What I Want to Tell Goes Like This Page 6

  The ocean moved beneath Brighton’s car. Waves passed and never returned. He was being carried off, he thought, to a place where he would never sleep again.

  Palmer was in that place, he thought. At the bottom of that sea.

  Brighton sat up and ran his fingers through his hair. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to stop after all.

  He closed his eyes again. He and Palmer are walking out across swells of grassland. A short post-and-wire fence skates along beside them and then disappears into the distance like contrails into the obliterated blue.

  Where am I? Brighton thinks as the parched grass topples beneath their feet, tiny cities razed under their weight. He recognizes nothing. They are both children as they always are on these occasions. Brighton is sure nothing like this ever happened.

  Palmer carries a slingshot and a pocket of marbles, one of which he rolls around in his mouth like the eyeball of a fish. Then he spits out the marble, cradles it in the sling, turns and sends it hurtling at Brighton, the whole mass of the sun turned in on itself and dropped through Brighton’s head.

  Brighton opened his eyes. Water seeped out of his skin and through his clothes. He climbed between the front seat and out the driver’s side door.

  Standing outside the car, he took off his shirt and used it to towel his hair. Fuck this, he told himself, I just have to keep going. I have to get in the car and keep going. Fuck Palmer. Fuck this truck stop. I need to call Miriam.

  Brighton walked back towards the diner, past dreaming men high up in the sleeper compartments of their cabs. Somewhere amongst all this cargo, Brighton thought, a clutch of prizes from China awaits their final destination in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the loving hands of Edgar’s children. How long will that take?

  In the lobby, Brighton picked up the phone. Through the diner window he could see Palmer sitting at the bar reading a book. It was the man from the shower. The book was Treasure Island.

  Brighton fed the phone mouth a quarter and listened to it drop down the machine gullet like a pinball. The dial tone clicked in and he punched Miriam’s numbers.

  It rang and rang. It rang for a long time and Brighton was about to give up when the ringing stopped and a voice came on line.

  “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

  Brighton could not speak. He wanted to cry.

  “Palmer?” she said. “Is that you?”

  Brighton nodded. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said.

  “Where are you?”

  GRAND FORKS, 1917

  LORDLY AND HOT ALL across the valley. The open sky making waves of truculent blue in the air over the scrub fields and the vegetable gardens and the mountains and against the waters of the Kettle River and the Granby. Something was out there indeed, beyond everything seen and known, and whatever it was it was abstract and blue. In the pale fields the Russian exiles, who had laid down the yoke and whip and freed their beasts from the labour of the earth, worked their gas machines. There was a factory on the horizon full of bricks and ovens and more Russians who didn’t own anything they hadn’t been forced to own. Here, on the gently rolling earth, alongside a clutch of wooden barns and work sheds, garden plots, fruit trees stood the red brick house of Peter Vasilevich, spiritual leader of the exiles.

  Mid-afternoon and quiet near the compound except for the engine and chassis rattle of the black car approaching. At the wheel was a man named Vereshchagin who was too young to remember when his people refused to serve in the army of the Czar or the Transcaucasian Highlands where he was born or the grapes of Azerbaijan. He did not remember even his arrival as a child in the port of Vancouver and the bank of rain clouds piled against the mountains that morning. A young Englishman called Albert Goodwin, Secretary of the Trail Mill and Smeltermen’s Union, sat beside Vereshchagin looking out at the fields. They’d drawn down the windows for the merciful breeze that washed over them and their silence and filled their ears. As the car rumbled past, chickens appeared then disappeared from the wooden fence and from the oat grass at the edge of the drive.

  Peter Vasilevich, tall and lanky in his late fifties, his hair thinning, his beard full and trimmed—half black and half grey—greeted the car as it arrived at the house. There was a fanfare of dust and wavering heat. Dressed in a collarless cotton shirt, straw hat and leather sandals, Peter Vasilevich opened the car door for Goodwin.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he said, grasping Goodwin’s hand in both his hands and then Goodwin’s elbow and shaking his whole arm.

  Goodwin’s eyes went to the brick house and the scattering of wooden buildings. In the house the windows were dark with daytime glass. The car had been hot and the five-mile drive slow from the train station. Vasilevich and his people were rumoured to go naked on their compound. There was a peacock underneath a lilac tree.

  “Thank you,” Goodwin said looking finally into the eyes of the old Russian. Goodwin had heard of the man’s sternness, his zealotry—that his people had marched naked across the prairie to protest the seizure of their lands, that before they had machines, teams of women had pulled their plows to save their animal brethren the trouble. He knew Vasilevich was an enemy of politicians and an enemy of war: his young men had refused the draft on religious grounds. He knew Vasilevich was loathed by lawyers and businessmen and politicians, the same people who loathed Goodwin now that he’d finally gone against the company and struck, had threatened the production of ordnances for the European War. He knew these things. But he did not know what Peter Vasilevich wanted with him. They had never spoken.

  The invitation had arrived with Vereshchagin in Trail two days before. Goodwin met the young Russian in the parlour of the Meakin Hotel where Goodwin boarded. He had slept poorly and his teeth were sore. He coughed coming down the stairs and he was wiping his face when he saw Vereshchagin in the lobby. He’d written two letters that morning: one to the press restating the demand for an eight-hour workday and one to the union decrying the smelter-poisoned landscape: “How can we have hope,” he’d written, “when even the trees won’t grow now.”

  It was midday. Through the parlour window, while Vereshchagin talked at him in the dimness, Goodwin watched three Russian women in their long plain dresses selling strawberries and gooseberries and onions on the sloping street and beyond them the black smoke of the smelter towers leaning down over the Columbia as the yellowing river flowed south into America. The hills were blackened rock and arthritic scrub trees. In his mind’s eye he saw nothing; and then Yorkshire, Treeton, the colliery and the River Rother where he was born. Someone was writing the name of the town in the Book of Last Judgment. He heard little of what the young Russian man said. If he was hearing anything it was own tiring heart. When he saw Vereshchagin again two days later in the car outside the train station, Goodwin could not remember agreeing to make the sixty-mile trip to meet Vasilevich, though he knew he had.

  Goodwin thought none of this at that moment with the Russian exile in the summer of 1917.

  “A pleasure, Mr. Goodwin,” Peter Vasilevich said. He was still holding the Englishman’s hand and upper arm. He looked right into Goodwin’s eyes. Peter Vasilevich’s voice was deep and the rhythm of his English idiosyncratic but clear as is common among those who study a language efficiently but do not acquire its habits.

  No one knew who Peter Vasilevich really was except those who were closest to him and like most people who are close to another they were especially blind to the whole truth about him. Still, standing there in the open valley with the heat and fatigue, disembodied somehow so he felt as though he was standing behind and slightly above himself, Goodwin saw in the older man’s face the mysterious weight of his long exile, his separation from his wife and son, his brutal, sixteen-year tour of Russia’s great northern prisons, and he knew without words that there was an anger and cunning in Vasilevich that made him dangerous and real. This was why people followed him and why they hated him too.

  Vereshchagin closed his door and said nothing. He was so quiet he might not hav
e understood English at all.

  “Come,” said Peter Vasilevich, “we’ll talk in the shade.”

  He led Goodwin towards the house. Vasilevich took long casual strides as though they were strolling a St. Petersburg garden or the esplanade at Odessa. He seemed older to Goodwin than his age. He’d left too much of himself in prison. It was in the corners of his eyes and the slope of his shoulders. He wore his own history like vestments in his muscles and bones. They walked side by side, Goodwin and Vasilevich, and the tall Russian pointed out at the factory and at the gardens and the farm machines moving over the fields.

  “This is the industry of my people. We need no one except to sell our strawberries and bricks to. We will not go to war. We will not be enslaved. We work the land and share everything amongst ourselves. We are vegetarians because we cannot take a life. Everything is the work of the Lord. Our sons will kill no one and be killed by no one. Wars are foolish. There is no winning in war because always there is killing which is forbidden.”

  Vereshchagin fell in behind the two men as they walked towards the house. He was a silent interlocutor. His presence made Peter Vasilevich even more the leader and made Goodwin even more the cautious guest. Goodwin was aware of the younger Russian and also unaware. They were in a strange land. A squatters’ republic in the boundary country. Vereshchagin was the only pure citizen. He existed in that land alone. He didn’t follow when Vasilevich and Goodwin climbed the steps to the porch. He was an escort only and he didn’t know why Vasilevich needed the sickly Englishman who coughed often and blackly into his rag. He didn’t know and didn’t need to know.

  At the top of the steps, Goodwin glanced back at the young man who was dressed as Goodwin himself was in grey pants and waistcoat. The heat was melting the air on the dirt road across the farmland and over the hood of the car. High above flecks of black, which were birds, circled. Vereshchagin, who with his silence and dark suspicion already seemed to be fading into the bitter future, met the Englishman’s glance and held it. Then he disappeared beyond the lilacs around the far side of the house where the peacock had gone.

  On the porch, Vasilevich directed Goodwin to a small table covered in a spotless, white tablecloth. The cloth was fine and immaculately stitched but Goodwin saw only its whiteness, which appeared impossibly bright.

  “Sit,” said Vasilevich. “We will have tea.”

  Wisteria grew wearily over the railing and the air of the porch was embalmed in the acrid breath of the year’s last blooms.

  “Woven right here by our women,” said Peter Vasilevich, fingering the edge of the tablecloth. “We have looms now and can make all our fabrics but still we trade for cloth.”

  A woman in a grey frock and white apron appeared on the porch with a small samovar and placed it in the centre of the table. Vasilevich introduced the woman as his sister, Anna. She was dark like Vasilevich and Goodwin could believe she was his sister though he was not sure what the term sister might meant to Vasilevich; it was possible she was simply Russian and his sister in spirit or solidarity. With a long match she lit a small flame at the base of the samovar. The flame was blue and gilded with orange. Then she disappeared into the house again.

  “From Lev Nikolayevich,” said the older man of the samovar. “Count Tolstoy. A gift upon my departure. You have heard of him? He is our greatest writer.”

  It was a strange thing to Goodwin: silver and urn-shaped with flourishes of metal that woman, Anna, used as handles.

  “What is it?” asked Goodwin.

  “Samovar,” said Peter Vasilevich. “For tea.”

  Goodwin brought his rag to his mouth and coughed.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  Vasilevich lifted his hand as if dismissing something. “Please,” he said. “It is nothing. We are all sick.”

  Goodwin nodded. He was not yet thirty but he knew his days were closing in on him. His teeth and gums were rotting. He was drowning slowly in his own lungs. Pneumoconiosis. There was fine-powdered coal in his chest from Treeton and Glace Bay and the coalfields of Vancouver Island and his body would never give it up as long as he lived.

  Anna returned a moment later with two teacups and a small shallow teapot on a wooden tray. The pot was made of clay and glazed black, and the teacups were a white and blue china. There was also bread and jam and loaf sugar in a saucer and a lemon and a paring knife.

  “The zavarka,” Peter Vasilevich explained as he poured a splash of dark concentrate from the teapot into the cups. “Don’t drink yet,” he said grinning. “Make you crazy. You’ll become a pacifist! March nude into the smelter!”

  For a moment Goodwin said nothing. Then he said, “You have saved my life,” and for the first time that day he began to relax. Peter Vasilevich knew what was told of him: that he was insane, a communist, an enemy of the state. That he was a charlatan possessed of mind tricks—voodoo, hypnosis, hallucinatory drugs—that he held his people duped and captive. Goodwin did not have to hide it. There was common ground.

  “And your reputation,” said the Russian.

  “Such kindness,” said Goodwin.

  From the samovar Peter Vasilevich added boiling water to the cups. As steam ribboned from the tea, he took the lemon and the knife and cut two thin slices. He put one in each teacup.

  “When I first came here to this country,” he said, offering one of the cups to Goodwin, “I was seeing new things all the time. I remember being startled by electric lights. Someone would turn one on and the whole world would jump out at me. It is strange how we can get used to darkness. It happens so slowly we don’t even notice.”

  “I have been here seven years. Seven years and most of them in the west. I have never seen one of these things,” Goodwin said, gesturing at the table as if looking for the word.

  “Samovar.”

  “Samovar,” Goodwin said. “I have never seen a samovar.”

  “This is what our people use to make tea in Russia. Tolstoy. The Czarists. The revolutionaries. Your friends Vladimir Ilyich and Trotsky. It is what makes us Russian even when we are from Ukraine. When I first came here I used a translator. I never learned new words until I started speaking with my own mouth.”

  “I feel closer to you now.”

  “It is nothing, Comrade Goodwin.”

  “It is something.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Eat, eat.”

  The jam was dark and the bread thick. Peter Vasilevich used the sugar as a relish.

  “Do not offend me,” he said. “Eat.”

  Goodwin spread the jam on a slice of bread. He ate and it was good, though his mouth hurt even with the soft bread. When the Russian drank, Goodwin drank too.

  “They arrested Comrade Trotsky,” said Vasilevich.

  “Yes,” said Goodwin. “In Halifax.”

  “It was your country?”

  “No country of mine.”

  “The British?”

  “Yes. But they are not my people. This is the Commonwealth. The King is the king here. In the ports and the parliament. Trotsky is an enemy in Halifax and London.”

  “The King is the king everywhere, Comrade Goodwin.”

  Goodwin brought his rag to his mouth and coughed again.

  “Yes. Not in the mine, maybe. But yes.”

  “He was detained for a month?”

  “That’s what was reported.”

  Vasilevich chewed his bread.

  “Trotsky would tell them nothing,” he said, but Goodwin was unsure how much the Russian believed this.

  “What is there to tell? There’s no secret to Trotsky.”

  “The Kaiser is the King’s cousin, no?”

  “And the Czar’s.”

  “And the Czar’s,” said Vasilevich.

  “They are all the same to me, regardless”

  “And Trotsky?”

  “He’s no one’s king.”

  They ate more bread. Peter Vasilevich gave little away. Goodwin still didn’t know whose side Vasilevich was on or why he’d been
invited here. There were factions within factions and it was easy to be against the Kaiser without being with the socialists. Across the ocean, night had long fallen on Eastern Europe where the Russians were retiring along the Romanian border. On the Western Front the Canadians remained entrenched in Vimy drinking Napoleon brandy in small tin cups in the evening dimness. Goodwin wiped his brow. The peacock stood now in the drive beyond the black car, alone in the heat.

  “I can help you,” said Peter Vasilevich.

  “How?”

  “Soon you will be dead,” said Vasilevich.

  “Maybe.” Goodwin knew this was true.

  “If you report they will draft you and you will die at war.”

  “Yes,” said Goodwin. “Probably.”

  “If you stay, you will die anyway, only maybe not so soon. You will go to jail or you will be shot.”

  Goodwin waited. He knew it. But he was dying anyway.

  “They will get you.”

  “Maybe,” Goodwin said.

  “They will get you,” said Peter Vasilevich. “There are spies everywhere. They know you are here now even. They are watching me and they are watching you. They know everything you do. You won’t be able to hide.”

  Goodwin didn’t know. The exiles kept to themselves. People hated them because their young men stayed home and worked while the other young men went to die in the Belgian mud. They hated them because they were different and wished to remain so. When the Russians were forced to register their land under individual names many burned their houses to the ground. He wanted for a clear and simple path to open in front of him. He had never been in love and suddenly he was grateful he’d been spared the anguish.