The Ladies' Lending Library (21 page)

Always, when Laura knocks on the Shkurkas’ door, she’s met by Nastia’s mother. For such a snip of a woman, she has an unusually powerful voice. Sometimes she refuses to undo the latch of the screen door: Anastasia’s asthma is acting up again, she might say, or Anastasia’s got a sick headache, or else a rash. Whatever the plot of Nastia’s “bad days,” the story always ends the same way: Anastasia has to lie down; she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Laura knows it’s useless, on such occasions, to ask if she could just call to Nastia through the screen door, just as she knows, but
cannot actually say to herself, that Mrs. Shkurka’s lying when she talks about Nastia not wanting to see her. Cannot say it to herself, or to any of the mothers, for they’ll never take her word for anything, and everyone knows that Mrs. Shkurka is a Mother in a Million. And so on bad days, Laura leaves the Shkurkas’ cottage, with its worn, grey walls and sagging shutters, and makes her way back up Tunnel Road, running the last few yards, till she reaches the birch tree with the sign bearing the letters
MARTYN
burned into the wood.

This afternoon she knocks at the door not hesitantly or defiantly, but with a certain cunning. She is not going to ask for Nastia when Mrs. Shkurka appears; she is going to ask if she can come in to borrow a book on the kingdom of Ancient Rus, which, as Mrs. Shkurka has so often told her, is the Glorious Cradle of Today’s Ukraine.

Laura’s plan works—or perhaps she didn’t even need to try it, for when Mrs. Shkurka allows her inside, Nastia is waiting for her at the kitchen table. Nastia’s mother is a skinny woman with unnaturally pale skin and features thin as the teeth of a comb. If she were Nastia, Laura thinks, she’d have run away a long time ago from such a flimsy jailer. But then, who in the world is like Nastia? Pale, quiet, good as gold and far more pliable, Nastia seems to know what her mother wants of her before Mrs. Shkurka says a word or even gestures to her. In fact, Nastia is closer to her mother than Laura has ever thought it possible for any daughter to be. But then, Nastia has no father—or at least, he’s as good as dead and gone, and that would make a difference.

Nastia is sitting at the kitchen table, her long, long hair pouring down her back and over her shoulders like some dark, silent waterfall. Laura bites her lips when Mrs. Shkurka tells her to sit
down and wait while she does Nastia’s hair. She watches as the brush comes down, hard, on her friend’s scalp; she notices the way Nastia nearly doesn’t flinch as her mother explains to Laura the importance of stimulating the oils in the scalp. Laura prefers not to look at Nastia’s face as Mrs. Shkurka proceeds to braid her daughter’s hair, pulling the strands so tight that the two long ropes hanging down her daughter’s back will look far more tense and indestructible than chain mail.

Nastia’s mother teaches school from September to the end of June; she drives up to Kalyna Beach on the first of July with boxes full of workbooks entitled
Grammar without Toil
and
More Fun with Figures.
Nastia’s shown them to Laura, and Laura can’t believe how they’re all filled in with Nastia’s perfectly neat handwriting, and pasted with golden stars that Mrs. Shkurka keeps in a small glass jar that used to hold horseradish. She also lugs up a gross of embroidery thread and coarse-grained linen from which she fashions cross-stitched bookmarks to be sold at Church Bazaars and Easter Teas over the coming year. She is a tireless supporter of worthy projects in the Ukrainian community, Laura knows, for Mrs. Shkurka has made no secret of what she calls her “causes” and has even tried, so far in vain, to recruit Laura to help her out with them, as Nastia will, once they return to the city. Laura has seen with her own eyes how ardently Mrs. Shkurka kisses the cross and the gold-plated cover of the Gospels at the cathedral each Sunday. She knows by heart how many A-pluses Nastia has racked up on her report cards over the years, for Mrs. Shkurka has never failed to tell her. So why, then, has Laura come back to the Shkurkas’ cottage over and over again this summer? Why does she befriend a girl like Nastia, the kind of prim, proper, perfect daughter that her own mother wishes she had?

Perhaps it’s because Sonia, for all the faults she constantly finds with Laura, has never warmed to Nastia. Down at the beach Laura once heard Mrs. Vesiuk telling her mother what a shame it was, the way Nettie had pinned her daughter down, like linen in an embroidery frame. And Sonia had nodded, saying something about how overprotective Nettie was, making Nastia wear those long-sleeved blouses and ankle-length trousers. She’s making a hermit out of that girl, Sonia had said—it’s all very well to say she has sensitive skin and needs to keep out of the sun, but to keep her locked away from all the other girls, as if she thought nobody was good enough for her, when anyone could see that. And then Mrs. Vesiuk had nodded, and they’d switched to some other topic, and Laura had been left trying to puzzle out her mother’s disapproval, not just of Nettie Shkurka, but of Nastia as well. For in spite of what she’d just told Mrs. Vesiuk, Sonia had never tried to invite Nastia over to their cottage; she had even hinted to Laura that it wasn’t a good idea, putting all her eggs in one basket as far as friends were concerned.

Laura and Nastia’s friendship has nothing to do with chickens, as far as Laura can see. They know each other from Saturday Ukrainian School, at which Nastia’s distinguished herself for her ability to memorize vast chunks of Shevchenko, Franko and Ukrainka, while Laura stubbornly refuses to answer anything she’s asked, and comes last in everything, from dictation to dancing, where her lack of balance and her inability to tell her left foot from her right make her sadly conspicuous. Yet it’s only this summer that the girls have really taken to each other, becoming as inseparable as their mothers will permit; that is to say, they spend the odd afternoon together, from one till three, the universal quiet
time. On this particular afternoon, they are sitting out at the back, on rickety lawn chairs. The trees have grown up to block the view of the lake, and the path down to the shore is overgrown, though they can easily hear the waves crashing below.

Mrs. Shkurka sits close by in a rocking chair, doing embroidery while the girls talk, and listening in on their conversation with a clear conscience. She frequently chastises or upbraids them—most often because of Laura’s ruling passion for the history of ancient Egypt, which, Mrs. Shkurka constantly reminds her, is far less improving and important than the history of Ancient Rus. That depraved woman Cleopatra wasn’t to be mentioned in the same breath as the saintly Princess Olha—does Laryssa know that Olha sought conversion to Christianity, and tricked the Sultan of Constantinople into being her godfather instead of the husband he had so wickedly plotted to become? And does Laryssa also know that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, is descended in the thirty-first generation from a Prince of Ukraine? For King Harold the Second of England, killed at the Battle of Hastings by an arrow through the eye, had married his daughter Gytha to Grand Prince Volodymyr Monomakh.

Whenever Mrs. Shkurka lectures her like this, Laura turns her face away, making savage scowls or sticking out her tongue, shocking Nastia with her bravado. If Laura has to look Mrs. Shkurka in the eye, she bites the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from saying something rude. Such forbearance is only possible because sooner or later Nastia’s mother always falls asleep—she sleeps poorly at night and is ruining her eyes with her embroidery, Nastia says. Whenever she talks of her mother she sounds as though she’s quoting her—not Mrs. Shkurka’s exact words, uttered in the heat or damp of the moment, but what that lady would like people
to believe she’s said. Laura isn’t interested in Mrs. Shkurka, and if the truth be told, her attachment to Nastia isn’t entirely disinterested. For Nastia has provided Laura with a rapt audience for her obsession with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and her alter ego, Elizabeth Taylor. Nastia can be counted on to listen, mouth agape, as Laura reads aloud whole paragraphs from the Souvenir Booklet she’s smuggled to the Shkurkas’ cottage:

“What do you suppose she was sick with—asthma?” offers Nastia.

“Of course not. She would have had some kind of terrible fever. They would have had to watch at her bedside night and day, feeling her fluttering pulse for vital signs.”

“Maybe it was T.B.”

“Maybe,” Laura answers cautiously.

“Lesia Ukrainka had T.B. She spent her winters in Egypt;
she would have died of cold if she’d stayed in Ukraine.” Nastia brightens—it pleases her to be able to share this knowledge. It’s like a gift she’s making Laura, and she has so few things to offer. Emboldened, she ventures a little more. “I had a positive reaction to a T.B. test once. My whole arm swelled up and went bright red.”

“Then it wasn’t T.B. Elizabeth Taylor had,
that’s
for sure.” Laura knows she’s being unkind, but she has the actress’s glamour to protect, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that Elizabeth Taylor and Nastia Shkurka could ever have in common. She decides to change the subject, reading out another passage from the Souvenir Booklet, one that sends shivers down her crooked spine. (Her mother is always at her to stop slouching, warning her she’ll be a cripple by the time she’s twenty.)

If there’s anything that Laura longs for, other than being Elizabeth Taylor, it is the chance to have a keen, piercing conversation with Richard Burton. She imagines Richard and Elizabeth sitting by the pyramids or riding camels through the desert and ranging over a host of subjects: Shakespeare, and Shevchenko, and Skin Tone. Of course they wouldn’t discuss anything so trivial as the latter—but it so happens that Laura is preoccupied with skin tone right now, and she would dearly like to know what a splendidly educated man could say to her upon this subject.

If there’s anything that Laura envies Nastia, it’s her complexion. Not its colour—sallow, like ancient ivory—but its porelessness. A tight weave, something Laura’s heard her mother say about fabric: nothing can get in or out. Laura has terrible skin. Sonia’s is flawless. Once, watching Laura finish a plate of french fries at a restaurant, she had said, mournfully, “You had such beautiful skin when you were little.” As if it were Laura’s fault, Laura’s decision that the pores of her skin should each become a pit filled with tar; as if she’d taken a darning needle heated to some unimaginable temperature and gouged her face, every quarter-inch, with its tip. Gross pore structure: this is how it’s described in the beauty magazines Laura reads surreptitiously at drugstores and dentists’ offices. It’s a sign of ruggedness in a man, and hence desirable, or at least acceptable. Richard Burton, in his leopard-skin tunic, looking on at the banquet Cleopatra has conjured up for him, looking up, from under beetling brows, not at the Nubian dancing girls, nor at the platters of jellied peacock, but at the flawless skin of Elizabeth Taylor.

Nastia, unsure of whether her friend has fallen asleep or into a trance, reaches for the Souvenir Booklet lying in Laura’s lap. Timidly, she takes it up, turning the pages until she finds a passage that she reads out in her whisper of a voice:

For once, Laura isn’t angry or upset at having her thunder stolen from her. She makes no move to grab the Souvenir Booklet back from Nastia, but merely hugs her knees, repeating, “The only thing I know how to do is be,” her eyes gazing out at where the lake would be, if you could see through the screen of poplar trees.

“What do you think she means when she says that?”

Occasionally, Nastia surprises her with a question that triggers the deepest pleasure Laura has yet experienced: that of thinking something through for yourself, thinking past what you’ve been told or taken for the truth.

“Well, she has servants, of course—to do her laundry, and look after her children, and cook the meals.”

“Like Mrs. Senchenko,” Nastia suggests shyly, and Laura doesn’t dismiss the comparison. Of all the grown women she knows, Nadia Senchenko is the only one you could speak of in the same breath as Elizabeth Taylor. They both have a regal, distant quality, and nothing they do, no amount of mixing with ordinary people, could ever tarnish them.

“I suppose it means,” Laura continues, “that she doesn’t ever need to think, that everything falls into place for her.”

“That everything makes sense,” Nastia adds, “and nothing happens that isn’t supposed to. Or else that you can’t help being the
way you are—it’s nobody’s fault what you look like, or who your father is, or why you can never do what you’re told.”

Mrs. Shkurka is snoring—a fact to which Laura makes no allusion whatsoever, knowing that Nastia would be deeply ashamed, and that as long as neither of them says a word about it, they can pretend the short, snuffling breaths, the almost animal sound, isn’t coming from Nastia’s mother’s mouth. Instead, they listen to the sound of the waves, Laura dreamily, remembering Cleopatra’s barge and the oarsmen beating time to a great bronze drum; Nastia shivering.