The ladies have put down their racy books and turned to a meatier source of gossip. And all because Jack Senchenko has bought himself a new motorboat, a zillion-horsepower Speed King, snapped up on sale at the end of the summer. For all his wealth, Jack is not averse to finding a bargain: he’s almost as fond of revealing the fortunes he saves as he is of boasting of those he spends on what the ladies and their husbands would all regard as shameful extravagance, outrageous luxuries.
Who, for heaven’s sake, was Nadia Moroz, to have made a catch like that of Jack Senchenko? Nadia Moroz, a scholar’s daughter, an only child. Sometimes you wonder how she ever got born at all, her father so unworldly, a small man with a dreamer’s face and a voice so soft that when he talked to you each word felt like a little pillow. He was a saint: he would, and often did, give you the shirt off his back; his wife spent all her time getting back enough of what he’d given away that there’d be bread on the table and shoes on their feet. She was a broomstick of a woman, a good six inches taller and five years older than her husband, with eyes like whips—this is what the kids at Sunday School said. Pani Professor Moroz was the only one who terrified them, so that never did any whispering or giggling occur when she marched them up from the cathedral basement to join the congregation above. More nun than woman, was Sofia Moroz; you couldn’t imagine her scraping off even one layer of the clothes she wore, summer and winter, geometric prints on murky backgrounds, and all that elasticated armour underneath. She should have been born a man: she could have been a general or at least a bishop.
The Morozes had come to Canada after the war, but not like all the other DPs in Toronto. For one thing, they arrived speaking fluent English: they all sounded foreign, but though her parents’ Ukrainian came through rich and heavy in their speech, Nadia’s accent was just like what you heard on the radio when they played a broadcast from the BBC. She was born in a part of Ukraine that was then the east of Poland; she had moved to England with her parents when she was ten years old. Her father had been a student and then a lecturer in philosophy at the University of London. When the war broke out, Sofia Moroz thanked God for their escape from Poland; when peace finally limped in, she left God out of it, and made preparations for the family’s removal to Canada. Nadia and her father had had no say in the matter: their happiness, their ties to England and their settled life in London counted for nothing in Sofia’s calculations. She was sick of war and a peace that made no difference to the meagre amount of butter or eggs, meat or wool, you could buy each week; she was sick of the ruins and rubble all around them (they had returned one morning from the shelter in which they’d spent a miserable night to find that their flat had been destroyed, along with all of Professor Moroz’s books and papers). They were British subjects, and Sofia had a cousin in Oshawa, so the immigration people hadn’t raised a hair, in spite of the Morozes’ strong accents (they had let Nadia do most of the talking).
Why Nadia had accompanied her parents to Canada is a question debated endlessly, not only by the ladies, but by Peter Metelsky, as well—Peter who had once made a point of finding out every scrap of in formation he could about the daughter of Professor Nestor Moroz. Why Nadia had ever come to Canada was a far greater mystery than why, for example, she had married Jack Senchenko. She had been twenty-three when the Morozes had embraced Sofia’s cousin and her family in the great hall of Union Station; she had been old enough to have stayed behind, to have been engaged if not to an Englishman, then in a course of study. Rumours had circulated that Nadia had, in fact, been a student, and of a subject as useless as philosophy: fine art. She had given it all up, Peter had mused: art school (about which he knew less than nothing), London (which he did know a little, from his army days), the country where she’d spent most of her life up till then.
She’d been a devoted daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, but not necessarily a “good girl”—which was to say, Peter reasoned, that she wouldn’t have been fazed by the prospect of living on her own in London. It couldn’t have had much to do with a desire for security: her father had found a position at the University of Toronto, but his salary was modest, as opposed to the expenses of moving three people across an ocean and renting as well as furnishing an apartment (Sofia Moroz had made it clear she wanted everything new, everything their own, untouched by anyone else’s life). You could even argue that the family would have been better off, economically, had Nadia stayed behind; they could have saved her fare, taken a smaller apartment, bought less furniture. But they’d come, all three—though Nadia, far more than her parents, had about her the air of a permanent refugee.
Peter Metelsky had first noticed Nadia walking along Queen Street one Saturday afternoon in late December, soon after he’d returned from the war. Peter was dating, in a desultory way, Zirka Senchenko, an armful of a girl, a real butterball. Peter could have had his pick of any of the girls, but he was friends with Zirka’s brother, Jack: they were both on the Beaver Bakery volleyball team, and they were going to set up a business together someday. It made sense, everyone agreed, for Peter to settle on Zirka, for Peter’s family was even worse off than Nadia’s. In other words, it made sense for Peter to settle on Jack, who may not have been much to look at—short, stocky, balding already at twenty-nine—but who had an eye for things no one else had his kind of luck at: buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, and most of all, sweet-talking old Lady Luck. He had managed to spend the whole of the war in Saskatchewan; he was financing his business deals on his proceeds from the betting track. He had Ambition, whereas Peter had Style and the kind of amiable weakness that makes a handsome man friends instead of enemies.
Yet when Peter had walked down Queen Street that December afternoon, had run into Jack Senchenko with Nadia Moroz on his arm, he’d stopped dead in his tracks and been barely able to answer Jack’s hello. Which came first, who can tell: Peter’s alarm that his plans for Jack to marry Sonia had been shot all to hell, or his shock at seeing, in Jack’s possession, the girl—the only woman in the world whom he, Peter Metelsky, Don Juan of the Dnipro, could ever desire? Right there and then, a double date was arranged: Jack and Nadia along with Peter and Zirka would attend the Malanka at the cathedral hall, see the New Year in together. As for Nadia, all this time she was looking off into the distance, towering over Jack, and, after a first absent hello, failing to so much as glance at Peter. Nadia, awkward and aloof—though perhaps she was only dismally shy. Nadia, who held herself so straight she loomed—that’s exactly the word for it—and who, what with looming, and the silence she brought like a cold wind into a room, made most people uneasy, as if her eyes in their dark-rimmed spectacles could see through to your bones.
The night of the Malanka, Peter had walked into the hall with Zirka dressed up to the nines, all crinoline and bright, bouffant hair. And there was Nadia Moroz in a cheap, dark print, more like a spent umbrella than a ball gown. Next to her Zirka looked like a plump little bird of paradise, but the first thing Peter did was to release his date into her brother’s care. Before anyone could say a word, he’d seized Nadia by the hand and led her onto the dance floor. It was the usual amateur band, heavy on accordion, all the old favourites like “The Anniversary Waltz” and “The Beer Barrel Polka”—none of the bebop and jive you’d have found at more glamorous dances on a Saturday night in Toronto. But never mind the music—what mattered was that Nadia Moroz, even in that awful dress, was held like something rare and fine and infinitely precious in Peter Metelsky’s arms. Who would have suspected what a good dancer she could be, moving effortlessly across a floor packed with couples all ages from eighteen to eighty-three? Who would have imagined what a perfect pair they’d make—Peter a few inches taller than Nadia, with an athlete’s build, and extravagantly handsome? The perfect foil to the austerity of Nadia’s jutting cheekbones and high, pure forehead; the severe, black frames of her glasses, which made her look like a swan plunged into mourning.
He was a magician with words, that Peter Metelsky. He could recite poetry by the yard, in Ukrainian and in English. He had presence, that’s how everyone put it: “sex appeal,” and something more. He was a natural for the lead in the play that the Cultural Society was putting on that spring. And of course they cast Nadia Moroz as his opposite number, Nadia about whom no one could invent or imagine anything that wasn’t proper, chemna: Nadia, offspring of a Saint and a Broomstick. This was important: the Cultural Society had commissioned a dramatic adaptation of Kateryna from Pan Mudry, who’d been a theatre director in Kyiv before the war. The audience would be made up of respectable people who loved and knew their Shevchenko. Only Nadia could play a girl seduced by a Russian soldier, a girl who bears a child out of wedlock and who then, expelled from her village, wanders off, babe in arms, in search of the lying Muscovite who’d seduced her. In short, only Nadia could play such a role without giving the audience ideas. And only Peter could carry off the role of the heartless hussar, making almost every woman in the audience fall shamelessly in love with him.
Whether Nadia fell for him or not, nothing stopped her from accepting Jack Senchenko’s proposal. Jack was an up-and-comer, a man who would go places, who had only to look at a dollar bill for it to multiply and spin off in a dozen different directions. She married him because of her father’s illness, and the medical fees that had plunged the Morozes into the kind of debt that made their former finances appear as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. But it’s Peter Metelsky’s belief that Nadia married Jack Senchenko because she was afraid of her own feelings, because she didn’t love Jack, and would therefore be perfectly safe with him, at no risk of losing herself. For it had been Peter’s obsession, all through the rehearsals for Kateryna, to convince Nadia Moroz that she should have no fear of losing herself, if he was the one to find her.
Jack and Nadia married three months after the night of the play, Peter and Zirka a year later, by which time Nadia had given birth to her only child, a son, Jack Jr. She’d carried her child the way she always carried herself: so that nothing showed outside the lines of what was expected, acceptable. She was a master at pulling herself in, vanishing into herself, so that her thoughts could be off in some other space while with her body she was shaking someone’s hand, lifting a fork to her mouth, pressing her face against Peter’s and Zirka’s in the receiving line at their wedding. Where did she go when she performed her vanishing act? Maybe nowhere very far away, but straight overhead, like the dove hovering over Christ’s head at the Baptism. When Peter kissed her a moment longer than he should have, when Zirka hugged her so tight she seemed to be trying to crack her ribs, maybe Nadia could see it all as if it were a film projected in an empty cinema instead of a church hall dense with wedding guests and streamers and whisky-laden tables. As for when she went home and lay down in her husband’s bed, who could tell where she was then, what she was or wasn’t watching?
So that’s how it went—Nadia keeping her distance, making Peter keep his, their dancing, their acting together nothing more than a joke remembered, it being understood by all that anything between them could only be a joke. After some years of trying, Peter and Zirka had had two sons. The business the two men had set up together fell apart, as Jack went into real estate, and Peter—who had a genius for bad investments—joined company after company, each time at a lower salary, with less and less responsibility. Gradually, the family gatherings tapered off, and finally stopped happening, the Senchenkos and Metelskys having moved to very different sides of the social tracks. Until, if it weren’t for Kalyna Beach, Peter and Nadia would hardly have seen one another at all, in or out of the water.
What does it look like to Sonia, or Sasha, or to any of the other ladies at Kalyna Beach—a pure accident or a game of chicken? Especially after what happened not so long ago at the Plotskys’ party. Does Jack even care? He’s such a confident man, so bluff and large and generous that he seems to be above anything as small as suspicion.
Isn’t it just like Jack, showing off, taking his wife and sister and brother-in-law for a spin on his new speedboat, SVOBODA—FREEDOM painted on its side in heavy, gilt-edged letters? True, Peter and Zirka are here as replacements for the business associates from the city, who’ve cancelled their visit at the last minute; they are stand-ins, invited to ooh and ahh over the speed and power of Jack’s latest toy. What’s surprising is that Nadia has come along too, a scarf tied round her head, dark glasses on—the expensive, prescription ones that make her look like Jackie Kennedy at Hyannis Port, only this is Kalyna Beach, and her husband is president of no superpower, but of Senchenko Enterprises Ltd. Zirka’s as excited as a child, so delighted with Jack’s urging her to sit up front, where she can have a turn at the wheel, that she neglects to consider the implications of Peter settling himself in the back seat, beside Nadia. They say not one word to one another, Nadia and Peter, there’s too much noise for that, for Jack’s intent on showing off, zooming across the lake like some maniac horsefly.
It’s Nadia who leans forward, calling out, “Slow down, for heaven’s sake. There’s no need to go this fast, you could cause an accident. There are swimmers in the water, can’t you see?”
Jack just keeps grinning and gunning it, as if his wife and their guests and all the people at the beach have asked to be given the show of their lives. Peter is about to stand up, stand over Jack and physically force him to slow down, when Nadia rises from her seat, clutching the side rail, the wind whipping the scarf from her head. And before Peter can begin to comprehend what’s happening, she makes a spring and tumbles overboard, into the wake they’ve torn up behind them. Even before Jack kills the engine, Peter is jumping in after her, Zirka screaming at him to stay put, to think of the children.
That rough, sudden silence as he hits the water, the breath nearly knocked out of him. Somehow he is swimming out to her, strong, swift strokes, though each wave is a glass door to be crashed through, over and over. The look on Nadia’s face as he approaches: not terrified, but pitiless, that is what amazes him. As if, instead of reaching out to grab hold of him, she is inviting him to come drown with her. Somehow he hoists her on his back, somehow he manages to swim back with her to where the boat is waiting, its lack of noise as jolting as its stink of gasoline. His arms round her waist, her thighs; hoisting her up to Jack who hauls her in, one eye on the shore—who is watching, what has been seen? An accident, of course: disobeying the rules, standing up in a speeding boat. Who wouldn’t have fallen in, entirely, irresponsibly, by accident?
Anyone who thinks otherwise, Sonia had protested, has been reading too much Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. Or watching films like Cleopatra, reading the movie magazines Darka’s addicted to and that Sonia confiscates, which she only manages to do when Darka leaves them lying about like empty banana peels. Sonia doesn’t want her daughters coming across such trash, she tells herself: she doesn’t, however, throw the magazines out, but takes them down the road to her sister-in-law, as a guilt offering. For Sonia has failed in her sisterly role: failed wholeheartedly. She doesn’t invite Zirka over for coffee or dinner, not when Max and Peter are here for the weekends, and certainly not when they’re off in the city. She does her best to ignore Zirka both on the beach and on Sasha’s veranda. And she isn’t nearly as attentive to her nephews as she might be. Her excuse is that she knows nothing about boys, which, as Zirka points out to her, is nonsense: didn’t she grow up with a brother, after all?
There’s much that Sonia could say by way of reply to this question, should she so choose. The fact is that she’s reserved, or, as Zirka likes to put it, cold, proud, and holier-than-thou. Very much like Nadia, as a matter of fact, but without the inestimable advantage, as Zirka sees it, of being married to Jack Senchenko. Still, Sonia brings her sister-in-law the movie magazines with which Darka had filled her suitcase on coming up to the cottage. Zirka, of course, would rather die than be seen buying a Hollywood Stars or Movie Times; she has her reputation to think of, after all. Movie magazines are for ignorant sixteen-year-olds like Darka, and not for sophisticated married women, the mothers of sons. Still, she’s not averse to thumbing through the copies Sonia hands over without a kiss or a hug since, as everyone knows, it’s the worst kind of luck to embrace across a threshold.
On this evening, as on all the others, Sonia refuses Zirka’s invitation to come in for tea and honey cake: she has to get back to the children, she says. As usual, Zirka warns her sister-in-law that she’ll wear herself down to nothing if she doesn’t eat. The medivnyk Sonia’s just refused is one of the specialities Zirka is famous for; pepper and rum are the secret ingredients—not that Sonia would care to find out, she is the only person Zirka’s ever met who seems to be allergic to the very thought of food. She’s not skinny, exactly—Nadia Senchenko’s skinny—but Sonia has a perfect figure, if you like small-breasted women, that is. She seems immune to age, childbirth and the bad habits induced by motherhood. Zirka has just finished her own dinner and the half that Yuri left on his plate before running outdoors to meet the Vesiuk boys, who are waiting for him on the porch.
So it’s with Andriy, her youngest, her favourite, that Zirka sits down to tea and slightly boozy honey cake. He leafs through the old Maclean’s that have piled up on the end tables, while she goes for one of the magazines Sonia’s brought her, the one with SYBIL’S ANGUISH in letters two inches high on the cover. She’s a terribly impatient reader, Zirka: she can’t follow any kind of plot or argument, but looks through each article for what she calls “items” she can lift and plunk into whatever context pleases her. What she’s gleaned from the cover story reassures her. Mrs. Richard Burton, it would seem, has been through this kind of emotional tornado before: her husband may be notorious for “forming attachments” with his leading ladies, but—and Zirka straightens her spine as she reads this—he always comes home to his wife and two kids and “the life he has made with them”—that “made” sounding to Zirka’s ears like the making of bread or borshcht, something serious, beneficial, nourishing for all concerned.
But it’s the feature on the current cause of Sybil’s Anguish that Zirka saves for the moment she’s alone at last, once Andriy has had his bath and been tucked into bed, and Yuri’s come home from his visit with his friends. The visit has made him impossible: slamming doors, refusing to answer when spoken to, sticking out his tongue. “Your father will hear about your behaviour when he comes up on Friday, don’t think I—” but Yuri’s slammed yet another door, cutting off his mother in mid-sentence. “And don’t wake your brother,” she yells, as if Andriy were a cranky newborn instead of an eleven-year-old known for the soundness of his sleep and the mildness of his disposition. Zirka shakes her head, cuts herself another big piece of medivnyk, stirs two spoons of sugar into her tea, and curls up in her nightie on the sagging sofa.
Elizabeth Taylor: Starlight All the Way! reads the title of the longest story in the magazine, stretching far beyond the centre page, with plenty of the glamour shots that Zirka loves. There’s something so glossy, creamy, sweet and sumptuous about the photographs—they make her think of pale-pink-and-green meringues, or the sugar roses on a birthday cake. She devours the pictures: from teenage starlet to teenage bride, from wife to divorcee to widow to wife; from El Mocambo to Egypt and the set of Cleopatra. Of course she knows what some gossip columnist once wrote: “There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t want to look like Elizabeth Taylor, or a man who doesn’t want to sleep with her.” Zirka brings the magazine closer to her face; stares at the beautifully arched brows and the dripping, violet eyes. Well, she’s the one in a zillion, she tells herself. She wouldn’t want to look like Elizabeth Taylor; not for anything would she want to look like that temptress, seductress, man-eater.
It’s not, she decides, letting the magazine fall from her hands and picking cake crumbs from the nylon of her nightie, the looks she’s after. It’s the life—the life! For, as she has just learned, never, ever has Elizabeth Taylor had to wash a dish, iron a dress, slice an onion, take out the garbage or rinse a stinky diaper—though it’s true, she has a zoo of pets who run in and out of the house, leaving God knows what kind of a mess behind. The point is, Liz Taylor never has to pick up after anyone, even herself. It can take her three hours to put on her makeup and get dressed for a party; as for her jewellery, she’s got diamonds bigger than her boobs, from what the story says.
Zirka doesn’t bother looking down to the ring digging into her finger: Peter had to borrow the money for the diamond from Jack, and even so, it’s no bigger than a baby tooth. Grace Kelly got a friendship ring of diamonds and rubies just for posing for a magazine cover with Prince Rainier. He was no looker, that’s for sure, but then what do a man’s good looks do for the wife in the picture? What had they done for Sybil Burton—or, more importantly, for Zirka Metelsky? It’s just as Father Myron has told her, over and over again: marriage is a cross to be carried the way you carry home loads of groceries or carry baskets of laundry from the basement to the yard. Unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor, that is, and can simply let go of what you’re lugging, let it crash to the ground and walk away as if the law of gravity applied to everyone and everything but you.
If you’re a Hollywood star you can do exactly what you want, whenever you want, with anyone who takes your fancy. If you’re Zirka Metelsky, née Senchenko, you’re stuck with the bed you’ve made, the stew you’ve cooked—there’s no getting rid of the mistakes ringing your neck, higher and higher. Zirka Senchenko, she’d been once: senchenko, another word for millionaire, zirka, meaning star. Some starlight she’d stumbled on, marrying a man with pockets like sieves and an allergy to an honest day’s work—or a dishonest day’s, at that! Liz and Dick: The Romance of the Century. If Jack hadn’t been there to care of things, if Jack hadn’t stepped in, again and again, to make sure the Metelskys didn’t end up on the rubbish heap—
Two boys, she’d produced; two bouncing boys, unlike that tribe of girls with which Sonia’s stuck Max Martyn. Four girls to marry off! Forever giving herself airs, Sonia, with her delicate this and her fragile that, and the headaches—not common garden headaches but migraines—she brings on herself. Elizabeth Taylor—now she’s a delicate one, what with the meningitis and the pneumonia, the crushed disks in her back, the tracheotomy. You could see the scar on her neck, the article said, when she limped up to get her Academy Award, limped up on crutches—although, Zirka recalls, the cleavage was completely unassisted, no doubt about that. Well, who is she to fault a pair of knockers—isn’t that her own strong suit? Zirka of the over-the-shoulder boulder-holder. If Peter had fallen for some Daisy Mae type, if he’d even tried to feel up Darka—and the way that girl flaunts herself she wouldn’t be surprised if all the husbands up for the weekends have got the hots for her—well, she could handle that. But to carry the torch for Nadia Moroz, that holy-holy titless wonder of a Mrs. Magoo!
Tears are rolling down Zirka’s plump, flushed cheeks; tears are soaking into the faded pink of her nightie and onto the crumpled pages of Hollywood Stars. She lies back on the scratchy sofa, remembering the time she first met Peter, when Jack had brought him home for supper and he’d fallen on the food she’d prepared like a famished man, lavish not just with appetite but with compliments. Remembering but rearranging those memories so that she appears thinner, prettier, and Peter attentive, if not downright smitten, calling her Zirochko moya. She hugs herself, and mops her face and falls asleep with the lamp still burning, only to wake an hour later in the thick of a dream.
She is standing naked, on the corner of Bloor and Yonge; naked except for a stack of wide golden rings around her neck, forcing her chin up from her goggling breasts, higher and higher until she can’t see the ground at her feet any more, or the people passing by, gawking and laughing at her. She can’t see her husband’s dark, handsome head walking straight past her, walking away from her, whistling as he always does. Not walking but running, running away from her, she knows this, knows exactly how far he will get from her, though all she can see, all the rings around her neck force her to keep seeing is the bright blue sky overhead—not clear, not cloudless, but like her head now that the dream has flashed through it: aching and empty.
All families have hierarchies of the heart: from the moment Andriy was born he was Zirka’s joy. In Zirka’s defence, you had to admit that there never was and never could be any sweeter baby, boy or girl. Andriy’s huge blue eyes and the blond buttercup curl on top of his head enchanted everyone; instead of turning to dirty blond as he grew up, his hair stayed flaxen and curly, so that his mother hadn’t had the heart to cut it short. Alone of all the boys at Kalyna Beach that summer, Andriy sports no crewcut, but wears his hair long—almost as long as Darka’s pageboy.
Andriy has spent much of his time in Zirka’s company: he happily helps her to do housework, vacuuming being his specialty. He can be counted on, his mother claims, never to vacuum up the littlest Lego pieces, or the buttons, safety pins and paper clips that somehow, always, find their way to the floor. He is a careful boy who likes to please, whereas Yuri has been a troublemaker from the time he was born. When Sonia considers her nephews she tells herself to be glad she’s only had girls: Yuri is so wild and rough and always getting into mischief, a hundred times worse than Katia. And Andriy, though he’s so milky-mild—oh, she doesn’t know, but she would have found it shameful to have turned any son of hers into a mother’s help.
There is nothing to vacuum at the cottage. The floors are swept of sand every night, but that is Zirka’s job, when the boys have gone to bed for the night. She insists that both boys go down with her to the beach every morning and afternoon, in spite of Andriy’s protests that he’d really be happier reading comics at the kitchen table; she wants to make sure that her sons remember this summer at Kalyna Beach as the happiest, most carefree time of their lives. Andriy tries very hard to give nothing away, putting on a brave face when his mother shoos him away to go play with the other boys. He hides, as best he can, the terror he always feels in the company of boys who are always pushing and shoving and pinching, daring him to hit back.
Which he will never do, for Andriy hates fighting: it sickens him. At home, watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, he would feel like throwing up when Popeye and Bluto went at it, shoving their fists in each other’s faces, tearing apart Olive Oyl’s house plank by plank. He would look up from the screen and see light pouring from the ground-level windows into the dark well in which the television flickered. And then he’d feel queasy at how they were making themselves prisoners while the whole world was waiting for them, outdoors. The daylight they hadn’t yet felt on their faces, the garden, the grass, the praying mantis hiding among the daisies or the skin of ice on the puddles—all of it unnoticed, eclipsed, as good as dead to them. It made his breathing go shallow and his chest ache. It wasn’t that the world didn’t exist when he wasn’t outside in it, but that he didn’t exist when he wasn’t face to face with things, real things and not crude drawings of them flashing on a television screen.
The great rock on which the boys are gathered this afternoon—the Seech—is hopelessly real. Andriy sits at the very end, while Yuri stands defiantly next to the throne. For Pavlo has demanded he announce his plan, describe, at long last, the strategy of the raid the Zaporozhtsi are to carry out, or else to relinquish his role as Hetman. Yuri’s eyes are painfully bright; he keeps blowing out air from his bottom lip, which he makes protrude until his upper lip has vanished. It’s to keep himself still, Andriy understands: to keep himself from shouting at Pavlo; from bursting into tears at the way in which he, Yuri Metelsky, is about to be disgraced, like the great Hetman Mazeppa, beaten and tied to his horse, wandering the steppes till he dies of exposure.
“So you have no clue?” Pavlo’s question is purely rhetorical.
“We could always kidnap Darka,” Teyko pipes up.
“For the last time, shut up,” Pavlo warns his brother. He’s not having Darka’s name mentioned by anyone but himself: it was only yesterday morning that she made a fool of him in front of everyone, and all because he’d been trying to peer down the top of her two-piece while she was reading a movie magazine by the lake. “Go away,” she’d grumbled. “Go away and don’t come back till you’ve grown up!” She hadn’t taken him seriously enough to be angry.
Ignoring Yuri, Pavlo walks right up to the throne, sitting down on the jut of rock as magisterially as he can. “While Yuri’s trying to come up with something better than burning another roll of tarpaper, I’ll tell you my plan. It’s very simple, and it gives us a chance to carry out an operation that will prove just how cunning we are, how—.” He is about to say brave but instead the word “diabolical” comes out.
“Meaning?” Olek asks dryly.
“Shut up, you. Look—who is the only guy in all of Kalyna Beach who’s so tied to his mama’s apron strings that he can’t even go for a pee on his own?”
Andriy braces himself, but to his astonishment the name that rings out isn’t his.
“Billy Baziuk!” Nick calls, sticking out his tongue, popping his eyes and wagging his head from side to side. Everyone laughs, even Andriy, who still can’t believe his good luck.
“So let’s do old Billy a favour. Let’s give him the chance to have a bit of fun, away from his mama and her makeup kits. Let’s get Billy a date—a date with Darka!”
There is a hush: the boys are struck dumb by the audacity of Pavlo’s plan. As he explains it, they will have all the fun of a prank, without any chance of getting caught. And even if they do, what’s the big deal? No one gets sent to reform school for a practical joke. Pavlo is acclaimed, not just as Hetman, but as resident genius as well.
Then Yuri speaks up. “She won’t even let you get a peek at her boobs—so how’re you going to get her to go on a date with Billy?”
According to the code, Pavlo should be taking a swing at Yuri for what he’s just said, but all Pavlo does is to smile, a broad, deeply unpleasant smile, as he calls Andriy’s name and motions him over.
Andriy waddles up as quickly as he can. When everyone’s eyes are on him, as they are now, he feels even fatter and clumsier: his walk becomes exaggerated, the wobble of his chest more pronounced. But for once there are no calls of Titty or Pampukh, no wolf whistles, no feet stuck out to trip him. For some reason, Pavlo has singled out Andriy, and the rest of the boys are stumped, wondering why Pavlo’s bestowing his favour on Yuri’s kid brother. For Pavlo’s voice isn’t scornful, as it usually is when he addresses Andriy or deigns to notice his existence. Pavlo is speaking to Andriy as if he were a trusted lieutenant, almost an equal, while Yuri is pushed to the edge of the group.
And so the New Hetman of Kalyna Beach unveils to them all the exploit he’s imagined, and the means by which it is to be arranged and carried out. When he has finished, he swears them all to secrecy. Even Yuri, to his brother’s great surprise, agrees to swear—what’s more, he volunteers to get Katia on side.
Boy crazy is the expression all the ladies are using, not just about Darka Marchuk, but about what they call “the whole younger generation.” Perhaps they pick the expression up from the books they’re reading so surreptitiously, or perhaps the words materialize from whatever’s in the air that summer, and not just at Kalyna Beach. Girls today are boy crazy, and it’s simply a disgrace. The fact that there are no boys anywhere near enough for Darka to chase doesn’t deter the ladies: it’s not the act so much, they say, as the state of mind.
They would never have been allowed to run after boys, calling them on the phone, hanging about at corner stores or soda fountains and making eyes at anything in a pair of pants. Not that they didn’t have boyfriends when they were Darka’s age, but that’s all they were—friends who happened to be boys. They did everything in groups: picnics at Centre Island or Niagara Falls, dances at the Ukrainian Hall, or just walking home after school, or church. And if a boy tried to get fresh, put his hand where he shouldn’t or started to say things that you even suspected were wrong, you didn’t for heaven’s sake encourage him. Of course there were always accidents, but in most cases the boy lived up to what was expected of him; marriage followed, the baby was born and the couple settled down to a respectable life like everyone else. It’s this crazy idea these girls have today that they can get away with it all, that they don’t have to pay for what they do, that they can slip into dark alleyways with every sweet-talker who comes their way and then prance down the aisle in pure white, with a boy from a good family, a boy with a future—that’s what gets the ladies’ goat, as they gather on their faded blankets down at the beach on yet another perfect summer afternoon.
Not, Sonia ventures, that it’s always the parents’ fault. Olya’s a wonderful mother, and Walter’s always been a hard worker, if not the best provider. Darka’s their only child, and if that’s made them spoil her, who would have done otherwise, in their situation? Darka’s a good girl at heart, this is just a temporary wildness, but what’s so hard is that she doesn’t know, won’t listen to how dangerous things are getting for her now. One slip and she could be ruined for life. You couldn’t be too careful, especially if you had Darka’s natural advantages.
“38–22–38,” Sasha quips, but Sonia continues, in a passion. “It’s not just your measurements, it’s the way you carry yourself—what you say about yourself by the way you walk, and sit down, and even drink from a bottle of pop. A man can always tell when he’s dealing with a lady. I modelled for five years, and I can tell you, there were times when things could have got out of hand in the worst way, but people always knew I wouldn’t stand for any of that, that I was a lady.”
“Nasha Grace Kelly—our own ice queen of the runway.”
“You can laugh all you like, Sasha,” Sonia retorts, “but I know what I’m talking about—”
Zirka jumps in, on Sonia’s side for once. “Just you wait another couple of years till Tania’s Darka’s age. You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth, just see if you won’t.”
But Sasha isn’t about to be provoked. “Oh, I’ll just pack them off to Samoa,” she laughs. “They have a much healthier attitude towards life over there.”
Zirka’s never heard of Samoa: she’s dying to ask her to explain, but Sonia leaves her no room.
“It doesn’t matter what’s healthy, Sasha. What matters is that you have to pay for everything you want, and that it’s better not to find yourself paying a whole lifetime for something you decide wasn’t worth even five minutes of your time. That’s what women do, what we’ve always done and always will—we pay, and we pay, and we pay.”
It’s safer, after this onslaught, the ladies decide, to keep mum. Sonia has some bee in her bonnet, her whole body exudes tension like a halo made of a fire so keen that though it’s invisible, it spits and crackles. They lie down on their blankets while Annie Vesiuk goes off to check on the kids, and Sasha keeps turning the pages of the copy of Margaret Mead that she’s brought along, wrapped up in a towel.
The cousins are walking into the undergrowth on the other side of Tunnel Road, dodging saplings and low branches, and twigs that seem to grow for no other purpose than to gouge out an unwary eye. When they reach the place where a broad, high slab of granite sticks up from the tangle of sumach and goldenrod and wintergreen, they sit down with their backs against the rock. Katia sees no point in delaying: she asks Yuri straight out what happened the night that Pan Durkowski caught him spying.
“Did he have his gun? His Lager—his Luger, I mean?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, did he interrogate you, did he slap you around under klieg lights, did he—?”
For a brief moment, Yuri considers telling his cousin the truth: how, when old man Durkowski collared him, he decided to go along instead of breaking loose. So he could be one up on Katia, who was always off plotting with Tania; so he could have an adventure, and a secret of his own to keep. His ruse had worked only too well. He recalls each shameful moment inside the Durkowskis’ cabin: the old man commanding his wife to empty a sack of dried peas on the kitchen floor, then ordering Yuri to kneel on the peas until he was man enough to apologize.
And himself, refusing, easily resisting the hands that are trying to force him to his knees, daring to provoke the old man: “Not until you show me your Luger!” Pan Durkowski staring at him as if he were crazy, or senile. “The one you used when you fought with the Germans. Your Luger and your SS badge.”
And how, out of nowhere, he’d felt against his neck the press of a cold, hard, narrow tube: the barrel of a gun. And a voice, a stranger’s voice, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, shouting harshly, “Hände hoch!”
How he’d had no choice but to raise both arms and hold them up until they hurt. How he’d been ordered to apologize to Pan Durkowski and asked what they teach in the schools these days, that a boy of his age could believe it was something to be proud of—a Luger, the SS. How, as the gun had shoved into the nape of his neck, there’d been the click of a trigger, and a trickle of pee had run down his leg. How tears had welled in his eyes, tears of shame and confusion. And how, when he’d made his apology, and the gun had pulled back, a hand had been put on his shoulder, a hand that turned him round to face no enemy but Pani Durkowska and the length of cold copper pipe she held in her hand, as she made with her mouth a clicking noise that anyone could tell was nothing like a trigger.
“Come on, Yuri, tell me,” Katia pleads. “Unless all that happened was Pan Durkowski taking off his belt and smacking you. Bad boy, such a bad, bad, boy!”
She makes her voice as teasing as she can, to show Yuri that of course she doesn’t mean it. But her cousin turns on her, shouting so loudly that his face looks as if it’s about to break apart.
“Why should I tell you?” And then, pausing for effect, he fires the best shot he has: “You’re just a girl.”
Katia pulls back her arm and socks him in the gut. Yuri stares up at her, dazed and winded, before grabbing her shoulders and pulling her down against the boulder. They wrestle, two wiry kids, the boy with the advantage of strength, the girl with some fund of fury that lets her hold her own against him, until they both sink exhausted, side by side, their backs against the earth, their eyes staring up at a whirl of leaves and sky.
In her narrow room, at the top of her wardrobe, in a cardboard box that once held a pair of too-tight, barely worn shoes, lies Darka’s whole stash of treasure: mascara and half a dozen lipsticks, a compact, three different kinds of cologne, eye shadow in plum and turquoise and pearly white; two pots of rouge; foundation, pancake makeup with a little sponge to apply it, and best of all, a set of false eyelashes. She hasn’t yet had a chance to try on the eyelashes—she’s afraid they’ll stick for good and she’ll have to cut them off, so that no one will discover what she’s been up to. If they weren’t so blind they’d have guessed already: it’s not like she could have walked out of Venus Variety with all this loot. But they were born blind, or else they don’t think she’s worth a second glance, for all they’re after her to watch this, stop that, and stay within the lines.
She hadn’t had to tell Frank, he’d known by instinct—or maybe she had said something to egg him on, a complaint about how they were shifting her around like a piece of furniture. The sleep-house wasn’t such a bad place: there was a three-quarter-size bed, plus a table and chair; there was even a shower and a toilet, so that it was a little like having your own apartment. They should have let her stay there from the beginning; it would have meant she was up here not as the hired help, but as a guest who would naturally do her share in making the household run, looking after the kids, doing the occasional load of laundry. But she’d been offered the sleep-house only when Marta had come up for a week of what no one could describe as holidays.
They couldn’t have made it easier for him if they’d tried. There’s a back door to the sleep-house, so he never risked being seen from the main house. They didn’t need to worry about being heard, either: the mattress was soft and saggy, the springs so shot they barely creaked.
When he’d come to her first, in the cellar, it had been like one more set of chores to cross off her list. And he had asked so politely; he had kept his distance. If you please, Darka, pull down the straps of your bathing suit; would you be so kind, Darka, as to show me your breasts? He hadn’t touched her at all, just leaned against the wall, sipping from his silver flask, watching her step out of her bathing suit and back into it. As if she were on stage and he were in the back row of the audience, as if she were modelling for him, not a swimsuit, but her skin, or as if her body were nothing more than a swimsuit. It got so she was hardly aware of him being there at all, in the dim, cool cellar: it was as if she were in her own room, standing in front of the mirror, looking her body over, checking it against the list in How to Have a Perfect Figure. Breasts should be pert, not floppy: the perfect breast is one that fits into a champagne glass. Hips: full but not pudgy. Buttocks: nicely rounded and above all, firm. When you stand with your legs together there should be three diamond-shaped spaces: between your calves, just under your knees and between your thighs.
What he’d done to her in the sleep-house, what she’d let him do to her … Because she was scared he’d tell on her, tell about the gifts he’s given her—accuse her of stealing them. Because he’d say she asked for it, she never stopped him. Because if she didn’t let him do it to her there, then, no one else ever would: she’d be stuck up at the cottage with a bunch of old women and their brats for the rest of her life. Because she was curious about how it happens, from start to finish, and with Jamie it’d always been a little bit of this, a little bit of that and never all the way. Because when she poured him a glass of the whisky she’d stolen from the main house, he drank it down like a glass of milk. Because he’d wanted it so badly, wanted her, Darka, and not that stale crust of a Lesia Baziuk, who always looked at her as if she were so much dust on the road. Because for once she, Darka Marchuk, has the power to give someone what he wants, what he says he’s dying for. Because he calls her honey-baby, and says he’ll help her, he’ll do anything she wants, give her anything she needs, take her away from here, far away and forever.
Because when they do it, it’s as if there are two of her, one sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward, watching, and the other one lying back as he parts her legs and shoves into her, pounding again and again and again. And then it stops, and he rolls back, heavy as a driftwood log, as she stares at the ceiling, the way she’d stared at the ceiling of her dark, narrow room in the main house, wondering if anything would ever happen to her, if her life would ever begin.
The first time, he’d left right after, putting his finger over her lips, not saying a word. She’d counted to a hundred once she heard the door close behind him; she got up, reached for the bottle of whisky and, remembering an ad she’d read in one of her movie magazines, set about douching. The whisky hurt, and she was glad: it was like pouring hydrogen peroxide into a cut; if it foamed and stung, you knew it was working. She had felt very grown-up, very sensible, very calm, as she rinsed the sheet and took her shower, letting the water run a long, long time, washing her blood and the smell of him out of her skin.
Darka hasn’t been stupid enough to give up thoughts of Jamie Ashford, just because of her gentleman caller. Where does she get that expression from? Not the movie magazines which her mother so disapproves of—and yet the expression is something Darka associates with her mother’s world, her mother’s time. She is wondering about this while the ladies gather on Sasha Plotsky’s veranda for an impromptu meeting of the Lending Library, a Wednesday pick-me-up to break the back of what always seems the longest week of the summer, the last week before the End, as interminable as the last week of a pregnancy. Darka’s still working at the riddle even as she’s sitting Katia down at Sonia’s dressing table. Gentleman caller. She undoes Katia’s ponytail and starts teasing her hair, from tips to scalp, so it sticks out like a dark dandelion clock all round her.
“You’re lucky,” Darka tells her. “You have good, thick hair—not coarse, but with a lot of body.”
Darka is going to become a beauty consultant when she leaves school this year. She won’t be any old Avon Lady, though. She wants to have a shop of her own; she wants to do a hairdressing course; she already has a diploma from the Charm School her parents finally agreed to send her to, after she’d begged and pleaded and threatened not to eat or drink until they gave in. She’ll even be helping to pay the fees with money she’s earned from babysitting and stacking cans at Stenko’s grocery.
“What did you learn at Charm School?” Katia asks, eyes on the mirror that shows Darka spraying and shaping the puffball of hair into a rigid helmet. With enormous satisfaction, Katia decides that the hairdo adds ten years to her face.
“How to put on makeup,” Darka answers. “We sat at this long, white counter, with white smocks on—everything was so clean, like at a hospital. Each of us had a mirror with a ring of light bulbs—they were so hot, they melted the makeup. We always started with the concealer.” Gentleman. She shakes out the shoebox she’s brought along, till a mass of makeup litters the tabletop. Then she picks up a fat stick like a pale orange crayon. “You don’t have anything to cover up yet, but let’s pretend we want to hide that beauty spot over there. See? It’s vanished. Magic.”
Katia touches the place where the beauty mark was. She can see the ghost of it under the orange blob, but she would rather die than say so.
“Now for the foundation.” Darka opens a jar of something beige and slippery that she strokes over Katia’s face. “Then powder—that’s to set the look—you know, like after you mix up a cake and put it in the oven. Close your eyes.”
Rouge is seared on Katia’s cheeks from a small, greasy pot; from a little palette of colours for her eyelids, Darka chooses Dusky Dreams. Eyeliner. Mascara. She’s talking all the time, Katia responding with yeses and uhms and reallys, her eyes shut tight while Darka tells her how she was taught to do a gliding walk, as if every bone in her body were made of Jell-O. How to pull on gloves, both wrist length and elbow. The correct way of getting up and sitting down, and how to cross your legs. Gentle man.
“Now open your mouth—just a little. Good, now smack your lips, just to spread the colour—just a little, I said—do you want to end up like Bozo the Clown? Okay, all done—take a look.”
Darka snatches the scratchy towel from round Katia’s shoulders as the girl stares into the glass. From chin to waist the mirror shows the skinny body of a twelve-year-old wearing a halter top over a chest flat as an ironing board. But there’s a line drawn, like the borders that divide countries in her school atlas, countries tinted different colours to show they’re meant to be separate. The line appears at her chin, where her tan turns into something peachy-orange. Her lips have a completely different shape, and her cheekbones jut out angrily, as though she’d held them against a hot iron. And her eyes—they are long and slanting and smoky, somehow.
“Wait!” Darka takes her comb, wets a few strands of Katia’s hair with spit, and sculpts a kiss curl hanging down over the middle of her forehead.
“Gorgeous.”
“Gorgeous,” Katia whispers back.
She looks at herself in the mirror, turning her head this way and that, pursing up her lips, frowning, smiling dopily, like Marilyn Monroe. She leans forward, tugs the straps of her halter top down over her shoulders, and pushes up her non-existent breasts with her hands. “Look, Darka,” she cries in her best imitation of a grown woman’s voice, “I’m a sex kitten! I’m a slut!”
But there’s no response from Darka, neither laughter nor impatience. Katia wheels around, stares at the older girl and gives a little cry. Darka looks as if she’s been turned into wood; her shoulders slope, and suddenly her eyes are the eyes of an old, old woman.
“You okay?” Katia asks. There’s no answer, so she tugs at Darka’s blouse. “Why don’t you make yourself up like Cleopatra, Darka? I bet you’d look a million times better than that old Liz Taylor. I bet if you did your hair, and put those long black lines on your eyes and went out to Midland and sat in the diner, they’d be rushing up to sign you on.”
Suddenly, angrily, Darka comes to. “Who, Katia? Who’s going to rush up to me?”
“Producers—you know.”
“In Midland, Ontario?”
“Maybe they’re on vacation—maybe they’ve just stepped off their powerboats and they’re hungry and they want to grab a bite to eat, and they walk into the diner and see—”
Now comes Katia’s moment of inspiration. She jumps up and grabs the older girl’s arms. “Come on, Darka. Let me do your face.”
To Katia’s amazement, Darka slumps down at the vanity table, keeping her eyes fixed on the laundry-reddened hands in her lap. Caller. Call her. Collar. First Katia takes out the rollers and the pins that skewer them in place. She brushes Darka’s hair so that it makes a golden cloud around her face, with the inky roots barely visible. She puts no foundation on Darka’s skin, which is beautifully tanned, but slaps on the rouge and lipstick as thick as she can. Finally, she takes the eyeliner, and then, when it proves too delicate, the eyebrow pencil, drawing a thick line all round Darka’s eyes and from the corners almost to her hairline. While this transformation is taking place, Darka remains still as a stone, the way an actress would keep perfectly calm and still having her makeup applied before she steps onto the stage.
“Hail, great enchantress of the east, Cleopatra, whose name means ‘glory of her race.’”
Katia’s imitation of Laura at her most pompous and self-absorbed is dead-on; Darka can’t help but laugh. But when she looks up at the mirror to see what’s been done to her, her mouth falls open. Apart from her hair, which is dyed anyway, she could be—she is Cleopatra. If he could see her now, if he could see her like this—
“Wait,” Katia says, running to the closet, pulling wildly at the clothes hanging there, till she finds, at the very back, the perfect thing. A gold, clingy dress, as out of place among the shorts and shirts and pedal-pushers as a chocolate on a plate of pork and beans. “Lamé,” whispers Katia. It’s a word she pulls out of the air, part of the magic that’s turning Darka from a drudge into a movie star—into an Egyptian Queen.
Darka hesitates, afraid that Sonia might come home early from the Plotskys’ or that Laura will burst in, cross at being left out, threatening to tell on them. “All right,” she says at last. “I’ll be careful.”
She orders Katia to close her eyes, then tugs off her shorts, stepping into the web of shimmering gold, sucking in her belly as she zips up the back.
“Now you can look.”
Darka is reclining on the bed as if it were a barge. She could have been poured from a bottle of syrup. “Come here, O Antony, and do the bidding of the empress of thy heart,” cries Cleopatra.
Katia can’t help herself. She makes a low, sweeping bow and struts to the bed, where she’s enfolded in a pair of queenly arms, just like in the photo in the Souvenir Booklet. The lamé scratches worse than the rollers: Katia can hardly breathe, and Darka’s breasts suddenly seem to her enormous, deformed, with pointy nipples jutting out, instead of being perfectly round and smooth as foam. There are holes in the dress, just below the bust—she puts out her hand to touch one, and Darka slaps it away, then bursts into giggles. Suddenly, they are jumping on the bed, Darka holding the gown up in both her hands, the bedsprings squeaking and thudding, the two of them breathless with laughter, till they collapse, at last, in a heap. Katia’s face is pressed against Darka’s breast: when she pulls away at last, two black, eye-shaped streaks appear on the gold lamé.
“Bozhe—she’ll have kittens—quick, we’ve got to hide it.”
“Fix your face first,” Darka hisses. She shoves Katia towards the bathroom, wriggles out of the golden gown, and leaps into her clothes.
Katia scrubs at her face as hard as she can; when she returns, the dress has been shoved back to the farthest reaches of the closet. Now it’s Darka’s turn to scour her face with the washcloth Katia’s brought her, swearing when the mascara gets into her eyes. Katia doesn’t hear her: she is scrabbling to sweep the tubes and pots littering the dressing table back into Darka’s shoebox. When she finishes, she goes at her hair, yanking the brush through till her scalp aches, while Darka smoothes the bedclothes, saying words Katia’s never heard before: fat, ugly words made uglier by panic.
When the door bursts open at last, they scream as if they’re expecting a posse, but it’s only Baby Alix, her face pale, her eyes bright and black as ever. She stands there with her arms at her sides and no expression on her face. If she’d looked angry, or amazed, it would have been all right; it’s the blankness that spooks them, so that Darka scoops her up and carries her out. It’s up to Katia to collect the washcloth and shoebox; to make sure the room looks just as it did before they came in, as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened here, no makeup, no dress-up, no magic. Softly, Katia closes the door behind her, then dumps the shoebox in Darka’s room and stalks off to the porch.
There are at least six dead flies on the floor, but she makes no move to sweep them up. That is Darka’s job, she tells herself. She jumps into the hammock, setting it swinging, wildly. It helps her to get over her distress and then her fury at herself for having talked Darka into making her up in the first place; at Darka for having frightened her so by the way she’d seemed to burn out, just like a light bulb, with no warning; and at the Cleopatra dress for having been hanging there in the cupboard at all. Her mother will kill her! It’s all Tania’s fault; if she and Tania were still best friends, she would never have spent the afternoon with Darka, never gone near the shoebox full of makeup. Best friends, worst friends: what are they now, she and Tania? They haven’t had a fight; there have been no scenes, no heated words. There have been no words at all, and that’s the trouble.
Suddenly, Katia finds herself saying her grandmother’s name, softly, sadly, then coaxingly, as if she could make Baba Laryssa appear beside her, just by the force of her wanting. Her baba would have been able to help her, would have taught her what to do. She would have started by asking Katia a few questions, not trick ones, not angry ones that supplied their own, wrong answers, but questions that made you think about what mattered most, and what didn’t count. She wouldn’t have lectured, and she wouldn’t have shouted; she’d just have asked questions and made Katia think, until everything became—not easy, but clear.
Katia sets the hammock rocking again with a fierce shove of her foot. She wants to tear the hammock from its hooks, rip it into pieces; she wants to hurt something as badly as she herself is hurting now with missing her baba. Missing—as if Baba Laryssa were a shoe or an umbrella, something you could find at a lost and found. Katia pounds her fist into the palm of her hand. She will not cry—what good would that do? She will not call out her grandmother’s name any more: she doesn’t believe in ghosts. And she won’t pray to God, either, the way the priest said they must do at the funeral, pray that Laryssa Metelsky be forgiven her sins, voluntary and involuntary, as her soul stood before her God. It was God who ought to be asking forgiveness of Baba Laryssa—of Katia, for having taken her baba away from her.
When the hammock stops rocking, a phrase comes into Katia’s head, a line from a movie she’s seen on TV. What’s eating at you? Was that it? She’s eating her heart out—maybe that was how it went. She bites at her lips, bites down hard, till she reaches the salt and rust taste of blood. She curls herself into a ball and, raising her hand to her face, starts biting at a hangnail on her thumb. Before she knows it, she is sucking her thumb, her eyes shut tight, and the hole in her heart as small as she can make it.
She falls asleep like this; she turns in her sleep and the thumb, thank God, drops out of her mouth, so that when Yuri creeps up to the hammock and starts tickling her with a leaf he’s plucked from a sumach tree, she’s not doing anything to give herself away. It’s as though she knows he’s there even before the leaf touches the tip of her nose: she opens her eyes and stares right into his face, startling him by not crying out, by showing no sign of surprise at all.
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.
Peter has been lying here all afternoon, keeping company with Yuri, who is grounded for the rest of the weekend and spending his time indoors. When Zirka had gone down to the beach, Peter called the boy outside, and they sat together in a companionable kind of silence. Watching his son’s bare chest move up and down, the delicate ribs and collarbone, Peter had been filled with tenderness; he’d started to ask Yuri about what Katia had told him, but the boy had shaken his head, refusing to talk about Billy Baziuk, saying he’d feel better going back inside. So Peter is alone on the lawn, leaning his head back onto the triangle of his arms, an easy cradle that allows him to pursue his thoughts, which compose their own triangle, focusing as they do on a slap to the face, a jump from a boat, and the possibility of jailbreak.
He’d been a fool, of course, to have approached her at the Plotskys’ party all those weeks ago, but he saw her so seldom, how could he have ignored this chance? The very fact that she was there at all, that Jack had persuaded her to accompany him, that was miracle enough. But there’d been more to come. When he’d gone over to the corner where she was standing, alone as always, and asked if he could get her something to drink, she hadn’t refused him, as she’d always done before, on any of the myriad occasions when he’d offered her some small service—the only kind within his power to perform. She’d looked at him with an expression on her face that had stunned him, so naked had she seemed in her unhappiness. But like the idiot he was—a thousand times worse than Jack—he’d been afraid to answer that look she’d given him, to answer it in kind. And so he’d fallen back on his party trick, playing the buffoon, dropping to one knee, addressing her as the Empress of the Nile, in case, just in case, he’d mistaken her expression, got it all wrong, as usual. Afraid he didn’t have it in him to ever get it right. No wonder she had slapped him: Nadia who, for eighteen years, had been like ice whenever he’d so much as looked her way; who was given to no public gesture more compromising than taking off her glasses.
His heart’s desire was nothing so grandiose as to possess Nadia, but just to provoke from her some sign that his existence mattered to her—mattered enough to anger, if not to please her. She’d given him that sign, and, like the coward he was, he turned it into a joke, something for which Jack could pat him on the back, and Zirka reproach him for making a fool of himself, once again. She waited till they got home, till they were in their bedroom, undressing, before she lit into him. He hadn’t listened to the words, the tone of her voice had been enough, and the sight of her, poor Zirka, the puffy flesh that reminded him of tomato soup boiling over; the strips of skin untouched by the sun, so that, naked, she looked as though she were trussed up in lard. He lay on his side of the bed, his face turned to the wall, wondering if he’d only imagined that look of sheer unhappiness on Nadia’s face, while Zirka accused him of every marital crime in the book. To quiet her—he could hear the boys mumbling in their sleep—he had to promise he would keep away from her brother’s wife. And he had kept away, to his shame; but also, if he were being honest with himself, to his secret joy. For as long as he kept away from Nadia, he could believe that she cared for him, cared enough to be furious with him—to touch him, even with the sharp flat of her hand.
Oh, yes, he’d kept his promise to Zirka—until Jack made him break it. Jack with the flashy new toy he’d so badly wanted to show off, and his need of an audience. Nadia hadn’t even said hello to him as he climbed in beside her at the back of the boat. Nadia had been ice and stone, plunging him into an agony of unknowing: had he been utterly mistaken at the party, had her gesture been a mark of contempt for him, and nothing else? But then she stood up and begged Jack to slow down, and then calmly—as calmly as you could move in a speeding boat—jumped overboard. He knew that kind of senseless risk, also called courage. He knew it from the five years of his life gone down that blood-clogged drain glorified by the name of war.
Wasn’t it that which had made such a mess of his life? So many meaningless deaths; his own survival so random, unmerited by anything other than sheer good luck. When he’d returned home to the shining future he’d been promised—an immigrant and the son of immigrants, off to university on a soldier’s scholarship!—he hadn’t known what to do with it. The easy lie of it, the happily-ever-after he had only to sign on to possess. What could he do but play the fool, lazy, careless Petro Metelsky. The trouble being, the trouble having always been, that he could never act in his own best interests, that he knew he didn’t deserve any better than he got.
Look at him now: eighteen years in a trap sprung by his own foolishness and, yes, weakness. Marrying Zirka—marrying her not, as everyone supposed, because of her brother’s deep pockets, but because it was the only way he could stay in touch, however rare, with Nadia, catch a few crumbs from her table. Nadia, the only woman who’d ever refused him. How he’d fallen for her—off a cliff, down a mountain, all at once, and forever. And how different his life—he himself—could have been, if only she’d accepted him. Closing his eyes against the green-fringed sky overhead, Peter allows himself the bittersweet pleasure of remembering the opening night of Kateryna.
He’d thought it the absurd magic of stagecraft, how, in the thick of wheezing machinery and cardboard sets of thatched cottages choked by sunflowers, he had known, not only that he was in love, but that he had to marry Nadia Moroz. Without exchanging more than a few words with him, and spending more than one dance in his arms, she had cut a hole in his heart that nothing has ever filled, certainly not Zirka, and not even his children, dear as they are to him. Standing next to Nadia in the dark closeness of the wings, that night of the first and only performance of Kateryna, he’d felt the warmth of her thin body through the curtains serving for her cloak, and all the layers of starched cotton underneath. Her dark hair was so glossy he could have seen his face reflected in it if he’d had the courage to look. It had all been exactly like the folksongs he’d always whistled in public and laughed at in private: lovers meeting in cherry orchards or on a riverbank; stars, a slender moon bathing the sky.
Petro Metelsky, so good with words, such a smooth, sweet talker, panicking in the wings as the children finish their dance with flags and wheat sheafs made of stiff, yellow-painted cardboard. Just as they’re given their cue to proceed onstage, maiden and evil Muscovite, he lurches into a declaration she must, he now believes, have taken for a joke. With no time for “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” or even “I love you,” he blurts out, “Marry me!” as he gropes for her hand to lead her onstage—she is blind without her glasses. A little pause, and then her words clear, colourless as window glass: “Jack proposed to me last night. I said yes.”
This is the last of what he remembers of the evening: Nadia’s words, and then a huge blank in which he somehow goes through the motions of his role, not a step wrong, not a line forgotten. Prolonged applause from the invisible faces in the black sea in front of them, applause he hears as laughter at his own expense. For even if he’d beaten Jack to the mark, how could she ever have accepted him? What could Peter Metelsky have offered her but the sum of his disillusionment and the uncertainty of his future? Of course she’d take Jack, with his easy laugh, his get-up-and-go, his eye, as he was always boasting, for quality. He’d found it in spades in Nadia Moroz: educated, elegant and lovely in a way that left even the prettiest girls—Sonia included—at the starting gate. When Jack had reclaimed Nadia from his arms, that night of the Malanka, Peter had stood on the sidelines, watching how her height and grace transformed Jack from a squat Saskatchewan farm boy into a perfect gentleman.
Which was exactly what he had tried to be, standing by as best man while Jack and Nadia went through the wedding ceremony and Zirka—the only bridesmaid—caught the bouquet with a delighted squeal. It hadn’t been difficult for Jack to manoeuvre him into doing “the right thing” by Zirka, whom he’d taken out perhaps a total of half a dozen times, always in company. Didn’t Petro see how humiliating it was for Zirka to be left on the shelf? Hell, he’d lend him the money for a ring as big as an apple, if only he’d step up to the plate—take the plunge, face it like a man! Newlywed Jack, slapping him on the back, rolling his small eyes, as if life with Nadia were some bitter dose he had to swallow every morning, every night.
All the times he’d tried to end the travesty of his marriage to Zirka; all the times he’d been prevented. Not by cowardice, believe it or not—not by cowardice but by something he wanted to call decency. Hiding his relief when, month after month, no sign of any baby had appeared; unable to take his leave of a woman railing at what she kept calling her fault, her failure. And then, after the trips to the specialist (paid for by Jack), after the operation, and the birth of the two boys, how could he have given the lie to his marriage? And for what? No sign of anything but indifference, cold and blind indifference from Nadia, whom he almost never saw once Jack moved her to the house he’d built on Hamilton Mountain, on Millionaires’ Row. Indifference that crazily made him love her even more, scheming to find ways to catch a glimpse of her, sit next to her at the family dinners that became rarer and rarer, exchange a sentence with her on the cathedral steps each Sunday morning. Walking, every night that he’s up at the cottage:walking along the shore to the point where the bluffs are highest, just to look at the lights in the windows of her cottage: warm, golden light, the colour of perfect happiness, of your heart’s desire.
Sonia arrives so soundlessly that Peter doesn’t hear her—is caught exposed, lying under the birch tree, the very picture of idleness. His sister imagines their mother folding her arms and saying something cutting: What a fine kozak you’d make. Forget the fighting, you’d just swig horilka under some damned tree till you passed out.
“Brateh miy,” Sonia calls out, sitting down beside him, hugging her knees with her arms.
He smiles at her, though he’d give anything to be left alone, thinking of Nadia. “Sonechko,” he says. “Shcho novoho?”
There’s nothing new in Sonia’s life, unless it’s this new worry that’s been heaped on her plate. After the scene on the boat last weekend, Sasha had gone after her, again: Talk to him—make him promise to behave. Sonia feels a prickle of irritation with Sasha: why doesn’t she go after Nadia? Nadia was the one who’d made this particular scene—unless people are accusing Peter of having pushed Nadia into the water! What business is it of anyone’s, the mess Peter’s making of his life? Leave him at least the dignity of going under in his own way; don’t lecture him as if he were a child. If she is going to talk with Peter, let it be about something that matters more than the smug, small circle of Kalyna Beach. So Sonia asks her brother about work—whether his boss has eased up on the lectures, the demands for overtime to make up for the undertime Peter gives to his job.
It’s a mistake, of course. For Peter replies with some fairy tale about how the boss is really a Russian spy, paid by the KGB to make life miserable for honest, hard-working Ukrainian immigrants. In spite of herself, Sonia’s drawn in by the details Peter spins so effortlessly: how the boss, Mr. Anthony Horton, is really one Anton Hortinsky, b. Minsk, Order of Lenin, shoeshine boy to Stalin himself before he graduated to spy school in Moscow. From which he’d managed to pass, a mere hundred-rouble note away from abject failure. The only job they could find to match his capacities, Peter is saying, was infiltrating a certain tool-and-die outfit in Willowdale, captained, of all patriotic heroes, by one Peter Paul Metelsky.
Peter is grinning at her now, for all the world like the ten-year-old he once was, shaking plums down from the neighbour’s tree, filling his pockets with the ripe, red-juiced fruit as the neighbour shook his fist and yelled that Peter’s mother would hear about it! Sharing the plums with her behind a row of tall gravestones in the cemetery, where the tiger lilies grew thick and tall; feeding her plums till she nearly burst from the sweetness. And then, once they’d stolen home at dusk, how Peter had taken the punishment their mother had prepared at the neighbour’s urging, stealing smiles at Sonia while the switch came down and she’d huddled in the corner, knowing herself as guilty as he.
“Peter,” she says, stretching out her hand to his mouth, stopping the words, the foolish, entertaining, cover of words. Her voice is careful, a whisper: “Peter, don’t put on a show, not now. Tell me what’s wrong.”
He stares at her for a moment, then takes her hand, kisses and releases it. He looks away, not up at the sky, but at the grass on which they’re sitting, the grass and the earth showing dry as powder between the blades. When he speaks, the words come quickly, as though he were afraid of running out of time to give her what she’s asked him for.
“What’s wrong, Sonia? I am. And that’s the truth of it. No, listen, Sestrychko. All my life, all my woefully misspent life, I’ve believed I could be somebody different than I was. Someone better, finer, the person everyone expected me to be. I thought I’d found a way to make the jump between who I was and what I could be when I went off to war. But I came back no different—worse, if anything. There was one more chance, which I lost even before I knew it was there. I would have lost my belief in that better self, or what remained of it, except that I kept on wanting what I didn’t—couldn’t—have. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Sonia shakes her head. Peter smiles at her, a wry, twisting smile.
“It doesn’t matter. You know, Sonia, if I were to break my neck in some accident on the highway, they wouldn’t be any the worse for it, Zirka and the boys. There’s my paltry insurance policy, but that doesn’t begin to come into it. Jack is Zirka’s insurance policy: there’d be much, much more for her and the boys if I were out of the way. Can’t you just hear the talk in the community? What a guy, that Jack Senchenko, looking after his sister and her orphaned boys.”
“Don’t, Peter, you mustn’t even think that way,” Sonia urges, but Peter keeps on.
“As far as Zirka and Jack are concerned, I’d be better off out of the picture. But the boys?” Peter’s stomach tightens, as if his gut were a string being tugged to breaking point.
Sonia rushes to reassure him. “Yuri and Andriy adore you, you know that.”
“Two months of weekends spent building forts in the sand, swimming, wrestling. That’s all I can give them—because once we’re back in the city, well, you know how it is. Work, and pretending to work. But here—Sonia, I’m not a father to them, just some crazy older brother to horse around with. When I step into the Almighty Father shoes they laugh at me—they’re no fools, they can see those shoes don’t fit, that they’re a country mile from fitting.
“I’ll tell you something, Sonechko. Every time I climb into that rusty old Chev to drive up here or back to the city, I’m wondering if this time it will be my car, bashed in and smoking at the guardrail, me being pried loose from the driver’s seat. It doesn’t even need to be my fault, or anyone else’s—it might just be that little bunch of veins at the top of my head letting go: the ones that killed Tato, when he was not all that much older than I am now. The poor bastard never had much luck, did he, apart from marrying our mother.”
“Peter,” Sonia cries, “Petro.”
The pain in her voice is absurdly poignant, like a blunt-edged knife; he is starting to reproach himself for having spoken so freely to her, having loaded his fears on her, vulnerable as she still is, when his sister goes on to speak with a fierceness that shocks him.
“Take your happiness, Peter. Don’t just keep reaching out for it—take it.”
His voice is angry now. “And what if I do just that—what if I grab hold and discover that it isn’t anything like I thought it was, all this time? And what if the person I catch hold of only wants me the way you want to hold on to a railing when you’re running down a steep flight of stairs?”
“Don’t give up on your life,” Sonia pleads, her voice echoing against the leaves and the grass and the walls of the cottage, as if she doesn’t care any more who might hear her.
And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she’s gone.
That evening the Metelskys sit down to a meal of salmon mousse and fresh corn and dilled potatoes, though as far as Peter’s concerned, Zirka sighs, it might as well be Shake ‘n Bake chicken and canned beets. Afterwards, Peter plays a game of checkers with Andriy and chess with Yuri, allowing Andriy but not Yuri to defeat him. Once the boys have been packed off to bed, he flips through a junky novel while Zirka washes her hair at the kitchen sink, and puts her rollers in, the sponge kind on which she always sleeps. But after his wife’s turned off the bedroom light, and the boys are blanketed in dreams, Peter calls out, to the walls with their scabbed paint and kitten calendars, that he’s going for a nighttime walk, as he always does, along the beach.
Like everyone else, Jack Senchenko has built his cottage overlooking the lake, but on a point of land far higher than the bluff on which the other cottages are built, and at an appreciable distance from them. To get to the Senchenkos’ on foot means a fifteen-minute walk along the shore, and then a hike up a steep trail through dunes and pine and undergrowth to the cottage and its twin flagpoles, flying the Red Ensign and the blue and yellow banner of Ukraine.
Light is spilling from the large, screened-in porch. Peter makes his way slowly towards it. Looking past the moths clustered on the screen, he can see her in profile. She is alone, sitting at a small table; she is bent over a sheet of paper on which she is writing something. The dark wings of her glasses should make him feel, what? Pity for her short-sightedness, her solitariness? Pity instead of anger at the way she keeps her self to herself, the completeness of her presence at the table, the perfect geometry between her eye and the page and her hand. This desire of his, as sharp now as the first time he saw her—what proof does he have that she feels anything for him but pity, or contempt, or mere exasperation.
A slap on the face, a leap into the lake, a leap to which he should have responded then and there by carrying her off, forever. From a husband so crude he leaves the price tags on the paintings he’s plastered across his Hamilton mansion, and buys a new, more expensive car every year: one in the garage, another parked in the driveway, just for show. From the boxed-in loneliness, the remote suffocation of Kalyna Beach. What must she have thought when he hoisted her into the boat, handing her back to Jack once more? What if she thought nothing at all—what if he mistook an accident for an incident? Yet isn’t Sonia right? Isn’t it time he risked finding out, once and for all?
Her feet are bare. The whiteness of her feet against the deep black of her trousers startles him. Seeing her like this, he is back in the cool deep waters of the bay, holding her up in his arms, his heart flapping like a flag in a gale. He’s afraid that if he knocks at the screen door she’ll take him for an intruder, a prowler, and let out a scream, wake Jack, who is surely asleep in some far-off wing of this huge and horrible house, prison or castle or monster chalet. He is here to see Jack on a business matter, something urgent; she won’t think any the worse of him for coming by. Or better yet, he’s here on a whim, having had one too many whisky and sodas: Peter the mimic, the clown, the spoiled actor. Star of church-basement stage and home-movie screen.
He forces himself to do nothing, say nothing but her name, “Nadia,” which, as he reminds himself, means hope.
“Peter?” She hasn’t yet turned to look at him.
From the sound of her voice, she isn’t startled, or displeased, yet there’s an intensity he can hardly believe has to do with his presence. She shakes her head over the piece of paper. He sees now that there’s an old shirt lying crumpled on the table beside her—she must be mending it.
“Quiet, Peter,” she says at last, though he hasn’t shouted. “Be quiet and I’ll unlatch the door.” Nadia gets up from her chair, moving soundlessly towards him; he can sense the scent of her face, her hair, through the mesh of the screen.
“Hurry up, you’ll let the mosquitos in.” Softly, she closes the door, and they stand together just inside the threshold.
“Jack’s not here,” she says. “He’s delayed in the city on business. He’ll be back for the party tomorrow night.”
“Oh, right, then. I’ll try to bend his ear tomorrow—at the party.”
“Is it something important?” Meaning, are you in trouble again?
He shakes his head. And then, summoning all his courage, with as much difficulty as if he were only just learning to speak, he asks if that’s coffee he smells.
“It will keep you up. Besides, it’s bitter, it’s been on for hours.”
“I like it bitter.”
She looks at him, then back at the table where she’d been sitting; she waits for a perceptible moment, and then she goes off to the kitchen. He stands there, unable to take a seat, and powerless to walk over to the table, to see what she has been writing. Take your happiness, Peter—don’t just keep reaching out for it—take it. Though he’s had the whole walk over to decide, he can’t begin to think of what he’ll say to her when she returns. The whole walk, and a whole life leading up to this walk, tonight. Hands in his pockets, he stares down at his feet in their shabby canvas shoes, as if they will help him. Her skin, under the white blouse, the black trousers—it must be bruised from that jump off the boat, and the way Jack hauled her up the ladder. How could she have summoned up the courage to jump, and how could he have gone along with the rest of them, pretending she’d fallen, lost her balance, when it was plain for anyone to see that she’d decided to jump? To stop Jack from killing some innocent swimmer, or to remove herself, at once and for always, from the need to care?
Nadia is standing at the door, carrying a tray and watching him—how long has she been standing there?
“You don’t take sugar, do you? Or cream?” she asks, in that English voice that always makes him think of a tumbler of cool water. But she’s brought them anyway, the sugar and cream, along with the percolator and a cup and saucer on a tray. As polite, as considerate as if he were a stranger who’d dropped by seeking directions, or one of her husband’s business associates, which in a way he is: Jack Senchenko’s tame black sheep. Looking at her now, he can’t imagine she is that woman on the speedboat; the girl he once saw shivering on Queen Street, danced with on New Year’s Eve, stood next to, so close he could feel the heat burning from her body, in a basement theatre.
He swallows hard, then walks towards her, taking the cup she offers him. “To Kalyna Beach,” he proposes, lifting his cup.
Warily, she watches him take a sip of his coffee. Then there’s silence: plain, simple, awkward.
“Have you ever tasted kalyna?” is the only thing he can think to say.
Nadia shakes her head.
“My mother used to brew up the berries in the old country—she’d make cough syrup out of it. Poor Sonia, the face she’d pull, drinking that stuff down. A cross between cranberries and rotting turnip, I always thought.”
Watching her face reflected in the shiny metal of the percolator—black hair and white, white skin—he registers the fact that Nadia spends most of her time at Kalyna Beach indoors, much to Zirka’s disapproval. Why she comes up for the summer I can’t understand. What does she do with herself all day long, with her boy away working, and her husband stuck in the city, and just that housekeeper to look after him? Nadia doesn’t sunbathe, she doesn’t swim, she doesn’t come down to the beach at all.
“Sonia can’t swim either,” Peter blurts out. And then, blundering on, “She’s deathly afraid of the water.”
Nadia shows no surprise at the turn the conversation’s taken. She puts the tray down on a low table between them. “I wondered about that” is all she says. She sits down in a chaise longue, and he pulls up a folding chair, facing her.
“When she was a kid—this is before we came to Canada—some boys chased her down to the river. They threw her in, thinking she could swim.”
“And she couldn’t?”
“Someone happened to be passing by and pulled her out.”
“Have you always made a habit of rescuing people?”
It’s the archness, the coolness in her voice that goads Peter into leaning forward in his chair. He notices how her hands are clenched so tight that the knuckles stick out, bone-white. “In the boat, last week—why did you jump?”
She says nothing, balancing on the chaise longue as if it too were a boat capable of capsizing.
“You were crazy to jump,” he goes on, his voice both stern and tender. “You could have got hurt.”
Now she leans back in her chair, her fingers still knitted together, but loosely. “It was like something out of a book.”
“What?”
“People do risky, dangerous things all the time in books. It’s only in real life we never seem to get the chance. Why do you think that is?”
“Nadia—”
She pulls herself forward, sits with her elbows balanced on her knees, her face leaning into his. “Peter, I need you to tell me something. What do you think of me? I don’t mean do you think I’m bad or good, or ugly or attractive, but what were you thinking when you saw me sitting there, at the table, just before you called out to me?”
What does she want to hear? What can he say that will be the right words, the only answer, like in those fairy tales where the prince must choose just one casket, or one gift to win his heart’s desire? But he knows better; he knows nothing. He is lost for words, lost altogether. He can hear a branch tapping against the screen, in cruel imitation of the clock that is carving away his chances, second by second. So that it’s Nadia who breaks a silence that seems to have lasted for hours: in her voice is something heartsick, the pressure of anguish.
“Oh, Petro, Petro, what a coward you are.”
Suddenly he is looming over her, shoving the little glass table so that their coffee cups rattle. His anger is a key shoved into a lock, turned violently. “Since I’m the coward, then you go instead of me, Nadia. Tell me what you think of me, Peter Metelsky, neighbourhood dilettante, genial failure—”
Her voice now is merely sad. “Why are you always answering your own questions?”
She takes off her glasses to look up at him, as if she can see better half-blind. He can feel her eyes as if they’re fingertips tracing all the lines of his face, the tiredness that can’t be undone by sleep, any more than the grey hair at his temples. Tracing what’s inside his head, too, the chart with numbers crossed off, his father dead at fifty-five, twelve more years, only twelve to go. In the nakedness of her eyes he sees, all of a sudden, that she, too, is counting. The days you can’t pretend aren’t passing you by, moment by moment, flakes of pure fire that leap up only to fall back into ash.
If he sits down again, he is lost. He slams his fists into his pockets as if to hold himself up, and prepares to speak. What he is about to say to her, the feelings he wills into speech, will be the most important words he ever utters. Now is the time to tell her what matters more than anything else. Now is the time to stop clowning, stop dodging, to speak out at last, whatever the consequences may be. But it all comes out differently from what he means to say.
“You want to know what I thought of, Nadia, when I saw you at that table, writing? I thought of when I was a kid of fourteen, when I got a chance to spend a week at summer camp. How I would run off by myself into the fields, and lie down under a tree, just lie there and watch the sky through the leaves.”
He laughs, embarrassed, frowns, and goes on, not trusting himself to look at her. “They would always come after me—scold me for being lazy, making trouble for them. Once I was angry enough to talk back to the woman sent to look for me; she was one of the camp cooks, she knew my parents. I told her that when I grew up, I was going to spend whole summers lying under the trees, looking up at the sky.” He pauses, stealing a glance at Nadia; her face gives nothing away.
“In spite of everything I knew, in spite of the way it was in the old country, in spite of my parents’ lives, I really believed that once you grew up, you could do whatever you wanted. That only people who were too dull or stupid or frightened to want anything better would end up working at a factory or office, or in a hellhole of a kitchen all summer long.”
Peter’s staring at the floor again, as if his life depends on registering its strips of varnished tongue and groove. “She told me not to be a fool. Didn’t I understand that things got worse instead of better when you grew up? That I would have no time to think of trees and sky and the rest of it, that nobody, nobody was free to do what they wanted. I swore at her, told her that she was the fool, that I’d prove it to her—she would see!”
He stops. There’s nothing more to say, if he’s been saying anything at all. She must have heard his words as if they were being spoken in a language from outer space; she must despise, or worse, pity him. But when, at long last, he looks at her, he sees that she is smiling.
In all the time he has known Nadia, he has never once seen her smile. Not as she is doing now, here, for no reason at all, a smile that turns her face into a piece of paper that’s caught rapid, joyous fire. Something shifts—something in the atmosphere, in the light of the screened-in porch, in Peter’s own heart, which is no longer a soft balloon or a fist-sized stone, but a muscle, pumping out blood, keeping him awake, alive. So that he smiles back, a fine, open smile without a trace of mimicry or mockery, for once.
In some dream vestibule, Jack and Zirka are complaining, pouring out a job lot of disappointments and injuries to a God whose one blue eye is firmly shut, so that Peter can be alone here with Nadia. As if, eighteen years ago, she had held out her hand to him in that dark auditorium and said, Yes, Peter, of course I’ll marry you. As though they were in their own home: a couple whose thoughts and hopes and imaginings are like books that they have read together: known, shared, puzzled through. He is alert now as he’s never been before. He can’t believe how keen his senses are: how much pleasure he’s taking in the rasp of crickets in the bushes round the porch, in the look of black coffee pooled in a stark white cup. He wants to laugh, he wants to sing, he wants to blurt out, as he’d done all those years ago, “Marry me!”
But it’s Nadia who speaks, holding out her hands to him, letting him pull her up from the chair where she is sitting. “Don’t say anything. Just look.” She leads him over to the table, and he immediately sees his mistake. She wasn’t writing, as he’d assumed, but drawing. There’s a pile of sketches that she’s been sorting: he goes through them, taking his time, amazed at how meticulous and yet moving they are. Small sketches of perfectly ordinary things—a pair of spectacles, a glass, a pine tree seen through the minute grid of a screen window. They are drawn expertly, beautifully and so poignantly that he has to bite his lip. He pauses at an unfinished one of an old, crumpled shirt, with a button hanging by a thread.
“You know that Jack took me to New York to see Cleopatra? The world premiere, and we were there, along with the movie stars and producers and politicians: Mr. and Mrs. Jack Senchenko! We sat through the whole four hours—and all the way back to our hotel, Jack couldn’t stop talking about that scene where Caesar and Cleopatra visit the tomb of Alexander the Great. Do you remember it?”
She doesn’t wait for Peter’s answer; she rushes on.
“There’s this strange light playing over the tomb, so you can’t tell whether it’s a bas-relief of Alexander that you’re seeing, or the actual body—uncorrupted, like a saint’s. But what Jack kept going on about was Cleopatra—not Elizabeth Taylor—Cleopatra. What a woman she was, and how a man backed by a woman like that could do anything. Could be not just Someone but a Conqueror of the Earth! That was when I finally understood just how hopeless it was, our marriage, what I’d tried to make of it. After all those years—not that he didn’t know who I was, but that he still didn’t want what I was, what I could give him. He thought that all I had to do was to make up my mind to do it: paint up my eyes, put beads in my hair, command his empire with him.
“Instead of which, I do this,” she says, putting out her hand to the sheaf of drawings, just touching them. “They’re nothing much,” she says. And then, “They’re what I am, Peter. They’re all I am.”
This time he doesn’t hesitate, or fumble. He draws her into his arms, and holds her as close as if they were dancing. To the far-off beating of waves at the shore; to the clock ticking on the wall, to their very breathing. Dancing close, slow, their arms pressed tight round one another, as if to keep themselves from drowning.
For as long as there has been a Kalyna Beach, there’s been a zabava at the Senchenkos’ cottage on Labour Day weekend. The party starts at eight on Sunday night, once the children have been fed and put to bed, or been left reading comics in their pyjamas in their bedrooms. The parents take turns checking in on them all, cottage by cottage; it’s a regular patrol.
This evening party in cottage country is always as formal an affair as can be contrived. The men dress up in short-sleeved shirts and neatly ironed Bermuda shorts; the women all wear long, poolside dresses by Sea Queen, though no one’s ever put a toe into the water of the Senchenkos’ swimming pool. Sasha Plotsky usually shows up in something people agree to call “different”: a backless black dress, one year; Italian-designed palazzo pants, another. Sonia Martyn is always admired no matter what she wears, though there are hints that this year, the year of Cleopatra, she’ll dazzle them all with something spectacular.
As for the food, there are bowls of pretzels, chips, salted peanuts when you arrive, with wine, beer and soft drinks to wash them down, as well as a bottle or two of Mrs. Maximoynko’s homebrew, which she sells to special customers only. The shelves of Venus Variety are well stocked with Eno and Alka-Seltzer, so she doesn’t do too badly off the Senchenkos’ hospitality, though Mrs. Maximoynko herself would never show up for the party. About midnight, Mrs. Matski, the Senchenkos’ housekeeper, who’s been brought up to the cottage for the occasion, appears with loaded roasters of holubtsi and patychky. There’s always a sweet table, too, with cherries jubilee and platters of poppyseed strudel baked by Jack’s sister, Zirka, plus tea and coffee and more soft drinks. People start saying their goodbyes well after one in the morning, and the very last hangers-on can be seen weaving over the dunes at three. Jack believes in showing people a good time, but Nadia usually says good night and goes off to bed just past midnight, after the food—none of which she’s been seen to taste—is served.
The Senchenkos’ cottage is a cross between a Swiss chalet and an apartment block. There are those who say Jack should have stuck to his own if he wanted the ethnic touch—a thatched cottage, whitewashed, surrounded by a wooden fence with glass jars upended on the staves to dry in the sun. Others cluck their tongues over the sheer showiness of a mansion that can sleep a dozen people at a pinch; that has window boxes filled with geraniums, and shutters with hearts cookie-cuttered out of them, while other people make do with construction kits sold at Beaver Lumber. But that’s the way Jack is; he has money and he sees no reason to hide the fact. It’s good for business to show off what you’ve done for yourself, it inspires confidence. Money attracts money. Hence the chalet’s pièce de résistance: the swimming pool, the most grandiose, utterly unnecessary item among the chalet’s mod cons and luxury appointments.
People wonder what Nadia thinks of the whole business; they keep on wondering, since Nadia keeps her thoughts to herself. She never objects when, party after party, Jack takes people through the house, pointing out all the new additions, boasting about how much this or that appliance cost, or the price of the baby grand by the picture window. There are some who are fascinated by the fuss Jack makes about price tags, and others who denounce any objections to the show as worthy of the Anhleetsi, the Smiths and Joneses with their paralyzing fear of being thought vulgar. Still others keep safely silent, visiting the Senchenkos’ cottage and comparing it with their own houses in the city, hugging to their hearts the thought that you could lug a grand piano into the bush and turn a whole wall into a picture window, but still behave like a farmer at a country fair, showing off your prize pumpkins.
Everyone is preparing for the Senchenkos’ party. Even the few who’ve not been invited, or who have refused their invitations, can think of nothing else. The children are as keyed up as their parents; with the disbanding of the Zaporozhtsi after the Billy Baziuk affair, all plans to spy on the grown-ups have been abandoned. The most the children can hope for is leftovers from the sweet table that will have been pressed on their parents by an affable Jack Senchenko as the party winds down. Leftover cake for breakfast; grumpy adults staggering around with small eyes and hands pressed to their heads and warnings not to make a peep, a single peep: warnings that for once will be heeded.
But that is all in the future: it’s what’s immediately at hand that presses on the Martyn girls—at least, the two oldest. Though they’ve strenuously avoided each other’s company, like armies pitched on opposite sides of a great plain, waiting for the right conditions to attack, they are obsessed with exactly the same dilemma: what to do about their mother’s dress. They can ask no one’s advice on the matter; they come up with no inspired, or even desperate solutions. The dress is still hanging in their mother’s closet, hanging like a murder victim, slashed and soiled and with their fingerprints all over it. The only wonder is that the corpse hasn’t started to smell and give itself away.
They know, Katia and Laura, that this time it won’t work: blaming another for their own misdeeds, or protesting it had all been an accident. What do they fear when, this evening, their mother goes to her closet, reaching for the treasure she’s buried in such perfect confidence of safety? Not that she will take her hairbrush, or a wooden spoon to them; not that they’ll be sent to their rooms, kept indoors, away from the beach, away from their friends. It is, after all, the last weekend of the summer. What the sisters are most afraid of, without being able to think it, to say it in words, is the stomach-churning possibility that blood is thinner than water; that hate is stronger than love.
All the girls—except for Baby Alix and Nastia Shkurka, of course—are lying on their beach towels in the hollow behind the sand dunes. The towels are much the worse for a whole summer’s wear—some have rips in the eroded terry cloth, but it’s far too late in the season to toss them out and ask for new ones: these will just have to keep on doing. For once, the mothers aren’t encamped nearby: there’s just Mrs. Vesiuk keeping an eye on everyone, a baby on one hip, a toddler pulling at her hand. The other mothers are up at the cottages, already immersed in the sweaty task of packing up. They calculate, Laura and Katia, that Sonia will be far too busy, even with Darka’s help, to bother about the dress right now; they calculate they have another six or even eight hours before their mother discovers she has nothing to wear to the Senchenkos’ party.
All the girls have reason enough to lie limp on their towels, as if they’ve just swum across the lake, or finally dug that vanished tunnel to China. Tania, Vlada, Lenka, Rocky-short-for-Roksolana—they are all of them exhausted, as if a summer’s worth of sun and sand and water, Popsicles bought at Venus Variety and hot dogs eaten out of doors, comic books read and stories listened to, bathing suits pulled carelessly on and struggled out of, had suddenly filled them to overflowing, filled them past moving even an eyelash. Tonight is the Senchenkos’ party, and the last summer’s day at Kalyna Beach: tomorrow is Monday, and might as well be winter. It’s true that they won’t actually have to cram themselves into their parents’ cars, along with their duffle bags and suitcases and coolers packed with leftovers, until the afternoon. Yet they know that Monday morning will be drenched in the sorrow of leaving, shadowed by school, a whole year of bells and drills, homework and spot tests, exams, assemblies, gym class and those awful bloomers with their telltale names chain-stitched across the back. English school, at which, however much they excel in their studies, they’ll be socially stranded, just different enough not to fit in. And Saturday School means yet another kind of failure, not social, this time, but a failure to do with something there’s no word for in English: with dukh—a cross between breath and spirit—the dukh of Ukraine they’re expected to breathe in and out, even though they’re living in Canada.
One long, drawn-out day lies between them and the bleak horizon of Monday: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as Rocky’s mother, who has a religious bent, is fond of quoting. And so the girls stretch out on their towels, pressing their bodies into the heat of the sand below, and soaking up sun as if it were syrup you could never sicken of. Even Katia and Laura, lying as far apart from each other as they can, keeping Bonnie as a buffer between them, let go of their separate bundles of fear, their minds replete with lake sounds and the rub of the wind in the tall, narrow grasses nearby.
The sun is hot, their stomachs are full—the girls in the dunes are on the verge of sleep when, whether out of malice or sheer ill luck, a voice breaks the calm. Perhaps it’s to win back Katia’s confidence, to regain her affection, that Tania drawls, “Anyone want to guess what Nastia Shkurka’s up to right now? I’ll bet she’s putting Band-Aids on her pimples.”
For a moment, there’s silence. Then Laura sighs, taking off her glasses, rubbing them as clean as she can on the edge of her towel and putting them back on again. “I’ve already told you, she doesn’t get pimples, you moron. She’s got perfect skin.”
“Purr-fect ski-in,” Tania mocks. “How do you know that, Laura? Have you seen her bare naked or something?”
Laura sits up straight. “Shut up,” she growls. “Shut your dirty trap!”
Tania pokes Katia; she’s honour-bound to join in now. More from habit than from any desire to jump to Tania’s aid, or even to rile her sister, Katia starts to chant, “Nasty Nastia,” at which Laura’s face goes dark as thunder—purple thunder. “Dupo,” Laura snaps. “You’re one to talk. Don’t think I haven’t seen you—” Something in Laura’s tone, even more than her words, warns Katia, makes her try to drown out her sister. “Fatty and Nasty—what a pair! You two going steady?” And then she starts to sing: “Laura and Nastia, sitting in a tree—”
Laura staggers to her feet. Fists clenched, she leans over her sister, who doesn’t even bother to look up at her as she completes the rhyme: “Kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee.”
“Tell her, Katia,” she hisses. “Tell Tania what you did with Yuri in the sleep-house, just the two of you. How you took off your clothes, and rubbed yourselves together, bare naked. I’ve seen them, Tania, so don’t go calling me a liar. I’ve seen them with my own eyes!”
And Katia, who should have laughed out loud at this ridiculous claim, who should have resumed the chant of “Fatty and Nasty,” just sits there staring at the sand. She is not about to defend herself, or betray her cousin by telling them how, when she and Yuri had rubbed their bare bodies together on the sleep-house bed, they felt nothing at all—nothing except an embarrassment so deep it made them believe they must have committed the worst of sins. Tania won’t believe her if she tells her—Tania standing there with her arms hanging and a sick expression on her face as she whispers, “Did you, Katia? With Yuri—did you? Did you?”
The other girls have got to their feet and are pulling their towels into their arms, their eyes round and staring. Something terrible is about to happen, they all know this: something in them wants it to happen, wants there to be a scene like in the movies, with grand gestures and the scrub of violins, something earth-shattering, even if that earth is only the sand dunes on their little stretch of beach.
But all that happens is Bonnie, running up to Laura, grabbing the hand Laura’s folded into a fist, poised over Katia’s head. Bonnie pulling and pulling Laura until, shaking her off, Laura staggers over the dunes, her feet sliding in their clumsy flip-flops, so that she trips and falls and has to pick herself up again, in view of them all. As Katia throws herself back down on her towel, pressing her face as hard as she can into the sand.
It never rains but it pours, Sonia complains to Darka. There’s Katia refusing to come in for lunch, Laura off sulking in her room, Bonnie sick to her stomach—thank God the baby’s sleeping, at least. Sonia would prefer it, would be grateful, even, if Darka gave her a weary smile and said something like “No kidding” or “You bet”—something, anything that could be taken as assent, even approval of Sonia’s having, this last day of summer, thrown in the sandy towel, given up on disciplining the children, keeping order. But Darka might as well be one of them, a fifth child for Sonia to keep in line, and the most difficult, the most frightening, by far.
For Darka’s changed in a way that Sonia can’t pin down, but that worries her far more than the peroxide and baby dolls and movie magazines have done. All of a sudden, the girl has given up—given up on aggravating Sonia, flouting her wishes, rebelling. For the past few days, she hasn’t worn a trace of the makeup she’d somehow smuggled up to the cottage—Sonia had pretended not to notice the smears of rouge, the gobs of mascara Darka thought she was being so careful in applying. Nor has the girl spent hours curing her hair or flouncing about in her two-piece at the beach, when she should have been looking after Alix. Yes, Darka’s given up—the way women of a certain age give up on looking or acting attractive.
Good as gold, Darka sits back on the kitchen chair, letting Sonia dye her hair back to its natural colour. Fumes rise from the bottle, making Sonia frown and purse her lips as she applies the tint. Dark brown globs are staining the ragged towel round Darka’s neck: they might as well fall on her face for all she cares—he cares. She doesn’t exist for him any longer: all this weekend he’s stayed put, smoking his cigarettes, reading the papers on Lesia Baziuk’s veranda, drinking the glasses of rye and ginger she grudgingly doles out. As if he hadn’t a care in the world; as if he’d made Darka vanish, not just from his view, but from the whole, wide world. The first night she’d thought he was playing it safe, biding his time. But on Saturday nothing had happened, nothing. Even when she walked past his cottage on her way to the store, he stared at his paper as if she were some ghost stopping before him, looking up at him, willing him to return her gaze. A ghost of a ghost, without the power to summon a single shiver from his pale, pink skin.
It’s not the makeup she misses; to tell the truth, it isn’t Frank Kozak she misses, either. It’s the feeling he gave her of being the most important person in the world, the most precious thing he’d ever held. Far more important than his cigarettes or even the booze, she was his honey, his baby, his sugar-pie. Darka makes a choking, gagging sound.
Sonia’s afraid that somehow she must have got some of the hair dye into the girl’s eyes, or even her mouth. “Darka?” she cries, “are you all right? It won’t take long, now—another five minutes. Darka?”
“I’m okay,” the girl says at last. “It’s the stink that’s getting to me.”
In the one room in her cottage with a lock on the door, Nettie Shkurka is washing her hair. Not that she has anything to hide: her hair really is her crowning glory: long as her arm and not a grey hair to disfigure the rich, mahogany colour that her daughter, alas, has failed to inherit. This is only one of many ways in which Nastia’s been a disappointment to her mother, but Nettie has seen enough of the families at Kalyna Beach to know it’s a universal law that daughters let their mothers down. She also recognizes that, as things go, she should feel relatively confident in the daughter department. Nastia would sooner throw herself under a bus than talk back to her; she’s not going to run after boys; and she’ll continue to do well at school, entering the teaching profession just as her mother and grandmother have done before her. In fact, Nettie’s only worry about Nastia is how to keep her as good as she is now—if not as good as gold, then as copper: bright, serviceable, but needing to be shined up every so often.
If Nettie locks the bathroom door when she washes her long, thick, red-brown hair, it’s more as a gesture against the evil eye than anything else. For she can’t help feeling vulnerable when that hair is unpinned and splayed down her back; vulnerable when bending over the small sink, fearful lest the tap dig into her scalp, intent as she is on rinsing out each scintilla of soap. For Nettie’s obsession is perfection. “People are always watching you,” she has told her daughter from the moment the child could give signs of an independent will. “They’re always watching and waiting for you to make a mistake, fall flat on your face. I never gave them that satisfaction, and neither will you.”
The only way to achieve perfection, Nettie knows, is to have it beaten into you, beaten till you’re black and blue. The way her mother beat her; the way Nettie beats her daughter at home in their cramped apartment, and here, in the equally constricted cottage. While the mothers of Kalyna Beach lie down on their blankets at the water’s edge and their children make sandcastles or sunbathe in the dunes, Nettie is taking a hairbrush or a wooden spoon to Nastia. Or else the peeled birch wand kept by the front door, that makes its whistling sound instead of the thwack, thwack of the hairbrush.
Nettie always makes sure the beatings start when Nastia’s as far as possible from the bathroom with its lockable door—in the kitchen drying dishes, or searching the bookshelves in the sitting room for something she actually wants to read. Always, they occur when the girl has let down her guard, can be taken by surprise by what, after all, she should have suspected was coming: the smack of something hard against a softer target, shins or arms or back. And the words, a rhythmic accompaniment to the blows: “Ty durna kor-o-va.” Nastia never says anything in reply, for her mother’s logic is unassailable: if she weren’t a stupid cow, why would her mother be beating her? She knows she must save her energy for running, ducking, deking this way and that, so she can get to the bathroom without her mother realizing where she’s heading.
Nastia is small for her age; there is scarcely room on her skin for all the bruises she wears. Were Laura ever to ask, Nastia would say the beatings hurt less than you’d imagine, that she carries her wounds as lightly as if they were the badges you get at Brownies, or those fabric souvenirs of Pioneer Village or the CNE meant to be stitched to your shirt or jacket. But Laura doesn’t ask, because, in spite of how smart Laura is, smart at things they never teach you at school, she doesn’t guess what Nastia’s secret is—not just Nastia’s, but Nettie’s, too. Doesn’t guess even though Nastia’s given her all the clues she can; led her by the hand; shown her the writing on the wall.
As Nettie Shkurka lifts her long, damp strands of hair, sectioning them off with the end of the thin-handled, stainless-steel comb with its strong, small teeth, she gazes not in the mirror, but at the wallpaper: she disapproves of mirrors, preferring the way she thinks she looks to what actually confronts her in the glass. Thus it happens that, scanning the pattern of tropical fish weaving in and out of ribboned weeds, she discovers a text as deliberate as a message in a bottle. Not some splotch of rising damp or dirt or grease, but small, immaculate lettering scratched right into the paper, for anyone to find.
At first, Nettie won’t believe her eyes. It can’t be her name etched into the wallpaper; it can’t be I hate in front of her name. Who would do such a thing? Who would wish her ill—who could say something so cruel? For a moment she feels as though she’s going to faint; she wants to stagger off to her room and lie down, unpick the words from her memory as if they were a spoiled stretch of embroidery. But then she tightens her grip on the handle of the comb and pushes the tray of rollers away from her. Half her hair up, half down, her mouth taut, her eyes hard, she steals from the bathroom, down the corridor, to her daughter’s room.
Nastia is sitting on her carefully made bed, reading a movie magazine Laura has pilfered from Darka’s stash. She’s feeling both guilty and bored: her mother says such magazines are garbage, and now Nastia’s seen for herself that it’s true. There’s nothing in the words or pictures she can make sense of, no idea worth following. So that when she looks up from the exposé on Eddie Fisher and sees her mother standing before her, her arm raised, she is almost willing to take the punishment she knows she deserves. Almost but not quite, for the woman by her bed isn’t recognizable as her mother, this woman with wet hair swinging across her face and rippling over her shoulders, with half a helmet of rollers stabbed into her head. Even as the blows come down, Nastia’s confused, unable to shield herself.
This time, for some reason Nastia can’t fathom, the beating isn’t a matter of bruises, but of jabs and cuts. She knows she must think harder, faster, must find some way she hasn’t tried before to get away. Before the steel comb strikes not just at her arms and legs, which can be covered up with long sleeves and trousers, but at her face as well.
Down at the beach, Lenka and Rocky are drinking cream soda behind the dunes, enjoying the absence of Katia and Tania who, they’ve come to realize, have lorded it over them far too long. Laura is helping Baby Alix build a complicated castle by the water’s edge. Mrs. Vesiuk is still on patrol; the boys are diving off the raft, the air is still and the lake a bowl of blue cream. Sonia has come down with a pitcher of Kool-Aid for the children, accompanied by a listless Darka, and a troubled Zirka; the women stand on the dry sand, absorbing the sun’s heat into muscles strained from lifting and fetching. There is nothing to deflect the sound when it comes: a thick, dark, ugly sound, like the clots of blood at the bottom of the toilet bowl when it’s that time of the month for those who are young ladies now.
The sound is coming out of an animal of some kind; it is tumbling down the bluff at the far end of the beach, not falling off the edge, but sliding and shoving through the undergrowth, holding on to the trunks of saplings, grabbing at bushes to keep its feet on the ground. Above it comes another sound, just as ugly, but high-pitched, like a drill, shouting the same word, over and over and over.
Laura clutches her shovel while her mother and Mrs. Vesiuk run towards the sobbing, shaking form that has come to rest on the sand. Zirka is struggling up the hill to where the shrieking has suddenly stopped. Now Mrs. Vesiuk lifts the thing in her arms and strides away with it as if she were carrying nothing heavier than a damp towel. If it’s an animal, it’s not the bear cub the mothers have always been warning them about; if it’s a person, Laura doesn’t want to know who it could be. Blood is pouring from the head, streaking the sugary sand below.
And then it’s all over: Mrs. Vesiuk has disappeared with her bundle up the steps to her cottage, and Sonia seems to be apologizing to them all, mothers and children.
“Everything’s all right,” she keeps saying. “There’s been a little accident at the Shkurkas’ cottage, that’s all. Don’t worry. Nastia will be just fine.”
The only people left on the beach now are Laura and her mother. They are standing apart, facing the lake, their arms wrapped round their waists. For once, an onlooker would be struck not by the difference but by the sameness between them: the sag of the shoulders, the hang of the head, the arms like bandages or a wide belt holding in what must not be let out.
Overhead, the sky is a pale, stainless blue: the water below it is still perfectly calm, unruffled by even a cat’s paw of wind. Water slaps, slaps, slaps at the shore, and from nowhere a pair of dragonflies darts across the lip of wet, packed sand, and over the water. For a long moment, Sonia cannot say where she is, or even what time of day it is, and which day, at that. It’s not just the end-of-summer collapse, the weak but grateful giving-up, for just one day of the year, of all rules and order. It’s the feeling that she’s fought against all summer, fighting to keep it from drowning her: fear of the worst, no hope for the best.
Sonia knows that she must go to her daughter, must open her arms to her, hold her close, try to undo what she has seen, as if the blood streaming from Nastia’s face and scalp, the smear of her mouth, could be smoothed away. But her arms stay cinched about her waist; the most she can do is to sink, slowly, to her knees, and then to sit on the sand.
Laura remains on her feet: she knows what her mother is thinking. She is blaming her for not looking out for her friend, her best, her only friend; for not knowing what was going on at the Shkurkas’ cottage; for not knowing or caring what she knew. And whether or not she knew why Nastia kept to her room so much, and what the word asthma meant from Mrs. Shkurka’s lips, Laura, of all the spectators at Kalyna Beach, knows why this particular drama has occurred. Knows that somehow, while fixing her hair or washing her face, Mrs. Shkurka has found the message inscribed so neatly on the bathroom wall. And suddenly Laura can’t keep from crying out; she sinks to her knees in front of her mother, sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Sonia raises her arms to her daughter, pulls her into an embrace. “Shh, shh, donyu, don’t cry, there’s nothing for you to be sorry about. There’s nothing you could have done to stop it—nobody knew, nobody guessed.”
Stroking Laura’s limp, fine hair, feeling her daughter shudder so helplessly in her arms, Sonia feels something unlock in her, something buried painfully deep. Her voice is soft, as if it were a lullaby she were crooning. “Nobody asks to be born, Laura. We think we are born out of love, we think we are born for happiness. But even if our parents loved each other, even if they wanted us more than anything else, it changes once we come into the world. Everything changes. What’s happened to Nastia—there’s no excuse for it, donyu, and there’s no way anyone could have stopped it.”
Laura barely breathes. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she has her mother all to herself; her mother is holding her, stroking her hair, speaking to her as if her daughter were a friend, and not an enemy. Sonia forgets, for a moment, about her other children, the ones whom Darka’s shepherded up the hill; forgets that Max will be back with the rest of the men at any moment, and that tonight will be the party for which she’s been longing all summer long. She sits on the sand, with her daughter in her arms, and tells her a story.
“Once, in our village, there was a girl who was very pretty and very spoiled. Her mother adored her, and her brother loved her, and the girl ended up by thinking she was better than everybody else, that nothing bad could ever touch her.” Sonia breaks off, starts rubbing at her foot, the site of an old blister, a bright pink scar.
“And?” Laura prompts, needing to break the silence that’s fallen on her mother, afraid to break the delicate spell that binds them together. For she knows that this story which has begun like a fairy tale, like the baiky her baba used to tell her, will be different from them in some crucial way.
“And so they decided to teach her a lesson, the people in the village—the boys in the village.” Sonia draws away, a little, from her daughter; as she speaks, her eyes are fixed on the lake. Her voice is different now, the kind of voice you use to talk to yourself instead of to the person beside you.
“One day they followed her when she went walking by the river—it was spring and all the trees were in bloom, and her mother had let her spend the afternoon doing just what she pleased when she should have been working, helping …
Laura frowns: she was wrong, this isn’t a new kind of story but the same one she’s heard so many times before. How the proud, lazy girl gets punished for her sins; how it’s better to be busy and obedient and meek. Yet as her mother continues, Laura leans in towards her, afraid to lose even one word.
“So the girl walks down to the riverbank, where the apple trees are in bloom; she thinks of herself as one of those blossoms, pink and white and free to fly off in the wind, wherever she chooses. And all the time the boys are watching her, thinking how pleased she is with herself, without a care in the world, because she is the world, all of it that matters. And just at the moment when she’s most lost in herself, most careless and free, the boys rush up to her and grab her and carry her into the river. First they make sure she gets covered with the muck from the bank, they smear it all over her dress and her legs and her hair, and then they dump her in water just deep enough to cover her, all except her face. They laugh at her and leave her to make her way back to shore.”
“And?” Laura asks again, eagerly this time. She knows that her mother’s story has its own momentum now, that it has taken its teller to a place that is neither Kalyna Beach nor the Old Place, but somewhere in between, where remembering happens.
“She couldn’t swim—and she was too proud to tell them. They ran off and she became frightened, too frightened to cry out for help, or to move to free herself, in case she drowned. She knew she was going to die in that river, and that nothing could save her, and so when he came at last to rescue her, she’d given up caring.”
“Who rescued her? Who was it, Mamo?”
But Sonia doesn’t hear the question. “He carried her out of the water, and he washed her and fetched a towel and dry clothes for her. He walked her back home and she made him swear that he would never tell anyone what happened, especially their mother. And he kept her secret, even though—” And here Sonia breaks off the story. “It doesn’t matter,” she says sadly. “We’d better go.”
But it does matter to Laura. It matters to her as much as knowing why Nettie Shkurka has battered her daughter’s face. But neither mother nor daughter can say a word; all they can do is take in the sound of the waves Nastia hates so much, pounding steadily, uselessly, against the shore. Sonia has got to her feet and is brushing the sand off her shorts; the voice she uses to tell Laura it’s time to get dinner ready is no longer the voice of the woman who held her in her arms, or who told the story of the girl who was rescued from drowning. It is the voice of Our Mother: tired, resigned, commanding, but with something else folded into it, something that is almost a plea.
“Come along, Laura, they’ll be wondering what’s happened to us. Come on, donyu—we’ve got work to do.”
It startles Laura: this is not a command so much as an invitation never before extended. Join us, become one of us, women who know what life is and what it can never be, who must hoard what little power we have, power not to save the beaten or to keep ourselves from drowning, just power over our children’s lives, for as long as we can hold them, nothing more than that.
Sonia looks at her watch; her voice takes on a hint of impatience. “Look, Laura, I know you’re upset about Nastia. It’s terrible, what’s happened. But that’s the way life is. If you’d grown up where I did—if you knew what kind of things can happen to people, not just being thrown into a river, but things you can’t even imagine, in the war—”
Laura has jumped to her feet; she’s remembering the mess she made of Sonia’s dress, she’s anticipating the scene her mother will make when she discovers it, the accusations of deliberate destructiveness, of malice. Her mother won’t want her company then, she won’t be calling her donyu, she will never hold her in her arms, or stroke her face again. And now, her head pounding, a stone in her stomach, Laura starts shouting.
“I don’t care about the war—I don’t care about the Old Place, and what happened there. We live here, I was born here—that’s what Baba Laryssa always told us. You don’t know anything, you don’t even try. I wish you were dead. I wish you’d died instead of Baba!”
Sonia keeps herself from staggering; digs her bare feet into the soft, pliant sand. She has imagined Laura saying this—she has thought it herself, even wished it. She looks into her daughter’s face, sees the glasses perched on Laura’s nose like a thick-winged butterfly, the puppy fat that’s swallowed her bones, the frown of puzzlement, of stubborn inability to accept or understand. Suddenly, she is filled with anguish, and a desire stronger than any she has ever known, to become for her daughter what she can never be: the perfect mother, all-wise and all-loving. A mother with both her eyes open—unlike the eye of God on the cathedral dome—both eyes looking not just out, but in, as well. Knowing her own flaws and failings, struggling to change the bitterness and fear inside her to love.
But before Sonia can reach out her arms, Laura has run off into the lake, her chunky body churning through the still and silky water.
The distinctive feature, the theme, if you like, that distinguishes this year’s party at the Senchenkos’ cottage, is unmistakable. Yes, there is the same food and drink, the same banter at the bar. There are the same long dresses and Bermuda shorts, the same tours of the cottage to show off whatever choice piece of decor Jack has had installed over the summer. But this year the sameness is shot through with the excitement everyone shares about the Burton–Taylor affair, which is far more of a blockbuster than Cleopatra.
Jack is rigged out in a toga with a purple stripe down the edge, and a laurel crown made out of gilded cardboard. Nadia, he explains, won’t be down for a while; she’s still in her room, altering her costume. He had it made up as a surprise by a dressmaker in town: an exact replica of the blue-and-gold dress Cleopatra wears in the throne scene. Damn thing hadn’t been ready till this very afternoon—he arrived only a few hours ago, to discover when Nadia tried on the dress that it didn’t fit. “So she’s taking it in here and there,” he explains, pointing to his chest and hips. “She’s not built exactly like Liz Taylor,” he says, flashing a grin at the men.
Ivan Plotsky sits down at the baby grand and belts out the Cleopatra theme song, waggling his bristly eyebrows to the lyrics he improvises, in which “nail her” is made to rhyme with “Taylor,” “hurtin’” with “Burton,” “quibble” with “Sybil” and—something of a stretch—”kyshka” with “Fisher.” Joe Bozhyk is looking everywhere for Peter Metelsky, who, as everyone knows, does phenomenal imitations of Rex Harrison and has been known to drop beach balls down his shirt and take off Liz Taylor to a T. Even after Ivan leaves the piano, the conversation continues to revolve around the movie of the century.
“Joseph Mankiewicz—his name sounds Polish, but he’s really Ukrainian, you know.”
“I still think Taras Bulba is a way better film—Yul Brynner, now that guy can act.”
“What are you talking about, he doesn’t have to act, all he does is shine up his scalp and he steals every scene!”
“Didn’t Tony Curtis have a thing for that German actress who was playing the Polachka? Christine Something—Krautman, Kauffman, was that it? She was only a kid, too—not much older than your Laura, Max. Yep, old Toothsome Tony walked out on Janet Leigh the way Burton’s left what’s-her-face, Sybil. Christ, and they think we have funny names.”
Mostly it’s the men talking; the women are still nervous, exhausted really, with the aftershock of what they’re calling Nettie’s Breakdown. None of the men know anything about it, except Al Vesiuk, who’d driven Nastia to some friends who have a cottage farther along the bay. Dave Lazar is a skin specialist, one of the best there is. To a small crowd of women trying to cool off by touching their iced drinks to their faces, Annie gives the details: “He had to put in a few stitches, but it’s not too bad, Al says. There’ll be a few scars but nothing she won’t be able to hide with a stick of concealer. Thank God she missed the eyes.” She tells them that Dr. Lazar and his wife will keep Nastia with them while Nettie’s medication is kicking in.
At the word medication the women nod, sagely. Not a few of them have had episodes that gave what their doctors call “cause for concern.” On their bathroom shelves, high up where they think their children can’t see and read the labels, are prescription vials of Valium and Librium and sleeping pills that they only take—they swear it—when they absolutely have to. And none of them has ever been a tenth as crazy as Nettie, who is sleeping soundly with the help of some NightEez administered by Halia Bozhyk. Stefka Stechyshyn is with her now—they’re taking turns, the way they do checking up on the children. And so far, none of the husbands has a clue. When Nettie had her attack, they’d been off, most of them, in the Senchenkos’ new speedboat, touring the lake, looking at some investment property Jack had his eye on. Al, thank God, had been home—and Al could be trusted, Al who’d sworn the Hippo-something oath.
It’s not that the women want to deceive their husbands—they don’t consider it a deception, keeping the news from them, but a kindness. Everyone understands the need for secrecy, for which another word is loyalty, not so much to Nettie, as to what Annie calls “their own kind.” Not just Ukrainians—and can you imagine the scandal it would cause if word got out to the Anhleetsi? Loyalty not just to Ukrainians, but to women themselves. For a mother to harm her own child—it’s unthinkable. Spanking, yes; discipline, a swipe with the wooden spoon, of course. But to lose control like that—to let go. It’s something far more scandalous than anything they’ve encountered through the Lending Library; something far more frightening, too, for nearly all of them can confess to moments, with their children, when they have only just kept themselves from lashing out in old country style.
But it is not to discuss Nettie Shkurka’s breakdown that Sonia Martyn is closeted with Sasha Plotsky in one of the two ground-floor bathrooms. Sasha is livid at what’s happened to Nastia, but she’s even more upset at what she feels in her bones is a whole series of disasters brewing.
“Bozhe kokhaniy, am I the only one with eyes in my head? Nadia’s in hiding at her own party and Peter, Mr. Life-of-the-Party, is missing—doesn’t that spell out anything suspicious to you? What did Peter say when you talked to him yesterday? You did talk to him? Sonia?”
But Sonia doesn’t answer immediately. She is studying her reflection in the mirror, the hang of the gingham shirtwaist she’s wearing. Sasha can’t help herself; she cries out, “For heaven’s sake, Sonia, can’t you stop worrying what you look like and give just five minutes of your attention to helping me prevent a colossal balls-up? Do you have any idea of what will happen if those two are allowed to get away with it? And don’t ask what; you know better than I do.”
In her ridiculously girlish dress, her face pale and her eyes burning, Sonia turns to her friend. For Sasha is her friend—her best, most trusted friend, and she is about to ruin this friendship, the way her beautiful golden dress has been ruined, beyond any wearing.
“From what Peter told me, Sasha, he’s in no condition to think of anything but saving his job and keeping himself from throwing in the towel. He isn’t the fool he pretends to be, you know. My brother’s in a bad way, Sasha. I’ve never been so worried about him—he’s much more likely to drive into a transport truck on the way home from the cottage than to run off with Nadia Senchenko. Nadia’s no fool, either—what could Peter offer her that she would want to take, that would make up for what she’d lose if she walked out on Jack?”
“Jack doesn’t have anything to do with this any more. Listen, Sonia, I’ve talked to Nadia—not that she’s gone into True Confessions—as a matter of fact it’s what she’s not saying that worries me. Sonia, Sonia, a lot of people could get hurt—a lot of things are at stake here. I know Zirka’s a royal pain, but there are the boys, too—and all this on top of Nettie Shkurka. Dear God, what’s happening to us all?”
Sonia hasn’t time now to consider Nettie Shkurka, or her nephews; she’s too afraid for her brother, afraid he’ll miss this chance just as he’s messed up every other. “Look, I’ll bet you anything that he’s still at our place, telling the boys one of his crazy stories. They’re spending the night in the sleep-house, so Darka can keep an eye on them. I’ll go over there now, and see.”
“Just don’t say anything to Zirka—she’s like a Molotov cocktail waiting to be thrown.”
Sonia nods: she is about to go off when Sasha grabs her by the sleeve.
“Listen very carefully, Soniu. If Peter and Nadia are having an affair, that’s their business, so long as no one else finds out, and Jack and Zirka don’t have to do anything about it—in public, I mean. So you find your brother, and hold onto him—don’t let him out of your sight. I’ll go after Nadia, I’ll sit on her if I have to, or drag her down to the party where she belongs. She’s the hostess, goddammit! Tomorrow we all go back to the city and everything will blow over, and things will go on the way they always have.”
Sonia removes Sasha’s arm from her own—she has grabbed her so hard that a seam has split in her sleeve. Ruined dresses; ruined lives—suddenly Sonia comes as close as she can to risking all.
“What if they don’t want things to go on as usual? What if they want everything to change, what if they don’t care who gets hurt? What if it hurts them much, much more to stay apart than to go off together?”
Someone’s pounding on the washroom door. Sasha yells out, “This house has six bathrooms and you have to use this one? Hai shlyakh tebeh trafyt!” Then she addresses Sonia, slowly and sternly. “Peter and Nadia aren’t movie stars; they’re only people, like you and me. They’re a part of us, they belong here, they can’t be allowed to do something they’ll regret the morning after—something that will rip this whole community into shreds. Now promise me you’ll fetch Peter while I look for Nadia.”
Sonia nods and Sasha puts her hands on her shoulders, affectionately. “Dab on a bit of lipstick, Sonia—you look like a ghost.”
The two women emerge from the bathroom, Sonia heading in the direction of the sleep-house while Sasha searches the den, the kitchen, the dining room, the bedrooms and washrooms upstairs, even the huge veranda with its boxes of moonstruck geraniums. Nadia is nowhere to be found. Sasha returns to the party, joking with everyone, being outrageous in her usual way and keeping her eyes peeled for the delinquent lovers. Shortly after ten, a half-drunken Zirka comes raging towards her, mascara running and huge half-moons of sweat showing under her arms. She, too, has been going from room to room, looking for her husband, looking for Nadia; now she is gunning for Jack. She’ll tell him everything, she swears, the whole dirty secret.
Somehow, Sasha manages to lead her off to one of the guest bedrooms, grabbing a bottle of vodka from a table as she goes. She pours Zirka a huge dose of what she calls medicine, and Zirka gulps it down with the resignation of a sick child. Sasha holds her hand and waits for her to fall asleep, murmuring, “There there, there there.” What she feels for the woman beside her, face streaked with makeup, hands clutching the edge of the covers, is exasperation mixed with sorrow. For Zirka, after all, has played her part in the community of Kalyna Beach: she had gone to take care of Nettie that afternoon, and she’d gone on the warpath after Peter this evening. He is her husband, after all—she has a perfect right to light into him, keep him from—.
Sasha lights a cigarette, which she holds in the hand with which she’s cupping her forehead, her elbow on her knee. It is her posture of defeat, of resignation. She knows by now that Sonia’s betrayed her: all she can do now is to delay the public discovery, try to stem the damage. For there will be damage, she has no doubt about that. In her mind’s eye, she can see a string of divorces, small at first, like a scrap of thread, and then longer, and thicker, till it extends so far there’s no way of telling where it will end.
Zirka sighs in her sleep. She’s out, all right—she might as well spend the night here, since the boys are sleeping at Sonia’s. Sasha takes a long drag on her dwindled cigarette, then stubs it out and leaves the room, turning out all the lamps but a night light shaped like a seahorse.
Close to midnight, Laura gets out of bed. She reaches between the mattress and the box springs and pulls out the long, thin package she’s hidden there. Bonnie and Katia and Alix are fast asleep, and there’s no light coming from the sleep-house. Darka has gone to her room, having spent most of the evening in front of the cracked mirror in the bathroom, teasing and brushing out and teasing again her dyed-back hair. Laura knows that her parents will return before long: if she’s going to go through with her plan, it has to be now. She has spent the whole evening working out a way to set things right, so that even the terrible blue eye painted on the dome of the cathedral back home will see that she’s tried to make up for what’s happened, for the fact that it’s been all her fault.
When, after supper—when no one but their father and Alix had eaten anything of the meal set down on their plates—Sonia had gone to her bedroom to dress for the Senchenkos’ party, Laura had risen from the table to follow her. She had waited outside the door, imagining Sonia reaching into the very back of the closet, pulling out the dress and—. But nothing like what Laura had imagined had happened: there had been one sharp cry, and then silence. Laura had waited for what seemed like forever, and then fled to the sitting room, where Katia was reading the same page of The Mystery of Larkspur Lane that she’d been working on since supper. Tato was complaining, in a joking way, about how long it always took their mother to get ready for a party, making his daughters promise never to torture their husbands like this. And then, at last, Sonia had come out of the bedroom, in the dress she wore to go on family outings to Santa’s Village or to visit the Martyr’s Shrine at Midland. Her old pink gingham dress with the dirndl skirt and the three-quarter-length sleeves.
All of them had stared at her, unable to say a word, even Tato. And she had stared back, but in a way that made it clear she didn’t really see them. Her face was white and pinched, and her eyes like lightning: not the way they usually were, wet with tears she only just kept from falling, but dry and terribly, terribly bright. No one said anything about her dress, or her face; everyone was waiting for an explosion, or at least an explanation. But all she told them was not to give Darka any trouble, as she walked out the door, with their father shrugging at them and following close after her. It had been worse, a thousand times worse, than what Laura had foreseen down at the beach.
A light burns in the main room, but there’s no one here. No one to witness Laura reaching up to the brass jar on the mantelpiece, taking out a box of matches and bending down to the hearth with the package she’s locked under her arm. The wrapper is one of the brown paper bags in which she’d carried groceries home from Venus Variety; before she opens it, she smooths the paper with her palm. And then she draws out what’s inside, slowly, carefully, as if it were alive.
But it’s not, of course. It doesn’t breathe or speak or smile, or weep. It’s just a pile of paper, stapled and printed, filled with paragraphs and photographs and, on the cover, a painting of two men standing on opposite sides of a woman with beaded, braided hair, sitting on a throne. The men are peering down at the woman with expressions of awe and adoration on their faces. The woman looks straight ahead, the beautiful woman in her magnificent blue-and-gold gown, staring blankly into the distance, holding a golden crook and sceptre in her arms.
It takes forever to burn. As usual, Laura admits to herself, she’s made a mess of things. The first two matches flare and die away without so much as scorching the paper. She has to reach into the cinders and bits of charred log on the grate, and tear up the book; to do it all at once proves impossible; she must work page by glossy page. She must ignite the scraps with one lit match and a dozen others that she scatters nearby. Her hands are grimy now; there’s a nasty smell from the photographs. Laura had thought they would burn as vividly as the colours they contain, but the pictures vanish in the same, sour flame as the white paper, the black words. She sits for a long time, stirring the chunks of charred paper with the poker, making even more of a mess of herself and the hearth in the process.
She is not just burning Cleopatra and her lovers. She is burning Nettie Shkurka’s steel-toothed comb and the boys who threw a frightened girl into a muddy river and left her to drown. She is burning the way she betrayed Katia and Yuri’s secret, and the way she’d pushed Bonnie away that morning at the beach. But even when the Souvenir Booklet has turned to ash, and the ash has been pounded into dust, nothing has really been destroyed. Nor has anything been saved. Laura feels neither relief from guilt nor any lessening of pain. The sacrifice has all been for nothing. But that, she realizes, is why it’s a sacrifice, and not a bargain.
There’s a small, shuffling sound behind her; Laura wheels round to find Bonnie, in her nightie with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves printed over it, for once not a hand-me-down from her older sisters but a Christmas gift that’s still almost as good as new. Bonnie doesn’t say a word: she comes to where Laura is kneeling and sits down beside her, staring into the hearth. She waits a while and then offers her own small sacrifice.
“I’m sorry I pulled at you down at the beach this morning. I’m sorry, Laura.”
Laura takes the poker and hits at the ash. “Go back to sleep, Bonnie,” she says. “You get into my bed—I’ll be there in a minute.”
Only as Bonnie shuffles back to bed do tears start rolling down Laura’s cheeks. She pulls off her glasses and shoves her palms into her eyes; she keeps her mouth shut, for fear of Bonnie coming back to her. What is she weeping for? Not just for Nastia, and for the child that Sonia was. Not only for Bonnie, burdened with the need to keep peace between her sisters, with the need to love them all. But also for herself, and for what she’ll turn out to be. For she knows, now, who and what she is: her own self, however ugly and awful and stubborn she may be. And she knows how close she’d come that afternoon, folded in Sonia’s arms, in the warmth of her lap, to giving herself to the World of the Mothers.
Sonia watches the car drive away from the Metelskys’ cottage, bumping and rattling over the patchy asphalt of Tunnel Road. She hugs herself, as if it were an autumn night and she’d come out to look at the moon without a sweater. There is a moon, three-quarters full, gleaming foggily through rags of cloud that seem to hang in the air instead of drifting by, as if something had happened to the mechanism of the universe, and the earth had stopped turning, the winds forgotten to blow. And then Sonia shakes herself. “Don’t be such a fool,” she says out loud. Words that Sasha had told her to say to Peter, words of warning, pleading, scorn and reproach waiting to pour themselves out, words surging up from the imagination of disaster.
What is it but the unexpectedness, the mystery of any life, that makes it possible to go on at all? The chances that perch like birds singing on a branch, or that whirl up like dust in your eyes: that a stranger might see your photo in a newspaper ad, and declare to himself that he will marry you; that a child will fall so ill on the eve of a life-changing journey that she will be abandoned by her parents; that a spider-shaped cluster of veins will burst in your brain just as you are about to enjoy some small share of happiness, after so many years away from your wife and children and country? A mystery, yes, but not like the detective novel she’s finally finished reading, with its suddenly simple answers to appallingly complicated puzzles. It’s more like a fog that appears just when you think things are fixed and certain, a fog that shakes and blurs, gently or harshly, all the firm, dark edges.
She doesn’t know where Peter and Nadia will go, what they will do, how they will live with all they’ll have lost, and what they will make, together. If they fail, she tells herself, it will be worse, far worse than if the car they are driving out of Kalyna Beach should crash on the highway. And then she stops herself, steps back, examines, like a colt upon shaky legs, the field of possibilities in front of them. Would it really be worse, failure? Must it be so? Isn’t there a chance of something emerging from this risky, haphazard escape that will be, if not better than what’s gone before, then different? Different enough for an ending that, even if it isn’t happy, could still be alive, could still be open?
All Sonia knows is that she’s had enough of living always in the purview of the Evil, or else the Ever-Watchful, Eye. She wants something more, something far better from what’s left of her life: she wants something like her mother’s talent for hopefulness. Her mother, who had led no charmed life, who had made as many mistakes as anyone else, who had been as wary of showing love to her son as she’d been profligate in loving her daughter, and yet had done what she could. Had given her children life and kept them from knowing war and all the horrors that had poisoned Marta’s existence. Who had brought them safely here, to this new place where it was up to them to make good or bad but to make their own ways, to live their lives, and not keep them locked up, like a dress in a closet, a statue on a mantelpiece.
Sonia is suddenly terribly, terribly tired. She wants nothing more than to go back to the cottage, and, without even changing into her pyjamas, to curl up in her bed and sleep. But she can’t—not yet. She must return to the party and speak to Sasha, face Sasha, without excuses or consolations, or even confessions: just with the fact of what’s happened, under their very eyes.
Sasha is leaning over the huge, empty balcony: nobody’s there, they are all inside, listening to Ivan playing “Moon River” on the piano. Max is standing beside the piano with Sonia, who came up to her not long ago, walked out with her here to tell her that Peter and Nadia are gone, and the rusty old Chev as well. And then there’d been nothing further to say. Sonia had returned to the warmth of the party, and Sasha had remained on the balcony, away from the lights and the laughter and singing, listening to the sleepy silence of the lake below.
It must be nearly midnight, Sasha thinks. Mrs. Matski must have finished loading the tables with cabbage rolls and meat-on-a-stick, the leg of candied ham and the roast of beef, more fitting for December than August, but then, that was Jack’s way—royal excess. The tables will be spread, and Jack will start bellowing for Nadia, who is supposed to serve her guests, like a queen putting on an apron at Christmas and filling the servants’ plates with turkey. With any luck he’ll think she’s gone to bed: he won’t be happy, but maybe he’ll think it’s just Nadia, who can’t bear loud noise, or too much of anyone’s company.
What will become of her? And Peter? Nadia can’t be in love with Peter: that was kids’ stuff, years ago—it wouldn’t be half so bad if she were. Sasha leans out over the railing, the way Nadia had leaned out the last time she’d come to a tea party, leaned out and looked at the waves, till Zirka had called her to account. Zirka and the children—it will be worst for Andriy; Yuri’s a tough one, he’ll survive anything. But it will be very hard for Andriy—Zirka will hang on to him, and hang on. Nadia and Peter: Sasha wants to curse them both. The selfishness, the thoughtlessness—and yet a part of her looks out over the lake, as if they’d fled, not in Peter’s car, but in the speedboat tied up at the dock, as if they had just escaped some catastrophe, an earthquake, a tidal wave, of which no one here has any inkling.
“The rest of our lives,” she says aloud, not knowing why, or what she means. She winces, thinking of the ugly explosion on the cliff edge that afternoon, the rage of a woman wild with pain and lost power. Then she hears something her mother used to say, one of the few things she remembers spoken in her mother’s voice.
“You’ve made your bed, now you’ll have to lie in it.” But not Peter and Nadia; they’ve broken the bed apart, they are cruel and selfish and for this one night, free, like characters escaping from the cover of a book.
It’s strange, Sasha thinks, that she should be the one to really mind about what’s going to happen, that she should care so much for this fragile group of women and children and absentee husbands. She’s always been the one to make fun of it; she’s laughed behind her hands at all the Zirkas and Annies and Lesias who think it’s the only place on the planet, this obliging little world of Kalyna Beach. But she knows it better than anyone else, and she loves it best. It’s the kind of love that comes with understanding that life’s a matter of meat and drink, a feast you sit down to together, making room for everyone at the same table—even a Zirka, and, God help her, even a Nettie Shkurka with her battered daughter. For what would become of them if they were to be cast out? And what might have happened differently, had they been drawn in, those two, to the world of the Lending Library? Standing there, looking out over the lake, pressing her palms against the balustrade, she can feel it weighing her down: the loss of community, so carefully built and contained, nursed along, laughed at, yes, but never scorned.
Ivan is calling to her from the doorway: Al Vesiuk is playing a waltz on the piano, she must come and dance. The schmaltzy old-time favourite, “The Anniversary Waltz.” But when Sasha goes to Ivan’s side, taking his hand in hers, she doesn’t move with him onto the floor. Instead, she watches, as everyone else in the room is watching, the couple dancing together as if they were the only people here.
Max and Sonia. Max in a white shirt and worn khaki trousers; Sonia in her gingham dress, more suitable for Little Women than Cleopatra. Yet they could be wearing a tux and a gown of gold lamé, the way they sweep across the floor, eyes locked, hands placed so lightly on each other’s bodies. Sasha hasn’t seen Max smile like this in years. And Sonia—the beauty of her face, not pale with grief or fear, but clear with the joy of the moment. She is looking straight into her husband’s eyes; she is looking at him without reproach or apprehension; she is fierce, almost reckless in her happiness. Knowing that for once, even if only for the space of a waltz, the short space between anticipation and experience, she has been swept up, body, soul and riddled heart, into a melody sweeter, stronger than the tune Al Vesiuk is coaxing from the out-of-tune piano.
Now Max and Sonia are beckoning to the others in the room to join them, for all the world as if they were bride and groom claiming the first dance of the evening and finally acknowledging their wedding guests. Ivan steers Sasha by her elbow onto the dance floor: a little drunk, a little too satisfied with himself and the hit he’s made tonight with his improvisations and his jokes, but still her own, dear Ivan. Sasha shuts her eyes and surrenders to the dance, wishing the waltz to go on forever, for Max and Sonia to keep them all together in this rare romance of the present moment. And yet what she sees is the two who are gone: no longer Peter and Nadia, but simply two lovers, driving together in the dark somewhere, on the way to Thunder Bay or Fort Garry or Montreal—wherever they’re headed to make this outrageous, impossible break with the way things are and have to be.
She wants to lash out at them, as Nettie’s done with Nastia. And she wants to shower them with rose petals, to rush down to the dock to wave them off on their reckless, needy journey into possibility.