Blood and Salt Read online

  He and his father whispered together. I heard Larysa’s name. I heard him say he had to get married.

  We all became aware of a commotion outside, something rhythmic, coming nearer every second. Ostap, who hadn’t moved since Ruslan came in, began to read again.

  Examine everything you see.

  Then ask yourselves: Now who are we?

  The door was thrown open. Six or seven soldiers burst in, led by a sergeant I’d seen around the garrison, Werner Schratt, a man nobody seemed to like. The army must have found him useful, though, because Ruslan said he always had charge of the new recruits.

  Ostap went right on as though the soldiers weren’t there.

  Whose children? Of what fathers born?

  By whom enslaved in utter scorn?

  Schratt grabbed my father’s newspaper from a table. “Socialist garbage!” he said. He tore it in half and threw it on the floor. It made me angry, but I kept still.

  He was coming closer to us. Ruslan’s hands shook, but he held his back straight.

  Schratt picked up the immigration poster. “Lies! All lies. You leave here, you lose everything.” He crumpled the poster and threw it down too. Ostap began again.

  Examine everything you see.

  The sergeant grabbed the book and tossed it to the floor. I could see hatred rise from the village men like steam, and Ostap continued from memory.

  Then ask yourselves: Now who are we?

  Teofan, who is Ostap’s son, stepped forward and recited with him.

  Whose children? Of what fathers born?

  By whom enslaved in utter scorn?

  The sergeant tried to sneer, but the old man’s dignity sobered him. “Nothing doing here, men,” he said and headed for the door. “Just a bunch of peasants who think they’re poets.” The soldiers didn’t think that was funny, since most of them were peasants.

  Ruslan brushed off his dido’s book and handed it back. Ostap held it to his heart.

  The sergeant paused by the door and pointed at Ruslan. “Oh, and bring that one with you.” The soldiers grabbed my friend. Ruslan struggled to free his arms.

  “Let my grandson go!” Ostap shouted.

  Ruslan continued to struggle, but the soldiers dragged him out the door. “Please,” he begged. “I can’t go yet! I’m getting married.”

  Everyone in the room, except Teofan, looked surprised.

  “He was getting married!” The sergeant slapped his thigh at his own wit and they marched Ruslan away, Schratt’s laughter echoing in the lane.

  This was the thing with the Austrians. People said they weren’t so bad, certainly better than the Poles. And probably that was so. But they had power over your life. I knew I’d never see them in the same way again.

  Soon I’d be in the army, and Halya would be far away. What was I going to do?

  “A beautiful old man, that Ostap.” Ihor says. “I wish I could have known him.”

  “What happened to Ruslan?” Yuriy asks.

  “Nothing good,” Tymko says. “You can bet on that.”

  “Did you get to see Halya that night?” Yuriy doesn’t give up easily.

  “All that is coming,” Taras says. “But the story goes its own way.” He hopes he’ll find the right words to tell it.

  “That’s fair,” Ihor says. “Everything will happen in its time.”

  “So. In a few minutes I came to a grassy clearing in the centre of tall beeches and Halya ran to me like a silver shadow in the moonlight. Her hair smelled like the forest.” Taras hears somebody sigh. “We kissed so long we finally had to pull apart to get a breath.”

  “Dobre,” Yuriy says. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Halya pulled an egg from her pocket. In the pale light I could barely make out the curving lines that spiralled around it. It was the one she’d meant to give me on Drenched Monday.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Tse chudoviy.” Beautiful.

  “This kind of egg comes from long ago,” Halya told me. “Baba showed me how to make it.” We were still a bit short of breath and I wanted to kiss her some more, but I knew we had to talk.

  “I made something for you, too,” I said. I gave her a brass pendant shaped like the sun with slender rays flowing outward.

  This is too much for the other men. “Where would you get something like that?” Yuriy says.

  “They have jewellers in Chernowitz, you know,” Tymko tells him.

  “I didn’t get it in Chernowitz. I made it.”

  “Made it?” Tymko says. “How?”

  “I got the metal from broken harness brass, and I worked on it in the evenings. The sun part hangs from a brass wire that fastens with a loop at the back. It took me a long time to learn to draw out the wire without breaking it.”

  “I wish I could have seen that,” Yuriy says.

  “Well then, you can have your wish.” Taras reaches under his shirt and pulls out a pendant just like the one he described. “I made one for each of us. Hers is just the same.”

  “Halya was right,” Myro says. “Tse chudoviy.”

  “Thank you. Maybe I could go on now?”

  “Please, do go on,” Tymko says. “And I’ll try to keep these ruffians from interrupting you again.”

  Halya fastened the pendant around her neck under her blouse. “Dyakuyiu, my love.”

  I showed her my own pendant. We kissed again and held each other close, but in a moment Halya pulled away.

  “I don’t want them to take you for the army!”

  “I know. But Halychka, there’s something else. Your father’s going to Kanady.” She looked at me as if I was crazy. “I found out at the meeting in the reading hall.”

  I told her what I’d heard, and at first she thought the men who were at the meeting were crazy too. But when I talked about Viktor and Kondarenko in the tavern, she stopped shaking her head. Like everyone else, she knew her father didn’t go there, and he certainly didn’t buy other men drinks. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that Viktor had been more secretive than usual lately. Just as if he were up to something.

  What on earth could they do?

  And then I told her about Ruslan.

  We agreed that she’d come to the smithy in the morning. After I watched her into her house, I went back to the unlocked reading room and picked up the creased poster.

  “Sounds bad,” Yuriy says. “What are they going to do?

  “Taras will have to join the army, and Halya will have to go to Canada,” Ihor says.

  “Yet he stands before us,” Tymko says. “Well, he sits. How can that be?”

  “Maybe they traded places,” Myro said. “Halya joined the army and Taras came to Canada.”

  “I hope we’ll know some day,” Ihor says.

  “I hope we’ll know a bit sooner than that.” Tymko winks.

  “I could tell you what happens next, but you’d say I wasn’t there.”

  “No,” Myro says. “I don’t think you have to worry about that. Just tell it.” So he does.

  Halya crept into the silent house and heard Natalka snoring in her bed over the peech. A rough hand grasped her shoulder and flung her into the room as if she were a stuffed doll.

  “You’ve been sleeping with Kuzyk’s son!” Viktor snarled.

  Natalka woke with a shriek and almost jumped down from her bed over the peech.

  “I have not!”

  Viktor slapped her face. “Don’t talk back to your father!” He got ready to hit her again, but Natalka moved in front of him.

  “My daughter’s dead,” she said fiercely. “I must speak for her child.”

  “Her child is a shameless slut!” Viktor said, but he looked a little ashamed at the mention of his dead wife. “She makes the whole village laugh at me!”

  “No! They laugh because her father’s a fool who can’t forget the past.”

  “I warn you –” He stepped toward her, arm raised.

  “You’d hit an old woman, would you?”
Natalka stood tall. “Coward!”

  For a moment Viktor couldn’t believe his ears. He took a step toward her.

  “Why shouldn’t she marry Taras?” Natalka asked. “He’s a good young man.”

  “His father’s a revolutionary!”

  “Pah! Kuzyk’s no radical. Anyway, it’s not the father she wants to marry!”

  “Shut your mouth!” Viktor slapped Natalka across the face and she cried out.

  Halya had been terrified a moment before, but now she stepped right up to Viktor.

  “Is this how you’re going to treat us in Kanady?” she asked. “When you’ve taken us away from every thing and every person we know? Every neighbour, every friend?” Her voice was like ice, and her eyes shone with fury. “Then you are a coward.”

  Viktor was stunned. Halya had never spoken to him that way. He’d planned to tell them, of course, at a moment he would choose. He’d never imagined it in any detail, only that they would see him as he saw himself. And now she’d taken away a little bit of his power. And made him feel almost guilty. He stomped out, muttering about “damned women.”

  Natalka was stunned too. What a terrible night, being struck in the face by that bully, and then finding out what he had planned for them.

  Halya went to Natalka, stroked her grandmother’s hair. “Baba, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why? You can’t help that your father’s an idiot.”

  In spite of everything they giggled nervously. Natalka put a finger to her lips.

  “Just one thing. Before you marry Kuzyk’s son, he has to promise he never lays a hand on you.”

  “He wouldn’t –”

  “Dobre. Because I’ll kill him if he does.”

  Halya gave a snort of laughter. “I don’t understand. Why is he doing this?”

  “Well, I suppose he thinks going to Kanady would keep Taras away from you.”

  “Why would he need to do that? Taras will have to go in the army.”

  “Well,” Natalka said, trying hard to imagine Viktor’s motives, “people do say you can get a lot of free land in Canada. And Viktor’s always liked the idea of having more of something than other people have. And also, maybe he thinks he’d get more respect. And he might, until the new people got to know him.”

  Halya almost laughed. “Isn’t there anything we can do?” she said. “We can’t just leave everything we know. He didn’t even have the decency to tell us.”

  “What can we do? Well, I suppose we could say we’re not going.”

  But he’d sell the house, the land. They could work for other farmers, doing housework, helping in the fields, but there’s not much work for a young woman and her baba on their own. Not much money. Less respect.

  “That was a bit discouraging,” Yuriy says. “Can you tell us a little more? Maybe something a bit happier? Then we can all go to bed.”

  “I could tell you about seeing Halya the next day. I suppose it’s happy and not happy all at once. But it won’t take long.”

  “Good,” Tymko says. “That sounds all right. Life is never all happy or all not.”

  “Well, let’s see, she was alone with her baba the next afternoon when a messenger came to the door with two envelopes. Viktor wasn’t home, so she and Natalka opened them. One contained passports for her father, Natalka and herself; the other, three steamship tickets. They would leave the village in one week.”

  “That’s not much time to get ready,” Yuriy says.

  “Halya went to the shelf where Viktor had left a folded paper she’d never seen before. She thought he must have left it by mistake, and was dying to find out what it was. He’d driven off in the cart and wouldn’t be back until supper, so, she picked up the paper and found it was a map of Kanady, with a circle drawn around a town in a province called Saskatchewan. She copied the name onto a scrap of paper and ran all the way to the smithy.

  “I was there by myself, saying goodbye to the place, since I would soon have to report to the army.” Taras waits quietly until the other men settle in to listen.

  I held in my hand a many-times-mended harness which was finally, after all my father’s work and my own, beyond repair. The leather felt warm and yielding. Sun filtered through gaps in the roof and wall boards, and through the open door. I had never thought about it before, but now I saw that it was a beautiful place, and I didn’t want to leave it. Didn’t want to let that light go. This was the place where I’d worked since I was seven years old, at first just watching Batko and fetching things for him, and then slowly starting to learn how to do what he did. And always the light coming in around us. How could I leave?

  I had to. I had my notice. My parents would take me to Chernowitz when the day came. But what would happen if there was war? The talk of war might turn out to be just that, but there was a feeling in the village that something had changed. That we young men might be in for something more than training.

  And then Halya rushed in, out of breath, and threw herself into my arms. We held each other a long time. She felt so warm against me; I wanted to feel that every day. And I asked myself if there was any way that could happen.

  We would never be together if Viktor could prevent it, but there must be some way to get past him. We were young and strong, and he was already getting old.

  Halya thrust a scrap of paper at me, pointed to the name written on it.

  “Spring Creek, Saskatchewan, Canada,” she said. “I think he knew someone from the village who lived there once. Taras, I’ll never see you again.”

  In a moment I made up my mind. “If your father can find this place, so can I.”

  I held her close, stroked her cheek where the sun striped it gold.

  “But no one can get away from the army.”

  That was what my parents and I had decided. But we also knew that if there really was a war, I might be in the army for years. I could be killed.

  I didn’t even know what I would be dying for.

  “I can’t go into the army.” My words amazed me. A moment ago I had never so much as thought them. “I’ll go to Kanady too, and I’ll find you.”

  Maybe something inside me had been thinking, planning, without my knowing.

  We had to tell my parents.

  “Did I not ask for something happier?” Yuriy says.

  “Well, Taras was showing some glimmerings of social and political consciousness,” Tymko says. “That’s a cause for celebration.”

  “What I just told you was about as happy as anything else that happened. I got to hold Halya. I learned where they were going so I could find her again. And we made plans together almost like we were already married.”

  “I’m sure Yuriy doesn’t mean to complain,” Myro says. “But maybe tomorrow we could hear something a little cheerier. Something with a little humour in it?”

  “I don’t know what that could be,” Taras says. “But I’ll try to think of something.”

  CHAPTER 8

  We were set up, boys

  “So...” Taras looks at his friends. “I tried to think of something cheerier. I hope you’ll like it.”

  “Has it got a little humour?” Yuriy asks.

  “I think it does. You’ll have to judge for yourself. But I want one thing understood first. I wasn’t there myself.”

  “Fine, fine,” Tymko says. “But how do you know what happened?”

  “Halya told me – when she came to the smithy. It wasn’t all about the two of us, you see. Some of it was about her baba. Some of it even made us laugh. Oh, and Maryna told my mother about it later.”

  “All right, all right,” Tymko says. “Enough. You just want us to know you’ll probably make a few things up.”

  “Tak. I think that’s how stories work.”

  Natalka scurried down the grassy lane, holding a loaf of her best black bread wrapped in a linen cloth in one hand and with the other restlessly smoothing her homespun apron against her hips, as if she felt a wrinkle that just wouldn’t go away. She came to the gate of a smal
l thatch-roofed house. Oh! There were leaf buds on the kalyna bushes, right beside the few berries the birds had left behind. Good, she’s always liked spring.

  Coming through the gate, she noticed the woven willow fence had been repaired. She knocked and entered the storeroom, even emptier than on her last visit. She passed into the room that was her friend’s kitchen, dining room and sitting room all in one.

  Late afternoon shadows filled the corners. Maryna stood at the peech, a fan of thin-cut noodles slipping through her fingers into a pot of soup. A ray of sun turned her gnarled hands golden as she separated the noodles so they wouldn’t clump together. Then she picked up a long wooden spoon and stirred them in as a cloud of steam rose around her, and placed the pot back in the oven of the peech.

  Well! Natalka couldn’t hold back a snort of impatience – her friend knew she was there, of course. Maryna turned to her, a smile pulling at the lines around her mouth. Small and a bit bent, she had all her teeth and her sharp tongue still worked. Not all the wrinkles in the world could hide her playful spirit, her main weapon against a hard life.

  “Dobre dehn, Natalka.”

  “Dobre dehn, Maryna.” Another snort popped out.

  “What’s eating you? Did the bread fail to rise this morning?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s –”

  “No, of course not. Is that beautiful loaf for me?” Natalka nodded impatiently. “Dyakuyiu, just what I need. So what is it, then?”

  “I’m trying to tell you. Viktor, that son of a wild boar, has this crazy idea. He wants to take us away –”

  “To Kanady.” Maryna smiled at her friend, enjoying being one step ahead of her.

  “How did you know?” Natalka hated having her forward energy checked. She went to the peech and glanced into the pot. Not much in there but noodles. A soup bone, some chopped onion, a few pieces of potato.