The Ladies' Lending Library (20 page)

“I don’t want to hear it,” Sonia says, when Laura starts to protest her innocence. “I don’t care who it was, but it’s going to stop right now, and you are going to apologize to Darka.”

Laura’s about to protest that it’s Katia’s doing (for since it wasn’t her, who else could it be?) when she decides this battle is not worth fighting. So she turns to Darka and says, in the sweetest singsong she can muster, “I’m so terribly sorry, Darka, for not going into your room, and not messing around with your things—as if I’d want to handle them anyway!” And turns and runs, slamming the screen door behind her.

Darka is sitting on the steps off the small porch by the kitchen, thinking over the situation. She has no reason to believe that Sonia would go so far as to actually rummage through her room; besides, Sonia’s too neat-and-tidy to leave sock balls lying under the bed. It has to have been one of the girls. Judging from the performance that’s just taken place, it hadn’t been Laura snooping in her room, so it must have been Katia, conveniently in bed with a tummy ache. Darka hadn’t wanted to get either of them into trouble—though God knows they deserve to be smacked, with all that they get up to. But she has to scare them off. So far she’s been lucky: they haven’t thought to look on top of the wardrobe, or else they haven’t had time to, yet.

Darka sighs, scratching the place in the small of her back that is always so difficult to reach; suddenly she hears a small rip.
Kholyera yasna
—she will have to mend her blouse again; it tore in that very place just two weeks ago. The same night that Mr. Martyn drove back to the city, after bringing that bitch of a sister to stay. They’d all gone off to look at the sunset—the Martyns, Marta, the children; she hadn’t minded being left out, like some Cinderella with dishpan hands and a
khustka
on her head. Of all the things worth looking at, for God’s sake, who would waste time on a sunset? She’d decided to race through her chores, then settle down with her stash of movie magazines: it was the best she could do in the entertainment line, stuck up at this
nudniy
beach. She had started laughing then, knowing what Jamie would do if he could hear her, thinking she’d said not
nudniy,
or “boring,” but
nudie.
She’d laughed so hard she’d hugged herself to stop her belly from hurting, and that was when the shirt had ripped, just as it’s done now, under the arm.

That was the reason she hadn’t gone to the door when he’d knocked, asking through the screen if Max was in. She’d just
yelled from the sink, “They’re out at Painter’s Point. They’ll be back when it’s dark.”

He hadn’t said anything about waiting, but she’d heard no footsteps going back down the porch steps. She wondered just how long he’d stand there. The latch wasn’t fastened—he could have come in if he’d really had a mind to. But he’d waited—he’d outwaited her—and she’d finally put down the sour-smelling dishcloth, wiped her hands on the sides of her shorts and braved the screen door.

It was Frank Kozak, Lesia Baziuk’s “special friend.” Darka knew what that meant—she wasn’t the fool everyone took her for. From behind the screen his pale-pink skin didn’t stand out so much, nor did the sandy-coloured lashes round his eyes. It had been a nice enough evening, and the kitchen was steamy with dishwashing, so she’d decided to open the door and step out onto the landing. She can’t remember now whether she nodded at him, or ignored him as she made her way down the stairs to the lookout point across the lawn. She does know that she had to brush against him to go down: he took up room, he was like one of those plastic containers filled with gravel or water in which you plant a table umbrella so it doesn’t blow away. She grazed his belly with her arm; she smelled whiskey—a not unpleasant smell, golden, not sour like wine—and felt his breath on her face, her neck, the way you feel the sun on your skin the very moment you realize you’re getting a burn. And then she ran down the steps and leaned over the railing at the lookout, staring through a screen of leaves at the water below.

After a while it occurred to her that he might tell the Martyns she’d been rude to him—disrespectful—so she turned round to where she thought he was standing, but saw no trace of him. Then
she guessed he might have gone inside to wait for the Martyns in their living room, reading an old issue of
Look
or
National Geographic
as the sunset blazed across the picture window. She thought they might not like her leaving somebody alone in the house like that, even a neighbour, so she ran back to the cottage, tramping up the steps and slamming the screen door behind her as loud as she could, to give him notice of her intentions. But there was no one on the sofa; no one’s feet were up on the coffee table. And then she remembered that she’d left a pot to soak, and that Sonia would get after her about it. It was when she went to finish her chores that she found it on the windowsill, as if it had been waiting for her there all day.

Sphinx Pink.
Its metal cap looked like gold; when she pulled it off and swivelled the lipstick up, she saw that it had never been used. It wasn’t Sonia’s, left out by mistake. It was hers.

The very next evening, he’d come by again. This time Sonia had been inside with Marta, and Katia and Laura had been sent to their rooms in disgrace, for fighting at the dinner table. She’d been on the little porch off the kitchen, throwing soapy water onto the parched bed of dill and parsley below: Sonia can’t stand anything to be wasted, even dirty dishwater. Darka paused for a moment, with her elbows on the railing, as if waiting for something—and sure enough, it had come. A movement first, in the bushes beside the sleep-house, and then a soft whistle. She left the basin on the porch and made her way down the steps towards the sleep-house. If Sonia were to see her, she’d tell her the truth: that she was investigating something fishy in the bushes. But Sonia hadn’t been looking; no one was there to witness how he beckoned to her from the side of the sleep-house, and she followed him, walking carefully because of the poison ivy. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask
him why he was doing this. She does wonder whether she was just being stupid, or whether she wanted not to know.

Her
special friend.
He didn’t offer her a drink from the silver flask he carried with him and that she could see in outline beneath his sports jacket. He said he didn’t like to see young women drink—or had it been young ladies, was that what he’d said? He had an air about him, that’s for sure; he was always nicely turned out, smelling of Old Spice as well as the whisky. They stood behind the sleep-house where no one could see them from the cottage. There was a small moon, low in the sky, and it painted rough silver on the leaves of the bushes around them. He didn’t say anything for a long while; then he pulled from his pocket a compact, not plastic, but that same shiny metal as the lipstick tube, and put it in her open hand like a giant coin from some pirate’s hoard.

“They work you hard here?” he asked. With concern, she thought, not just out of curiosity. She started talking a little, telling him what her chores were, and how boring it was, each day the same. When she told him about how she was made to do the laundry day in, day out, how her knuckles were rubbed raw by the washboard, he asked her where; she’d been about to show him her hands when she understood he was asking where she did the wash. She told him about the cellar, how cool and quiet it was with the pack of them gone down to the beach each morning. And sure enough, when she went off to do the wash right after breakfast the next day she found, propped up on the scrubbing board, a small, prettily shaped bottle of cologne, the glass ribbed and twisty, the cap shaped like a heart.

Later that day, down at the beach she heard the women talking about him—how he was up for his week of holiday, more’s the pity for Lesia Baziuk. “I guess we women are gluttons for punishment,”
somebody said, and Darka remembers hugging her knees and smiling, liking the sound of the word
glutton,
liking even better the secret that none of the women knew she was keeping.

The next day, when she went to the cellar, she nearly jumped out of her skin, opening the door and seeing him there. He was leaning against the wall, his pale skin and sandy hair making him look like a giant mushroom in the cool dark. She’d been about to say something when he put his finger to his lips, pointing upwards: sounds of children running, doors slamming. The family was getting ready to go to the beach, though it would be another ten minutes or so before they’d make their way down.

“I have to get on with this wash,” she whispered, feeling she owed him an explanation. He said that was fine; he’d just sit there and enjoy the coolness, if that was okay with her. She shrugged and continued with her work, though she couldn’t help darting glances here and there to see if he’d brought her anything. She realized, suddenly, that she’d never thanked him, and then decided he didn’t want her to—he’d be embarrassed, or he’d think her no better than a little kid. Liz Taylor—you wouldn’t hear
her
saying
please
and
thank you very much,
not for a measly tube of lipstick!

How strange it had been, going about the washing, her back turned to him, feeling his eyes on her as she wiped a hand across her forehead to catch the sweat, or wrung out the clothes, then stood with her hands on either side of the sink, watching the dirty water swirl away. She had her two-piece on under her shorts but no shirt, so her back was exposed, the straps criss-crossed so they wouldn’t keep sliding off her shoulders. She was aware of the smell of her skin—the moist, slightly sour smell in her armpits that she couldn’t disguise no matter how much deodorant she put on, and the ripe smell of her hair, which she hadn’t had time to wash
that morning. At last she’d turned to him, a basket of rinsed and wrung-out clothes weighing down her arms. He made no move to help her, he just said, “Come back when you’re finished—come back when they’ve left,” reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small, thin, silvery cylinder.

“Mascara,” she’d said, by way of an answer.

Laura’s the one who named it Tunnel Road, because of the way the trees reach across the asphalt, joining overhead as you walk or drive below. So the road really belongs to her, she thinks, walking quickly along, tripping over a stone or fallen branch, or sometimes her own feet; trying to pull her head up from her shoulders as her mother’s always telling her to do. Though it’s not because of her mother’s nagging, this attention to her posture; it’s because she needs to learn to walk like a Queen, an Empress of the Nile.

On one side of the road are cottages, and on the other, woods dense with spruce and cedar saplings and slender, grey-barked trees. Through the dark leaves, light boils like bubbles in ginger ale; if you walk as far as you can through the undergrowth you find places where coolness rushes up, the way it does when you pass the opened door of a cellar on a scorching day. They are always warned not to go into the woods because of poison ivy, and because of bears, but the children pooh-pooh this; Katia glimpsed a skunk once, making its way through the brush, and several porcupines have been sighted. Her cousin Yuri says he heard wolves howl at night, but no one believes him: wolves belong in fairy tales, not at Kalyna Beach.

At the end of Tunnel Road is the Shkurkas’ cottage. Next to the Plotskys’, it’s the oldest building at the beach, and it’s certainly
the smallest. It needs fixing—the floors sag and the roof is nothing but patches, but Nettie Shkurka says she can’t afford to have a man in to do repairs. She says this at the store, or stopping in front of various cottages when she takes her morning walks along Tunnel Road, her daughter at her side, pale and plain as a pot of porridge. Nastia, who never looks anyone straight in the face and has a sleepwalker’s abstracted gait. When the Shkurkas pass by, the women on their verandas wave and remind themselves to tell their husbands to stop by at the small, decrepit cottage to see if they can’t give Nettie a hand with things. Though they know they will never carry through with these good intentions. There’s something so self-satisfied in Nettie’s misfortune, Sasha says—something so righteous in her feeling herself to be poor and neglected and eternally shining up that crown in heaven she’s buying on the instalment plan. And then Sasha laughs and says she never could understand how Nettie ever let a man near enough to father that poor, scared rabbit of a daughter.

Laura has seen a picture of Mr. Shkurka that Nastia keeps folded in her prayer book: it’s not a photograph, but a blurred reproduction of one, printed in a magazine called
Glory to Ukraine!
There was an article on the Displaced Persons camps after the war, the educational and cultural events the inmates had organized there. Ostap Shkurka had been part of a musical ensemble including singers from the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theatre; they had staged parts of
Taras Bulba
with improvised costumes and minimal props. The picture showed Mr. Shkurka in a sheepskin hat and wide-skirted coat that were far too big, making him look like a small boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. He had played the part of the son who betrays his father by falling madly in love with a Polish countess. “He had a wonderful voice,” Nastia had
whispered, holding out her hand for the magazine clipping, as if terrified her mother would walk into the room and find them. Laura had nodded, wondering if Nastia really could remember her father’s voice—she’d been younger than Alix when he ran out on them. And what if this Ostap Shkurka in the magazine had nothing to do with the man who was Nastia’s father? What if he was someone who just happened to share with him a name as common in Ukraine as Joe Smith is here?

Now Laura is on her way to the Shkurkas’ cottage, having waited and waited for her mother to settle down in her bedroom with the book hidden in her night-table drawer. It’s not that her mother would forbid Laura to spend time at the Shkurkas’, but that she’d go on at her about how Laura should be making friends with other girls as well, girls less delicate and, though Sonia never says the word,
peculiar.
Laura never responds to her mother’s criticisms and suggestions, but just stands staring past her, shoulders slumped like a drooping shawl. Her mother doesn’t know anything; doesn’t know how Mrs. Shkurka keeps Nastia under her thumb, as if she were a prisoner so important she has to be guarded day and night. If Laura wants to see Nastia, she has to see her at the Shkurkas’, or not at all.