, Ihor winks and Taras feels a bubble of laughter in his belly. The building has three stoves in a row down its centre. Taras and his friends find bunks close together near the middle stove. Maybe things will be better.

  Supper is no better. Chunks of cabbage with a little meat. Bleached-looking carrots which have somehow been charred as well as boiled. Taras can’t look at them if he wants to eat anything.

  Afterwards the men turn in early. Although no one’s worked today, there’s a different kind of exhaustion. The realization that you can never let your guard down. What have these idiots got planned for them now? The bunks are slightly more comfortable than hard earth. Yuriy and Ihor fall asleep quickly, but Taras turns and turns. The pendant he always wears beneath his shirt digs into his skin.

  A man with stringy yellow hair and red pimples on his neck walks by. Taras has noticed this fellow staring at him before, lips curled in a knowing leer. God knows why. But maybe there’s something familiar about him. Maybe Taras should just ask him what he wants. The man passes on to the corner of the bunkhouse and disappears into darkness.

  In the distance Taras hears an amazing noise. Something big crashes through the trees, and calls in a deep voice that makes him shiver. It wakens Ihor, and he sits up to hear it better. He explains that it’s a male elk’s mating call. Taras listens, wordless; its power and longing call to his heart. He thinks that hearing it is the one lucky thing that’s happened to him, except for meeting his two friends, since he became a prisoner.

  In his old village, a man called Yarema played the sopilka, a handmade wooden flute. He played old songs but also made up his own. They sounded like the birds that flew about the village, or wind in the forest.

  The elk’s voice brings it all back. He sees that all places have their own songs. With a rush of pain, he remembers the village, the beauty and joy he’d known there and never needed to name.

  The elk’s call is the mountain’s night music.

  At first the bunkhouse is better than the tent camp. For a time it’s quite warm. Everyone gets new overalls and woollen mitts. In the daytime they work on many jobs – clearing brush from the town’s recreation grounds, building a bridge over the nearby Spray River, or sometimes just shovelling snow off the Banff streets.

  Then the real cold comes.

  CHAPTER 4

  Agitator

  November, 1915

  Taras stands in a forest clearing strewn with fallen trees and raw stumps, their sharp scent pierci
ng the air. The men in his bunkhouse have been sent out to fell and trim trees for the stoves. He sees tilted, scarred earth before him and a smear of green forest, shapeless except for the nearest trees. Hard white sky touches the ground; mountains dissolve in its pulsing light. The other men appear to float in the whiteness, and when they speak, their words slur and fade, never to be decoded. And yet the whole valley seems to ring, as if the air itself cried out.

  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.