Blood and Salt (52 page)

Taras makes himself stay patient. “Tell me why you hate me.”

Viktor sighs. “Your father stole from me...everything I ever wanted.”

“You’re crazy. My father doesn’t steal.”

“I wanted her, but she chose him.”

“You wanted to marry my mother?” Is this the big secret no one would tell him?

“Mykola stole my woman and he stole my son. You should have been my son.” He speaks as though Taras must see the justice of this.
Taras wants to weep at the madness of it.

They sit for a quarter hour or so, companionable almost. Or so it must appear to the nurse, who looks in for a moment.
You stupid, stupid man, Taras thinks.

“I’m sorry... Sorry I tried to kill... I was...a crazy man.”
Viktor takes deep sobs of breath and eventually grows quiet.
As if a demon has left him.

“I don’t understand why you were sent to the camp.”

“That bastard Shawcross.
Told the police I was a socialist.” He looks amazed that such a thing could happen to him. But resigned, somehow. Or just tired of it all.

“Would you like to go home?”

CHAPTER 40

Such food

On the train ride,
Viktor doesn’t talk. He stares out the window as if wondering where he is.
What country. Does he see the rolling hills of grass or some old country scene? Taras takes it a mile at a time, glad for the train’s slow, steady movement. He rode a train to flee a country and cross a continent.
A train took him to prison. Now a train rocks him home. He hardly dares think “home,” but hopes that’s what it is.
At last Spring Creek comes into sight. He’d forgotten how small it was during the six months he lived in Edmonton, how isolated and undefended. He imagines an invading army bearing down on Spring Creek.

There’s no snow, but he sees the quiet, waning look to the land and sky.
The hills drawing into themselves, for now, as the light fades. The train pulls into the station and Taras wishes he could have a few more minutes before he has to move into this world.

His friend waits on the platform. As Taras steps down, Moses folds him tightly in his arms. “Thank God,” he says. Taras feels a change in Moses and finally takes time to think of what his life might have been in the last two years. Up until now Moses has been someone who helps him, as a family member might. Now they can just be friends.

Viktor has crept down the iron steps and stares at Moses in utter wonder. Taras has told him that his friend will drive him home, and he’s told him Moses is a black man, but the reality is more tha
n
Viktor can take in.
As if he wasn’t paying attention one day and life left him behind. Of course, it’s been much more than a day.

Taras’s parents wait at the farm while he does this last thing for Viktor.
All three men are silent as they drive down the main street, everything so different from the day war broke out. They pass the police building where Taras and Viktor once had to report.
Viktor doesn’t even notice. He seems half asleep.

Schmidt’s grocery store is gone. The building is there but it’s called McGregor’s now.
The old green door and the window trim have been painted red.

A grey-faced old man goes down the boardwalk with careful steps and stops by a store window where prices of beef and lamb are displayed. Something familiar about him.

“Jimmy Burns,” Moses says. “Gassed at Ypres. By the time they sent him home, he looked like that.” The young-old man walks away without going into the store
.
Taras remembers him standing hip-deep in a hole in the ground, grinning.

“Look over there.” Moses points to the brick front of the blacksmith shop. The sign reads: “Patterson & Kalyna, Blacksmiths.” Torn unwillingly from the old village, his father is once more doing well. He feels the same pride he felt when Mykola stood and talked to the men in the reading hall.

Maybe he will spend some time working at the forge.

An open car approaches on the other side of the street, driven
by Ronnie Shawcross.
A young woman sits beside him, wearing
a navy blue suit and a hat trimmed with ostrich plumes. Ronnie doesn’t see them, and that’s good. Taras and Moses exchange a glance.

“Poor woman,”
Taras says. “She must have been desperate.” He tries to smile. Thinks of the village jokes about Radoski’s wife.

“Taras, listen. I think we’re going to get the union.
We’re meeting Sunday afternoon. Why don’t you come?”

“I don’t think so. I’m tired. I need to forget all that.”

Moses looks disappointed but doesn’t press him.

They pass out of town and continue west down a dirt road. Stubble shines red-gold in the late afternoon sun. The air feels so benign and clear that breathing is like drinking spring water.
Taras feels himself drawn to this land, even to the loneliness he feels when he looks across the hills or at occasional farmyards sitting along the road or hidden in valleys. This sparseness feels good, though it goes against everything he knew in the old country, with its fields and forests, the compact villages with houses set along a grassy lane.

After about ten miles,
Viktor points and Moses stops at a two-storey frame house with a British flag and lace curtains at the windows.
Taras remembers searching for Halya and thinking this place couldn’t be Viktor’s. He helps Viktor out, walks with him to the door. Moses waits in the wagon.

Viktor opens the door. “You see. Things have gone well for me. Very well.” He looks miserable, and immensely tired. Taras sees the portrait of the king, the lace tablecloth and a china tea service on the table.
Viktor looks at these things with pride, and then bewilderment.

The lace tablecloth now has a linen runner down the centre embroidered with cross-stitch flowers and other Ukrainian motifs. Similar cloths adorn the chairs and the icon in one corner and the portrait of Shevchenko in another. All these things come from their old house in Shevchana, and none of them were on display when he was sent away.

The portrait of the king is almost completely hidden by a hand-worked scarf draped around it.
Without a word,
Viktor looks to all corners of the room, trying to take it all in.

After a few moments, he nods to himself. He pulls the scarf off the king’s portrait and drapes it over a chair. He takes down the portrait and places it on the table. He also takes down a small British flag which he folds and lays on top of the portrait, where he also puts the china tea service. He picks up the portrait, weighted with these objects, and walks out the open front door. Tosses everything into the autumn grass and comes back inside.

Viktor takes down the icon, a gilded likeness of the Madonna, and holds it against his heart. He sobs like a child. “I shouldn’t have told her you were dead.”

“Stop hating me,
Viktor. It’s killing you.”

Viktor struggles to speak. “I don’t hate you any more.”

They hear the back door open. Natalka, wearing the English-style dress
Viktor bought her, comes in from the garden carrying a sack of cabbages. She stops in the parlour doorway and the sack slips from her fingers. Cabbages roll across the floor like big green heads.

“Taras? Viktor? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t worry,” Taras says. “It’s all right with me and Viktor.” He should go to her, hold her, but he thinks Viktor needs him to stay close.

At first Natalka doesn’t talk. She looks from Taras to Viktor, sees the scarf on the chair, the missing place where the king’s portrait hung.

“A letter came,” she says. “I got the neighbours to read it for me. They said he was sick and he had to stay in this hospital place. Nobody knew how long.” She pauses. “It’s been almost a year.” She seems amazed, as if this is the first time she’s put this fact into words.

“He’s better now,
”
Taras says. “He’s come home.”

Finally Viktor finds his voice.
“Dobre dehn,
Natalka. I hope you’ve been all right on your own.”

She looks a little amazed but then decides it’s not too strange: she’s seen something like this fellow before; he’s similar to the Viktor who sometimes gives people presents.

“Oh, I was afraid at first,” she says. “Then, you know, I just went on with my work.”

“
Dobre.
Thank you for looking after the house.
And the garden.
Dyakuyiu
.
”

“Bud laska.”

The air between them changes. Viktor’s power is gone. He’s just a man.

“Of course I couldn’t plant all the land.”

“You planted a crop?”

“Only about ten acres. But it was a very good crop. Took me many weeks to harvest.
The neighbour’s been grinding some of it for me. I give him bread. Oh, and the garden was good.” She begins picking up the scattered cabbages.

“You did well.”

Natalka looks pleased tha
t
Viktor has acknowledged her work. Taras sees she’s trying to find courage to ask about Halya.

“I saw Halya,” he tells her. “I was in Edmonton the day of her wedding. She looked very well.”

Natalka cries as she hasn’t cried since Halya left. Since the old boar was taken away. Or even on her own in the long winter nights. Taras holds her close and feels a connection to Halya through her.

“If only I could see her. I wanted to write to her but I didn’t know how.”

“I’ll write to her,”
Viktor says as he falls into an armchair. “At that newspaper.”

Taras realizes he can’t leave
Viktor there. “Come, you need to lie down.”

Natalka leads the way to Viktor’s room, smoothes the bedcover, closes the window that’s been letting the wind in.
Taras takes the icon from Viktor’s hands and sets it on the dresser. He picks up a woollen blanket draped over a chair and covers
Viktor’s shoulders.

“Perhaps some water?”
Taras asks, and Natalka goes to fetch it.

Viktor sits heavily on the bed. “Can you forgive me?”

“Yes,” Taras says, and is amazed to find it’s true. He’s been through too much to hold onto this any more. “Now rest. We’ll talk again.
”
Viktor nods.

“Don’t tell Halya I’m alive,”
Taras goes on. “She’s married now. It won’t help her to know.”

“That’s right.”
Viktor stretches out on the bed. By the time Natalka returns with water, he’s asleep.
Taras realizes he’s desperately thirsty and drinks the water himself.

On the ride
to the farm, Taras answers a few questions for Moses and then grows quiet.
The sweep of the land and the golden haze that outlines every blade of grass seem to make human talk unnecessary. He realizes his friend has been lonely without him. From a distance Taras sees his parents’ new frame house – only two rooms so far – and a small barn.

Daria and Mykola
hold him tight, all of them woven together like the patch of linen left behind on Natalka’s loom. Daria pats his cheeks, his hair, his arms. Kisses his face. His father hugs him with a blacksmith’s strength. When they let him go, Taras looks at Daria more closely. His mother no longer wears a headscarf. Her dress looks like what women in town wear.
Would he even have recognized her on a busy street? His father looks older, but fit.

The house is warmed by a clay
peech
and the Shevchenko portrait hangs on the wall.
Also the icon. Daria’s embroidered scarves decorate the walls. Two upholstered second-hand chairs finish
off the room. A fine meal is keeping warm on the
peech.
Soon they gather at the table and Mykola speaks a prayer of thanks.

Taras hasn’t eaten such food for more than two years.
Borshch, kutya,
potato dumplings, garlicky beans, carrots with dill and roasted pork.
As his body warms from the familiar foods, he thinks of the knife thrust so close to his heart and lets some of the terror float away. It’s not forgotten, just not as close as it was.

He tells Daria and Mykola that he saw Halya marry another man. Knew that she must have believed he was dead. He tells them everything that’s happened with Viktor.
That Viktor asks their forgiveness.
That he loved Daria.

“I should have told you before,” Mykola says.

“Never mind,”
Taras says. “It’s all over. I can never see Halya again.”

Later, Moses, Mykola and Taras go to the barn.
A smokey grey colt stamps its feet in a stall.

“I got him from a man on a ranch near Lillestrom. He traded me for working on his horses’ feet.”
Mykola watches Taras appraise the colt’s slender build, the cloud of pale blue-grey spots on his rump. “They call these horses Appaloosas. Indian horses.” Taras nods.