The Hunger (3 page)

Saturday, September 11

Gramma Pauline lived in a small brick house on Grand River Avenue just two miles away from the Romaniuk residence. On Saturdays, if the weather was good, Paula pulled on her running shoes and jogged over to her grandmother’s house in the morning, where they would share a pot of jasmine tea and some good conversation.

She was like nobody else’s grandmother. Even in old age she was beautiful, with a certain birdlike fragility. Today, her shock of white hair hung loose — a cloud of ripples down her back, and as always, she wore far too many rings. She had on one of her many brilliantly coloured but mismatched silk palazzo sets — today a crimson tunic and orange pants.

Gramma Pauline was sitting on her wooden verandah swing with her legs curled up under her, sketching with charcoal in an artist’s notebook. A pair of gold half-glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and as her granddaughter jogged into her driveway, her brown eyes sparkled over the rim.

“Hi Gramma,” said Paula, slowing her run to a stationary jog as she cooled down. She did her cool down stretches and then walked over to the verandah and gave Pauline a firm hug.

“Honey, it’s great to see you,” said Pauline, returning the hug. Then she held her namesake at arm’s length and looked at her in her revealing shorts and T-shirt. She noticed that Paula was thinner than she had been the week before, but she said nothing.

“Do you want your tea out here, or shall we go inside?” asked Pauline.

“Let’s go inside,” replied Paula, drying the sweat from her arms with a towel her grandmother had handed her. “I’ve had enough fresh air for the moment.”

Paula loved her grandmother’s house. Even though it was at least a hundred years old, it had a huge new picture window in the living room. And what used to be the dining room was now an artist’s studio with recently added skylights in the ceiling. Paula breathed in the familiar scent of turpentine as she stepped through the studio door.

When Paula was younger, she used to love sprawling out on the Oriental carpet that adorned the floor of this room and she would watch in fascination as her grandmother stirred paints and deftly applied them to canvas.

Her grandmother had a kitchenette set up in the corner of her studio, and the electric kettle was already on a slow boil. Pauline made the jasmine tea and Paula settled down into the overstuffed sofa on the other side of the room and looked around to see
what her grandmother had been up to lately. Her eyes were drawn to a new oil painting. It was an abstract design, and depending on how you looked at it, it was a bouquet of spring flowers, a spiral burst of sunbeams, or just random flecks of colour. Gramma Pauline brought over a china cup of tea and followed Paula’s gaze. “That painting is for you, honey. I’ll frame it for you once the paint is fully dry.”

“Thank you, Gramma, it’s beautiful,” said Paula. “It’s quite a bit different from anything you’ve painted before.”

“That’s because I painted it with you in mind.”

Paula sipped her jasmine tea and stared into the swirls and bursts of colour in the painting. She didn’t quite understand how this painting represented her, but she loved it just the same.

“Gramma, I have a school project about immigration. Would you tell me about how you came to Canada?”

Pauline was silent for a moment, and then she sat down on the sofa next to her granddaughter and stared at her tea. “It’s funny you should ask me about it after all this time,” she said. “For years I’ve tried to put the past behind me. But the more I try to forget, the more I seem remember.” Pauline set her teacup down, and stared at the carpet at their feet. Paula followed her gaze. Like the new oil painting, the carpet was of a colourful sunburst design. The more
you stared at it, the more it changed. Gramma Pauline seemed to be totally absorbed.

“If it’s painful for you, we don’t have to talk about it...”

“Actually, it’s okay, honey. I’d like to tell you the story, but I seem to only remember flashes of things. I don’t know exactly how it happened.”

“What do you remember?”

“I can remember arriving at the Georgetown Boys’ Farm when I was a girl. My parents had accompanied the first fifty orphaned boys from Armenia. I was the only girl, and I was also the only child with parents. I remember Union Jacks waving when we got off the train. And I remember being given a sandwich. I didn’t know what a sandwich was back then, because I had never seen one before in my life.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was strange. Canadian bread back then was all white store bought-stuff. It had no taste.”

“Do you remember anything about Armenia?”

“Only bits. There was a war. There was no food. And hundreds of children were huddled together in darkness.” Gramma Pauline sighed. “That’s all I can remember right now.”

“Do you know what year you came over?”

“That I remember well. I was seven years old and it was 1923.”

Monday, September 13

Paula stopped in to the school library during her spare. If she could find something here about Armenians coming to Canada, she wouldn’t have to go downtown.

Her first stop was the computer card catalogue. The system at her school library was not as sophisticated as the one at the public library, but she figured it was worth a try. First, she punched in “Armenia.” No hits. She tried “Armenians.” Again, no hits. She tried “immigrants” and came up with three books: one on German and Polish Canadians; one called
Strangers at Our Gates;
and one called
Canada: Land of Immigrants.
Noting the dewey decimal numbers, Paula decided to take a look at the books. None of them mentioned Armenians. Not in the chapter list in the front, nor in the index at the back.

She walked over to the reference desk and asked Mrs. MacPherson for some help. “Armenian immigration?” the librarian repeated. “I don’t believe we have anything on Armenians.” The librarian walked over to her desk and opened a drawer. “Maybe there is something in this, though.” She handed Paula a booklet called
The Fiction Fit.

“What is this?” Paula asked.

“It lists works of fiction on all different subjects,” explained Mrs. MacPherson. “Sometimes, it’s a good place to start.”

Paula took the booklet over to a study carrel and flipped through it. It was a listing put together by the board of education in 1992 of suggested novels for a huge variety of subjects. Scanning down the list, she found a subject heading for “Immigrants.” She checked out the reading suggestions, and found
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Joy Luck Club, Ragtime,
and other good novels, but there were none about Armenians. This was going to be harder than she thought.

Before heading home, she decided to see if she could find her history teacher and see if he had any suggestions for her. She found Mr. Brown still sitting at his desk in the history room, going over some papers. She tapped gently on the door and walked in when he looked up and nodded at her.

“What’s the problem, Paula?” he asked, setting down his pen.

“I’m trying to find information on Armenians immigrating to Canada for my project,” she explained, “but I can’t find anything in the school library.”

“Armenians?” asked Mr. Brown. “Are you part Armenian?”

“Yes,” said Paula, “I just found out that my maternal grandmother came to Canada from Armenia when she was a child.”

“That should make a very interesting project,” said Mr. Brown. “Have you interviewed her about her
experiences? That would be the logical place to start.”

“I tried,” explained Paula, “but she was so young when she came over that she doesn’t remember much. Just that there was a war and that she came over with a group of orphans in 1923 and stayed at an orphanage called the Georgetown Boys’ Farm.”

Mr. Brown shook his head. “Georgetown is just an hour away from here, but I don’t remember ever hearing about a Georgetown orphanage. I also don’t recall a mass immigration of Armenians.”

“Well, I don’t think my grandmother would get this completely wrong.”

“Neither do I. It’s just that I don’t know what to suggest. Have you tried looking in the public library?”

“Not yet.”

“That might be a place to start. Also, try the Internet.”

“Okay,” said Paula. “Thanks.”

When Paula got home after school, she made a beeline up to her brother’s bedroom. She knew that she would find him in front of the computer screen.

“How’s it going?” she asked, plopping down on Erik’s unmade bed.

“I think I’m going to die,” he answered.

Paula looked at the computer screen and tried to make sense out of the game her brother was playing. “What do you mean?”

“I should never have started on the ‘king’ level,” said Erik. “It’s impossible for me to win. I started out with ‘despotism’ as the type of government, but moved into a ‘republic’ too quickly, and now all the citizens are revolting.”

Paula looked at the screen and saw little symbols of people crashing into buildings and destroying things. It seemed silly to get all worked up about a game, but she knew her brother took his games very seriously.

“Do you think you could take a break some time soon and let me look something up on the Internet?”

Paula didn’t have a computer. The reason Erik did was because he saved every penny that crossed his palm. Birthday and Christmas money was carefully saved, and odd jobs like snow shoveling and grass cutting added to his stash. He had saved enough a year ago to buy a colour printer and a modem. And then Gramma Pauline sprung for a whole year’s worth of Internet access, much to the chagrin of his parents. “Both kids will use it for homework,” she declared.

“This game is toast anyway,” said Erik, hitting the exit button. “What is it that you want to look up?”

“I want to do a search on MetaCrawler for ‘immigration’ and ‘Armenia.’”

Erik rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe that you’re starting your project now. It’s not due for months! Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick,” Paula responded. “I get As because
I start my projects early. I don’t leave them to the last minute and get only Bs. Like you.”

“I’d rather get Bs and have time for fun things than be a work nut like you,” flashed Erik.

“Look,” asked Paula with sweet impatience. “Can we just do the search?”

Eric punched in both words and then waited while MetaCrawler searched through six search engines. He got fifty-three hits—most of which were tourism sites.

“That’s not right,” said Paula. “Try ‘Armenia’ and ‘orphans.’”

This search resulted in 33 hits, primarily youth groups, ads for encyclopedias, and so on, but one site caught Paula’s eye. It was a photo collection by a person named John Elder, and the photos were from 1917 to 1919. That would have been during the time that Gramma Pauline was still in Armenia. She would have been a toddler then, Paula calculated. Erik clicked onto the site.

The photos were chilling. There was one of ragged children walking up steps to a feeding station, and another of emaciated children in an orphanage. But the picture that had the most impact on Paula was the last. There was a barren country road, empty—except for the skeleton lying abandoned in the middle of it. Had Gramma Pauline actually lived through all of this horror? It hurt her to imagine her beloved grandmother as a child in these conditions.
What had caused it? And how many loved ones had Gramma Pauline lost? No wonder her memories were sketchy.

Friday, September 17, after school

The nurse gently closed the door behind her. Paula glanced around the examining room, and her eye lighted on the weight scale sitting in the corner. She stepped on the scales. This was the moment of truth! The scales at home could be wildly inaccurate. With expert hands, she quickly adjusted the sliding weights until the scale was balanced. But it couldn’t be right! According to this scale, Paula had actually gained two pounds since yesterday. Paula was five-foot-ten and her goal was to weigh one hundred and ten pounds and be just as beautiful as her favourite supermodel, Kate Moss. If this scale was right, then she still had twenty pounds to go. Damn! Tears welled in her eyes and she could feel a sob rise in her throat. She took a deep breath, trying to repress the sob.

She got off the scale and slipped the weights back into the zero position. Paula cringed at the thought of someone finding out how much she weighed. She stuck her head out the examining room door. No one in sight. At least she had a few minutes to compose herself.

As the door closed, she caught her own reflection in the mirror on the back of the door. Paula’s hair was a mess, and her cheeks looked fat. She glanced down at the image of her body in street clothes and all she could see were huge thighs. “I can’t stand this!” she cried, then pummelled her thighs with her fists. “This is where those extra two pounds have settled.”

The door opened and the nurse was back. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I thought I heard someone crying.”

“I’m fine,” Paula said. “In fact, I feel so much better that maybe I don’t need to see a doctor after all.”

There was a tap on the door and a young man’s voice said, “It’s Doctor Tavish. May I come in?”

Dr. Tavish again? Damn! One thing Paula liked about coming to the clinic was that she rarely saw the same doctor twice. They could get so nosy, after all. This would be the second time in as many weeks that she happened to be assigned to Dr. Tavish. She would have to be extra careful with him.

The nurse looked at Paula questioningly. Paula nodded with resignation. “Come on in, Doctor T,” the nurse said.

Doctor T wasn’t more than five foot two and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. But he had a cute sandy-blond moustache and kind blue eyes. He didn’t look like a doctor—he looked like Paula’s kid brother playing doctor.

“What seems to be the problem?” Doctor T asked, quickly scanning the top page of her medical history.

“My back hurts.”

He motioned for her to get up on the examining table and with firm fingers, he traced the lines of her muscles through the back of her shirt. “Do you remember when the pain started?”