Amidst the outrageous outfits, there were a few people who must have come only to sightsee. Kat noticed that these people wore regular black clothing — black jeans, shirts, skirts — but no vinyl and nothing daring.
There were a number of small tables scattered around the room where people clustered for conversation. Each table was anchored in place with a pole that extended from floor to ceiling. The walls were mostly painted black, but some parts were metallic, and Kat could see the outline of machine sculpture through the cigarette smoke.
There were a few people dancing frenetically, but most were either talking, or just walking around, enjoying the sights. Kat looked up and saw that there were some raised platforms decorated to look like jail cells. People were dancing up there too.
"Do you want to dance?" asked Lisa, motioning her towards the centre of the floor.
"No," said Kat.
Lisa pulled Ian to the dance floor and Kat watched.
It was such a welcome change to have such extreme sensory overload. The music was so loud and the lights flashing were so intense that it blocked out all thought. She revelled in the anonymity of it all.
CHAPTER 28
KAT WAITED ALL day Sunday, but Michael didn't call. Once, she picked up the phone and began to dial his number, but she changed her mind halfway through and put the receiver back on the cradle.
She opened the front curtains, thinking that maybe Michael was walking down the street to her house, but all she saw was the woman with the picket sign.
She was filled with impatient energy and a million thoughts. There was really only one thing that would ever settle her down, and that was to set her mind free by creating something with her hands. It was only days after Christmas, but what Kat had the urge to create was a pysanka — a written egg.
It felt odd to be getting out the mason jars of dye from their dark storage area months before Easter, but the sight of them brightened her spirits. A written egg was hope. And she could never write just one egg. After all, once you got the dye out and tested it to see which colours needed replacing, and then once you found some really nice smooth and perfect chicken eggs, it seemed a shame to just make one.
On a sketchpad, Kat quickly drew the outlines of a few ideas she had swirling in her head. She wanted one or two of her eggs to be fairly traditional, but she wanted to combine the old symbols in a new way. She experimented with a motif of dots, symbolizing the Virgin's tears, and waves, symbolizing immigration, but then she scratched that out. Stylized sheaves of wheat? No. Too typical. Kat tried to think of Easter eggs she'd seen when she was younger. She remembered the first time she had seen swastikas on a Ukrainian Easter egg. She was barely seven years old. Her grandparents had taken Kat and Genya to a travelling exhibit that had come to the Ukrainian community centre and some of the eggs were from the 1800s.
"Look at that pretty egg," she had said to her grandparents, pointing to a red and white pysanka decorated with a broad band of yellow and black stylized crosses. The label in front of it stated that it had been made in 1882.
"That used to be pretty, but not any more," replied her grandfather.
Kat looked up, startled by the anger in his voice.
"Those crosses, the ‘swastika' used to mean the wheel of life. It is ancient: thousands of years old."
"What do they mean now, Dido?" Kat had asked.
"Death," he replied huskily. "Death and hate. They shouldn't even display those eggs."
Even at that age it had startled Kat to think that something out of context could cause such pain.
She tried to reconcile this thought of Dido's reaction to the swastikas many years ago and what she had heard at the hearing. Her grandfather was repulsed at a visceral level. Yet he had worked for the Nazis. It didn't make sense.
Kat turned her attention back to her egg. She gave up on trying to sketch something altogether. "I'll just write on the egg and see where it takes me."
Kat struck a match and then lit the small stub of a candle that was nestled in a pool of hardened wax inside the lid of a peanut butter jar. She grabbed the red-handled kistka from the TV tray and stuck the metal tip into the flame. She had three different kistkas.The red-handled one had the thickest nib and she used it to write the broad outlines of designs. It was also good for filling in broad areas of colour. The blue handled kistka had a narrower nib, and the white had the narrowest of all. So narrow, in fact, that it kept getting clogged with soot from the candle. Kat had bought a metal wire finer than baby hair at the Arka store to clean it out with.
When the tip of the red-handled kistka was blackened and warm, she dipped the head into her cake of beeswax, then blotted it on a paper towel to make sure it didn't drip. Then swiftly, without even thinking of what or where the kistka would take her, she began blocking out sections with broad swift lines of blackened beeswax upon the egg.
She looked down at her egg and realized that she had blocked off the traditional pattern of forty triangles. There were a number of classic base patterns to a pysanka and one of the most difficult to do freehand was the forty triangles. Kat had never done it before without drawing the outline lightly in pencil first. She was amazed at the steadiness of her hands. I guess it pays not to be trying too hard, she thought to herself.
She set the egg down on a dishtowel and opened up the jar of red dye. With a teaspoon, she dipped the egg in gingerly, then resealed the jar. This one would sit till tomorrow.
"I'll start one more today," she said to herself, drawn to a beautifully smooth creamy white egg that seemed more oblong than the others. Since she had so much success writing freehand before, she decided to try it again, only this time with the blue-handled kistka.
As she heated the tip over the candle flame, Kat thought back to the testimony she had heard. Nothing she had heard had implicated her grandfather. But she was curious about why he would have become an auxiliary police officer in the first place? What could he possibly have been thinking of? Why hadn't he simply run away? She almost feared what he would testify.
Kat looked down at the egg she was currently working on and was startled to see that she had blocked the egg with a band down the middle and then another band perpendicular to it. It was like a motif of crosses. Behind the crosses, Kat had begun to draw a cross-hatch pattern: a fine mesh. This was a classic pattern and symbolic of a fisherman's net. Could it also be symbolic of the net that was closing in around her grandfather?
She blew out the candle, then set the egg down on the dish-towel. She opened up the mason jar of brilliant yellow, then gently plopped in the egg with a fresh teaspoon. Sealing the lid back up, she set the jar beside the one with the red dye. "I can hardly wait to see what you two eggs look like tomorrow," she said to herself.
CHAPTER 29
THE NEXT FOUR days saw more witnesses for the plaintiff. First on the stand was a retired immigration officer. Mr. Conrad Draycott had been stationed as a screening officer in Karlsruhe, Germany from 1948 to 1952. During those years, Mr. Draycott screened thousands of Eastern European displaced persons who wanted to immigrate to Canada.
Mrs. Caine began the questions. "Mr. Draycott, can you tell me how you went about deciding who could come into Canada and who was to be screened out?"
Mr. Draycott had an oblong face and a surprisingly full head of steel grey hair. While his arms and legs were long and lanky, the man also sported a substantial stomach, and in order to accommodate this, the waist of his navy blue trousers settled between his chest and navel, and his tie was tucked into his leather belt.