The Ladies' Lending Library (14 page)

At last she rises silently, cautiously, without letting the bedsprings creak even once, groping her way to the kitchen for a drink of water. The stove clock with its cracked face tells her it’s only two. Not a sound from the room where Marta’s sleeping—Darka’s room. Darka’s been packed off to the sleep-house, and Sonia doesn’t like the arrangement at all, it makes her nervous not to have the girl under her roof. Though what good would that do—how could you keep the worst from happening, when what was supposed to have been the best has turned out as it has?

Carefully, as gently as if she were touching the face of one of her children, Sonia opens the side door and looks out across the lawn to the sleep-house. Still as the grave, she thinks, pulling the lapels of her pyjamas closer. She doesn’t want to think about graves, she can’t stop herself hearing her mother, in her hospital bed, in pain so fierce you’d think it was skinning her, saying, “I would grab at a straw floating in the river to keep on living.”

The kitchen clock says 2:14, as if to spite her: it seems to her hours since she left her husband’s bed, opening the door onto a skyful of stars. Sonia makes her way once more to the children’s rooms, going in to them, covering them if the blankets have been tossed to the floor, sometimes bending to stroke their hair. By Laura’s bed she stops for the longest time, afraid to touch
her—she’s no longer a child, she has lost that ferociousness, that fever-sleep the little ones are still consumed by. And here, sleeping spoons beside her, Sonia’s golden one, her sweet, sunny Bonnie, whom she always has to keep herself from kissing, from throwing her arms around and holding, lest the others see that she’s Sonia’s favourite, the only one she loves without reserve.

Across the hall, Katia lies with her arms flung back, as if she is dancing wildly in her dreams. But when Sonia bends over the baby, the one who will only let herself be kissed when she is sleeping, she gives a little cry that makes Katia stir in her sleep; stir but not wake. Alix’s round, black eyes are wide open, staring up at her mother like pools into which the whole night has fallen. “Go to sleep,” Sonia whispers, using the old language, the one in which her mother sang lullabies to her in the Old Place. But Alix keeps staring up at her, her eyes accusing, as always. Until it seems to Sonia that the only way she can close them is by taking the baby into her arms, pressing her head against her breast, and carrying her outside.

Out onto the veranda, and the stairs that so badly need fixing. So warm, still, though it’s the middle of the night, a dark fragrant with pine and cedar, not the chocolate smell of summer nights at her mother’s house downtown. Not her mother’s house any more: it was sold weeks after her death. They’d had to scramble to clear it out, lugging boxes and boxes of what Max called junk to the basement of their house in the suburbs. Lamps and blankets and cooking pots; an envelope of yellowed paper on which, in pale purple ink, were marked the fields that had never been sold, that now lay under the jaws of some giant tractor on a collective farm.
Moyee polya
—my fields: words like a tongue dipped in chocolate, as soft as the most expensive velvet. Or the angora muff Mr.
Streatfield had once given her as a present, and that she hadn’t dared to show her mother, keeping it always in her drawer, taking it out sometimes to hold its impossible softness to her face.

Settling herself on the top step, holding Alix against her, feeling the child’s open eyes against her breast, Sonia tilts her head to look up at stars scratched upon the sky, endless and unreachable. She remembers waking up from the anaesthetic after Alix was born, waking in an isolation room, a belt of stinging blisters below her breasts, around her back, cinching her tight, so tight the skin felt rubbed entirely away. Shingles, it was called; it had been too painful for Sonia to nurse the baby, and so her mother had looked after the child, feeding her from a bottle every few hours. If it hadn’t been for Baba Laryssa, Alix would never have thrived, and now her baba is lying in a place dark as a night without moon or stars, without the smell or feel or even the memory of milk, or skin, or angora.

Sonia gathers Alix to her, the child’s body no longer stiff in her arms, no longer holding out against her but soft, collapsed into sleep. So that the mother can drop her mouth to her baby’s head and kiss the thick, dark hair, not demanding anything back, just feeling the soft warmth of the small body next to her own. “She’s dead, baby, and I will die, and you will die too, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.” The boat out from Gdynia, the
Marshal Pilsudski,
with the brass band and the sailors more like machines than men in their uniforms so spanking new, trouser creases you could cut yourself on. Holding Peter’s hand, pushing through a forest of trousered legs and thick wool skirts, lisle stockings. Till they got to the railings and held on for dear life, breathing in the salt sting of the sea so far below. No river that could drown her, filling her nose and mouth with dark; no river but a blue-black
road that would take her away, forever. From the village where she couldn’t face anyone, could hardly breathe any more; from the best part of her life, the child she’d once been in that village: at home, at one, complete.

The stars are sailing wherever it is they are meant to go, or not meant, it is all the same, thinks the woman sitting on the rotting steps of a summer cottage, holding a sleeping child against her breast. Throwing her head back and staring up at that starry, inky double of the sea, that road that she will never travel now, no matter how urgent, how huge her longing. The child’s mouth lies open at her breast as if she were about to nurse, drinking the milk her mother no longer has, and never wants to have again. Sonia recites, very softly, the words of the rhyme her children have taught her, words that have no meaning for her, or a meaning that is faint, unreadable, like the print on a dress that has been washed too many times:

S
unday afternoon, when it’s still too early to think of tonight’s traffic and tomorrow’s appointments, Max goes down to the beach. He’s finished whatever jobs could be compassed in a forty-eight-hour stay: putting a patch on the leaky roof, fixing the latch on the kitchen door. The steps on the front porch will have to wait till next summer. These two hot, empty hours in the afternoon are his gift to himself: he’s going to bake in the sun for a while, and then play with the children. Sonia’s up at the cottage with Marta, who refuses to come down to the beach: she will get sunstroke, the arthritis in her legs is so bad she can barely move, she needs to take her medicine at three. It has already begun, the two-step Marta and Sonia will perform for the next six days of Marta’s stay: Marta piling up objections, Sonia attempting to knock them
down: you will not get sunstroke, thanks to the beach umbrella bought at the hardware in Midland, just for your visit; the hot sand will be good for your arthritic legs, much better than a heat lamp; you can take your medicine with some lemonade I’ll have ready in the cooler I’ll carry down to the beach. But as in any dance, only one person can lead: already, Sonia has bowed to her partner, spending the best part of the day keeping her company in the stifling cottage, while the rest of them enjoy the breeze rustling the grasses in the dunes, or send beach balls spinning across the sand.

“Tatu,” Katia yells, rushing up to where Max lies spread-eagled on his blanket. “Tatu,” she cries, “
please
let us bury you!”

At first he pretends not to hear, but then, as the other children dance around him, even Laura, who’s been in one of her moods all weekend, he flaps his hands on the beach blanket, a signal for the kids to jump on him and tickle him till he begs for mercy. Until he finally rolls over and off the blanket, landing on his back on a platter of pale, dry sand.

It takes them a good twenty minutes. At first the sand is hot; it stings as it sprays across his face, over the lips and eyelids he’s trying to shut tight. Of course you’re not supposed to bury anyone’s face, that’s against the rules, but sand meant for your shoulders always ends up in your eyebrows and salting your moustache. Soon, however, the children reach the excavating stage, when the sand they heap over their father’s legs and chest and arms turns heavy, damp, like cold brown sugar. He imagines his body rising up like some mountain range—the Rockies or the Himalayas. He thinks of his head islanded in all this sand, taking in the sounds of his children, their frantic pleasure, the gravity of Laura’s directives: “Not like that, Katia, you’ll cause a cave-in at his elbows,”
and Katia’s blithe disregard: “Hey, his kneecaps keep showing through, they look like volcanoes!” A scrabbling pressure on his chest—”Somebody get the baby, she’s ruining everything!”—and then a crescendo of yells as Darka carries off Baby Alix.

At last, when the children have stomped the sand down with their feet and then heaped on another few pails for good measure, comes the chief delight. Their father, shaking his head and yawning as if roused from a hundred-year sleep, flexes first one arm, and then the other, tries and fails to shake a leg free, wriggles his toes and sets off the first of the avalanches. Until, with the roar of a lion, he heaves his whole body up in one great rush, throwing fans of sand into the air as he plunges into the lake, the children screaming as they run in after him.

Once they’ve splashed him clean, and he’s dived down to grab their ankles, once they’ve all lined up to wriggle through his outstretched legs, he tells them it’s Tato’s time now, which means he swims out, with his powerful, steady crawl stroke, far away from the group of small, tanned bodies. Bonnie, standing on a rock so the water reaches only to her waist, watches him with her fingers in her mouth, sucking anxiously each time his head disappears, praying,
Pleasepleaseplease let him come up again.
But at last, after he’s swum sixty, seventy, eighty strokes so that his handsome head is only a dark dot, he turns, waves—and comes back to them. How they love it when he stands up on the first sandbar, ten feet tall, the water streaming down his arms and chest, and how they love the way he cleans the water from his eyes with the flat of his hands, then combs his thick brown hair straight back with his fingers. He is the best-looking father at the whole beach, the best swimmer, and the only grown-up, besides Uncle Peter, they will ever include in their play.

Now it’s leapfrog on the sand, Max pretending to trip and making spectacular, somersaulting falls. “Horsing around” is what Sonia calls it, standing at the lookout post on the edge of the lawn while Marta’s still in the washroom. Horsing around. Her father had never played with her or her brother like that—and yet he’d been a good man, decent and hard-working even after his accident, managing the pain with sips of what he called “medicine,” from a shot glass. But never to excess—he was always dignified, her father. Unlike Peter. Unlike Max, making a fool of himself now in front of everyone. She bites at her lip, pushes her hair out of her eyes. He makes a fool of himself and they love him for it—when they are grown and think back to their summers at the beach they will remember playing leapfrog with their father, burying him in sand, and never spare a thought for the days and days she’s spent washing and cooking and cleaning, rubbing calamine lotion on sunburns, cutting up endless watermelons, making hundreds of jugs of lemonade.

“Soniu!
Shcho tam?
” Marta’s voice, flapping from the porch off the kitchen.

“Nothing,” Sonia shouts back, knowing how it annoys Marta when they speak to her in English. What would happen, she asks herself, if, instead of turning back to the cottage, where Marta will be sitting with a heap of darning (she has found a plastic bag of the children’s socks with great holes rubbed through the heels, socks Sonia was going to use for cleaning rags)—if, instead of turning back, she were to run down to the beach and join them, laugh and tumble with them on the sand?
Go if you want to.
She hears a voice, her mother’s voice, like a flower tucked behind her ear. But something huge and smothering settles on her shoulders, pushing her back to where her sister-in-law is waiting for her, holding the
door open, letting in the mosquitos they’ll be swatting all through the slow August night.

It’s Bonnie he catches in his arms, swinging her high, high in the air and down to his shoulders, wading with her into the water. It’s the last treat of the afternoon, one of them getting to ride on their father’s back to the rock they’ve christened Australia; to lie down in the sun beside him, having him all to herself for a whole half-hour.

His daughters are all dear to him—Laura because she’s his first-born, the details of her infancy and childhood etched on his memory, so that with each subsequent baby he’s relived Laura’s first tooth or word or step. Katia because of her flair for mischief, the way she dances her way through life without caring what anyone will think or say, knowing she can outwit them all. And Alix because she’s still a baby, and he has no idea yet of what she will become. But Bonnie is the gentlest, and with her red-gold hair, her brown, gold-speckled eyes, the most beautiful by far. No one in his family or Sonia’s has that colouring. None of the children looks like her mother—is that why, in spite of nursing them through fevers and all the childhood diseases, dressing them so smartly and making sure they get their vitamin this and that, and brush their teeth at night, she’s held herself apart from them? As if her heart’s a small room into which she’s locked herself, with no place for anyone but her parents’ ghosts and whatever she thinks she might have made of herself if she’d never married, or at least, never married him.

“Bonnie,” he says, sitting her down on the rock, heaving himself up to its broad, blank face, the water sluicing off his back, trickling through the brown thicket of his chest. “Bonnie, I want you to
be a help to your mother this week. It’s hard for her with Chucha Marta here.”

“Yes, Tatu,” Bonnie says, shifting closer, leaning her small, damp body in its frilled suit towards him.

“You know your mother’s still sad about Baba Laryssa. It takes a long, long time to get over …” His voice trails off; he is reluctant to say the word
death
in front of his daughter, just as he wouldn’t be able to tell an off-colour joke, or swear in the presence of any of his children.

“Tell me again about Chucha Marta,” Bonnie asks, “and why we have to be nice to her.”

He sighs, and stretches out his legs so they lift slowly from the water, then splash back.

“You know that when Baba Motria and your Dyeedo Martyniuk came to Canada—”

“There was a war on.”

“Clever Bonnie. Can you tell me which war?”

“Worldwarwon.”

“Exactly. And at that time, the part of Ukraine where Baba and Dyeedo were living was under Austria.”

Bonnie pictures her grandparents in a pool of murky water; someone is trying to hold their heads under, the way Pavlo Vesiuk tried to do with her last week, though she never told on him.

“If Baba and Dyeedo hadn’t escaped, secretly, in the middle of the night, Dyeedo would have been taken into the Austrian army. He would have ended up in the trenches, he would probably have been killed. A friend came to warn him: they had to flee.”

Bonnie bites her lip at the word
flee:
it’s a sign that something terrible is coming, the part in the story she can never understand.

“You know that Baba and Dyeedo had two little girls back in the
old country. They were very sick; they had diphtheria. The name doesn’t matter—what you have to remember is this: there were no doctors and no medicine. No one knew if those little girls would live or die—they were far too sick to be moved. And so …”

He doesn’t say
they got left behind.
He doesn’t say it was ten years before the sister who survived got off the train at Union Station, a sign round her neck, so that the parents who couldn’t recognize her any more, and the brother she didn’t know existed, would be able to greet her. He doesn’t say that Marta did not laugh or cry or spit or smile all the way from Union Station to the dark, narrow house on Dupont Street where she finally fell asleep clutching the carpet bag that had been her only luggage, and sucking her knuckle. He doesn’t want his daughter to know what he knows.

“You have to be kind to Chucha Marta because of what a hard life she’s had. She doesn’t mean to be scolding and complaining all the time—it’s just the way she is, like someone with a handicap, with a blind eye, or a wooden leg. A week isn’t such a long time, Bonnie. Be as nice to her as you can, it’ll make things easier for your mother. I’m trusting you—you’re the only one I can trust to help me out like this.”

Bonnie puts her arms around her father and leans into his chest. The thick hair tickles her, the ooze of suntan oil that hasn’t yet washed off in the water. She is thinking not about Chucha Marta, nor about Baba Motria and Dyeedo Martyniuk, long in their graves. She is wondering whether Chucha Marta’s sister is with Baba Laryssa, looking down at them all from the edge of God’s eye in Heaven.

“Okay,
Rybochko
? We’d better go back.”
Little fish:
it’s his pet name for her, though he’s long been reconciled to “Bonnie.” Funny,
how after his father’s thunderings and his mother’s head-shakings, he’d finally come to realize that Bonnie is the perfect name for this daughter, the only name that could ever do her justice.
Rybochka
is a pet name, a private name, but Bonnie is the name under which she will sail out into the world, a flag spelling
happily ever after.
Funny, too, how after all these years and all these second thoughts, he has never been able to confess as much to Sonia:
You were right, and I was wrong.
What if he had told her last night, when they got into the sagging bed together, the bed with the antique mattress he’s been meaning for years to replace? With something new, untouched and unstained, far too good for the cottage. Far too good, but never good enough, and yet exactly what is needed now.

Bonnie clambers onto her father’s back, hugging his neck just tight enough that she won’t fly off when he dives. It always terrifies her; her stomach is a knot like a tangled skipping rope as they plunge. Holding tighter as they hit the water, she swallows a mouthful, coughing and spluttering, as her father calls out, “
Dobreh, Rybochko
?” and she can barely answer back, “
Dobreh,
Tatu.” And it’s true; everything is fine as they swim back to shore. As long as they’re together like this, everything will always be fine.

Hungry or not, the whole family sits down to what Sonia calls “a proper supper” at six o’clock each Sunday, while everyone else, Katia keeps pointing out, eats sandwiches on the beach, or does a lazy barbecue—hot dogs, hamburgers, relish for a vegetable—on the lawn. “We are not,” her mother answers, “everyone else. Decent families sit down to a proper Sunday meal together.”
You are a decent family,
sing the ham that’s been roasting for the past three hours, the potato salad and runner beans and glazed baby carrots on plates Laura thinks of as planets stuck in low gear, or
seats on a Ferris wheel with a stalled motor. Plates her mother heaps with food, then hands to Max to pass round, the first one travelling from Darka to Laura to Katia to Bonnie to the guest, Chucha Marta.

“Is anything wrong, Marta?” Sonia calls out to the woman sitting with lips pursed, fork poised to stab the ham as though it were going to rise from the plate and attack her. Marta’s shrug is the only answer Sonia gets:
Things can’t help but be wrong in a household run by such a featherbrain, so what’s the use of asking?
Immediately, the ham on Sonia’s plate starts to looks raw and slippery, the potato salad becomes a pile of furred, white pebbles, as Max says,
“Smachnoho,”
and the eating begins.

What little talk there is takes place in Ukrainian, the children reduced to “Please pass the milk” or “May I have the butter?” “I suppose the traffic will be bad tonight,” Sonia says to no one in particular, to ease the strain. Max just shakes his head, and Marta, making a comment on the stupidity, the waste of buying summer cottages, might just as well be spitting out a caterpillar.