The Ladies' Lending Library (27 page)

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
.”