The Ladies' Lending Library (26 page)

Slowly, Katia pulls herself out of the hammock and walks down the porch steps to Tunnel Road, Yuri at her heels. She walks deliberately, keeping her eyes from straying to the clambering weeds that only last year had been her grandmother’s carefully tended rows of beans and carrots and onions. When she reaches the road, Yuri puts out his hand to her shoulder, stopping her. He nods in the direction of the sleep-house, and after a moment, Katia shrugs and makes for the little track to that building’s back door.

Abandoned, the hammock swings gently to and fro, until it finally comes to rest. Flies keep crawling up the screens, clinging to the mesh, waiting to join the others on the floor.

“So?” She has her hands on what will be her hips, one day; there’s a band of bare skin between the place where her halter top ends and her pedal-pushers start.

“So—let’s see,” he says, scuffing his feet against the floor, sitting on the sagging bed in the sleep-house across from the Martyns’ cottage.

“Only if you do,” Katia insists. “At the same time.”

Yuri shrugs, then drags himself off the bed so that he’s standing opposite his cousin. They are the same height, their bodies lean and muscular. With their dark eyes and hair, their olive skin, they could be brother and sister.

Anyone spying through the window would swear that what happens next has been carefully rehearsed: Yuri unbuttoning his faded cotton shirt as Katia crosses her arms to pull up her crinkled top; Katia pulling at her shorts as Yuri unzips his. Their clothing falling to the floor, pooling at their ankles as if it were something foreign to them, a puddle of brackish water they must wade through to get to some cleaner, drier destination.

Watching at the window, glasses pressed against the glass, you might note the moment’s hesitation before boy and girl, thumbs hooked into the elastic of their underpants, tug the white cotton down, and then, in the first awkward moment of this mutual disrobing, wriggle free, balancing first on one leg, then the other, for all the world like fledgling storks. Perhaps you would notice how solemn they look, and how, instead of giggling or pulling faces, they seem to recognize the gravity of this first moment of nakedness not just between them, but for each. For no matter how many times in the past they have stripped for baths, or changed from wet bathing suits, their bodies have been as weightless, as careless as the clothes they discarded. Only now, in this protracted moment on a hot summer day, in a sleep-house smelling of pine resin and sun, do they seem to register the shock of nakedness. The air prickles their skins, drawing a sharp, indelible line around their bodies.

This moment is so full and so charged, so intensely private, that the watcher at the window closes her eyes, withdrawing her
face from the glass; sinking onto the earth on which, straining, on tiptoe, she’s been planted.

“It’s okay, Andriy,” Katia croons, as if he were a baby to be sung to sleep. “It’s just pretend, like dress-up. No one’s going to know—right, Yuri?”

“Right. Hey, Andriy, remember
Fantasia?
Remember how Mickey wears a dress when he’s working for that Sorcerer guy?”

Andriy just hangs his head and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t need eyes to see himself tricked out in one of Darka’s skirts and cotton blouses, under which he is wearing his swimming trunks, and a brassiere stuffed with socks. On his feet are Darka’s flip-flops; his longish butter-blond hair has been wetted with spit and carefully waved by Katia.

“Good,” Katia says, moving in with the shoebox where Darka keeps her makeup. “Now, don’t move—just keep still. By the time I’ve finished you are going to be
bee-yoo-tee-ful!
”

They are in the sleep-house: Pavlo is posted as lookout by the front door, in case any grown-up or that lemon of a Laura should come by. But there’s no need for him to sound the warning: nobody shows any curiosity at what such quiet, out-of-the-way children could be up to. Once Katia is finished with the lipstick and rouge, the eye shadow and eyebrow pencil, she hands Andriy a mirror, exclaiming, “You’re much prettier than Darka!” quite honestly, no cruelty intended. Andriy refuses to look at the face that’s no longer his own; he stares at his feet as Katia undoes the bib round his neck and whispers, stagily, for she is boiling over with pride and excitement: “Quick—let’s go. We can’t afford to take any chances. We’ve got to hurry before they start missing us.”

Pavlo gives the all-clear, and they sneak out the back door, the one facing Tunnel Road. They’ve chosen the time of day when the mothers are busy making supper, and Darka’s sweeping out the cottage, and Laura’s telling stories to Bonnie and Baby Alix. It’s a Friday, and there’s the extra work of tidying up to do, so that the cottages will look decent by the time the husbands arrive. Yuri is confident that at this particular moment, no one will have the leisure to come strolling by.

For Yuri, not Pavlo, has taken on the major role. When he thinks about it, his insides go cold. He doesn’t need any grownup to tell him that there’s nothing heroic in taking advantage of someone weaker, less fortunate, than they: in tricking Billy Baziuk, using Andriy as bait. So Yuri doesn’t think about it. He concentrates, instead, on undoing the damage already done. That trickle of pee down his leg at the Durkowskis—peeing his pants because some old baba pretended to hold a gun to his head. Losing authority that day at the Seech to Pavlo Vesiuk, of all people—Pavlo with his narrow eyes and sleek, flat head, more like a weasel than a lion. If he had taken the time to think things through, Yuri might have wondered why Pavlo hadn’t insisted on grabbing the spotlight for himself. But Yuri has been too busy arranging things, building the trap, earning what Pavlo calls “credibility.”

Every afternoon for the past week, Yuri Metelsky has been a model child, helping Mrs. Baziuk by watching Billy for her. It’s a way of making amends for having been part of that gang of boys who’d nearly burned down the whole beach at the start of the summer, Lesia tells herself. Not that she wasn’t suspicious at first, but the Metelsky boy’s eagerness and sense of responsibility had quickly converted her. On Yuri’s urging, Mrs. Baziuk has aired out the small, dark bunkhouse that has been waiting
for guests to sleep over in it for years now, ever since Mr. Baziuk ran not into the deer he was stalking, but into a bullet meant for that deer. She’s set up a card table for Billy and Yuri to play on, a simple game, war, in which the deck is divided in two, and each player slaps down a card, the one with the higher number winning the trick. It is a mindless game of indescribable tedium, and the delight of children ages three to six, as well as twenty-five-year-old, heavily sedated men.

Every afternoon for the past week, Yuri has taken Billy by the hand and led him from the front porch of his mother’s cottage, across the grass and over to the spruced-up bunkhouse. Many times, that first afternoon, Lesia checked up on Yuri and her son, sneaking down to the bunkhouse, peering in at the edge of the window, making sure that everything was “just as it should be.” On Tuesday afternoon, she made two duty calls; on Wednesday, one; and by the time Friday rolled around, she was confident enough to leave the boys to themselves. She was actually singing as she prepared Frank Kozak’s favourite meal. He’d be in a foul temper after the long drive up; she would let him have a good, large rye and ginger, followed by cottage cheese topped with sour cream and chopped chives—and then shortcake for dessert, made from peaches brought in from Mr. Maximoynko’s fruit store on Augusta to grace the shelves of Venus Variety.

On this particular Friday afternoon, Yuri and Billy are down in the bunkhouse. They are labouring on yet another endless game of war in the light provided by a single small window, when there’s a rustling in the grass, and a triple knock at the door. Suddenly, Yuri sweeps up the cards, much to his companion’s displeasure.

“It’s okay, Billy,” he whispers, as if Mrs. Baziuk were in the next room and not a hundred yards away. “Remember that
treat I promised you, if you were good?” Billy nods, quiet and expectant.

He isn’t, Yuri decides, that creepy looking after all: his eyes are green as leaves and his thick brown hair, combed strictly to the side by his mother, has got rumpled during the stress of the game. Billy’s dressed in a neat, white, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants: if it weren’t for the way he has of breathing through his mouth, and the foolish look in his eyes—foolish because it so openly conveys his hungriness and eagerness—you couldn’t really tell, Yuri decides, that Billy Baziuk is a moron.
Why did the moron throw the clock out the window? Because he wanted to see how time flies.

Now the door pushes open, and to Billy and even Yuri’s amazement, in comes an apparition as marvellous, as unfamiliar in Billy’s experience as a winged dog or a talking tree. It is a girl, a girl as tall as Darka, and with Darka’s prodigious bosom and flaxen hair. In the half-light her huge, bright eyes and her scarlet mouth, her crimson cheeks and darkened brows seem to gleam and beckon. Yet this girl is shy, staring down at her feet in their flip-flops, twisting a fistful of skirt in her hand.

It is all going so well, Katia thinks, peering in at the window, while the boys behind her jostle for a view; it is successful beyond their wildest dreams. Except for the fact that Yuri’s forgotten his lines. What is it that’s supposed to happen next? she wonders—had that ever been explained? She’s about to go inside, poke Yuri on the shoulder, when Pavlo takes charge. He steps into the bunkhouse and gives Billy a little shove.

“Go on, Billy, say hello to the girl. She’s come all this way to see you. She’s in love with you, Billy—don’t you want to kiss her? Haven’t you ever kissed a girl, Billy, a grown-up guy like you?”

Now Katia has joined Pavlo in the bunkhouse, and the rest of
the Cossack Brotherhood is crowding round the door. Yuri’s been pushed back to a corner. Katia registers the tenseness of his presence, his silence as she watches Pavlo keep giving little shoves to the small of Billy’s back, guiding him towards the person they all think of, now, as The Girl. Until suddenly Billy grabs the girl’s shoulders and shakes her till her face tilts up to his; until Billy is kissing her, his tongue inside her mouth. Billy is kissing The Girl, and you could hear a pine cone drop, when out of nowhere comes a roar—no other word for it—a roar from Yuri.

Charging from his corner he tears his brother out of Billy’s arms, while Billy starts shouting and kicking. Now Katia and Pavlo are tugging Andriy out of the bunkhouse; they’re tearing along the forested path from the bluff to the beach. Halfway down they pause to tug off the boy’s skirt and blouse and brassiere, to scoop up the socks. Pavlo runs off with the clothes, while Katia uses spit and dock leaves to clean the makeup from what has become, once more, Andriy’s face. Meanwhile, Mrs. Baziuk has flown from her kitchen to the bunkhouse, where Billy’s yelling as if someone’s taken a cleaver to him. Blood is trickling from his mouth, where Yuri has punched him; Yuri is lying on the floor, where Billy has thrown him.

Yuri’s hand is bloodied and his voice hoarse: “You leave him alone, all of you bastards, just leave him alone.”

Mrs. Baziuk doesn’t understand why Yuri, who has just attacked her Billy, is now defending him. There are no assailants lurking nearby, no other culprits: it’s clear as glass what’s happened here. Zirka has to agree, though Peter, when he visits Lesia Baziuk later that night, isn’t so sure. He apologizes to her on Yuri’s behalf, assuring her that it was nothing premeditated, but just what-boys-can-get-up-to. Lesia Baziuk makes no comment, stands with her arms folded, her teeth clenched behind her open lips. Yuri’s a
good boy, at heart, Peter pleads. A good boy who needs—”a good licking,” Lesia supplies. “Spoil the rod and spare the child.” Peter shoots back, so quickly that she doesn’t catch him out. He walks purposefully back to his cottage, relaxing his stride when he’s certain he’s out of Lesia’s view. If she weren’t such a fool she’d have realized that there’d been more going on in that bunkhouse than Yuri suddenly turning on a totally helpless Billy. What, he doesn’t know. Yuri has refused to say anything in his own defence to either of his parents, and Andriy hasn’t been able to throw any light on the mystery, either.

It’s Katia who fills him in, Katia who’s been waiting in her pyjamas on the front steps of the Martyns’ cottage, listening to the crickets, and waiting for her uncle to make his way back from Mrs. Baziuk’s. Even before she sees him, she hears his whistling; she runs up to him and takes him aside, into the trees beyond the edge of Tunnel Road. It’s not Yuri’s fault, she insists: Billy had got upset when he kept losing at cards. He’d taken a swing at Yuri, and Pavlo Vesiuk, who’d come in to watch, had egged them on, the both of them. When her uncle asks her how she knows all this, she confesses that she’s as much to blame as anyone: she’d been spying on the boys, peering in at the bunkhouse window. She’d heard and seen everything; she should have tried to stop them, and she never should have run away.

He listens to her carefully, and when she’s done, he puts his hands in his pockets.

“Uncle Peter?” she asks, in a voice she hardly recognizes as her own, a frightened voice. “What are you going to do?”

He reaches out his hand and, making a fist, touches her ever so gently on the chin. “I think enough’s been done already, don’t you, Katia?”

Katia nods, then turns and sprints to the cottage. When she reaches the porch, she looks back over her shoulder, not really expecting to see him. But there he is, waiting at the end of their drive, waiting to make sure she gets safely back inside. She waves to him, and he lifts both hands in reply, the way the priest does when he’s giving the blessing. And suddenly Katia is filled with compunction. Was she wrong not to have mentioned Andriy—has she lied to her uncle? Or has she only kept him from knowing what could only hurt him, and hurt Yuri even more? She doesn’t know, and so she turns her face away, and slips into the cottage, listening for her parents’ voices in the living room, and sliding into bed under Alix’s black, wide-open eyes.

Lying flat on his back—not down at the beach but up by the cottage, alone, under a fine old birch tree—Peter Metelsky stares at the blue overhead, both limitless and encompassing. When he tries to imagine the world he knew inside his mother’s womb, it is exactly this blank and endless blue he conjures up; and when he thinks, as he does more and more these days, of what will meet his eyes the very last moment he has eyes to see, he envisions it not as black and lustreless, like a wiped chalkboard, but as this hard and glinting blue.