His father had died in 1955. It was not a dramatic death but quiet, like the man himself: he went to bed one night and did not wake up, slipping through a secret door. Cyril’s last glimpse of him was in the casket in church, crucifix in his folded hands, carrying an iron flower to the Lord. One of his earliest memories was watching him cut steel with a welding torch. Cyril wasn’t supposed to be watching because his father had warned it would damage his eyes, but unable to resist he’d opened the door that led down from the kitchen and peered between the steps, and for the next two days beautiful yellow spots hovered in his vision as though sunflowers were blooming in his eyes. For years afterwards, whenever he visited his dad’s grave he’d stare into the sun to relive that.
“At least he outlived that bastard,” his mother would always say.
Cyril didn’t have to ask who that bastard was. Uncle Joe. Koba the Dread. Any time his mother saw a picture of Stalin in a newspaper, book or magazine, she burned the eyes out with a match. It didn’t matter where she was, the waiting room at the doctor’s office, the library, a store, out came the matches. More than one person had shouted in alarm and yet she carried right on. Cyril remembered the day he came home from school, up the back steps and into the kitchen and was met by the smell of burning newspaper. There were his dad, his mother, and Paul hunched over a paper speaking low and intense, as if plotting. When they saw Cyril they went quiet. He’d come stumping up the steps but had nonetheless surprised them. Their expressions—round, flat, uncomprehending—said he was a stranger. It was as if he’d stumbled upon their campfire in the forest. Occasionally his dad would start speaking to Cyril in Ukrainian and then catch himself and halt as if he’d let a secret slip, and quickly shift to English. Yet over the years Cyril had heard enough to pick up some of the language, and the afternoon he discovered them hunched over the newspaper he heard Paul say, “Toy proklaty zdoh.”
“Who’s dead?”asked Cyril.
“No one,” said Paul. “Get lost.”
“Stalin,” said his dad.
Cyril’s mother and Paul embraced and sobbed and remained locked together swaying side to side while Cyril’s father watched with an expression as unreadable as his welding mask. He needed a shave and his hair was messed and he was in his working greens, and yet here he was, home an hour early. He went to the window. He was about five-foot-eight and broad across the shoulders. Cyril had inherited his sharp chin and large dark eyes. Exhaling hard as if at the end of an ordeal, his dad put his hands on his hips and gazed out, not at the cemetery but at the sky. It was March, almost spring, the sun bright and daffodils blooming. “See.” He pointed to a flock of starlings swooping from one maple to another. “The birds are free again.”
It was two weeks before he saw Connie. She showed up at the IGA on a Friday evening carrying an open package of red liquorice whips. She held the package out and he took one. Then she slid the crinkly package up under her black t-shirt and tucked it in. “You won’t rat me out will you?”
“Norm’ll nail you before you hit the door,”said Cyril. He tugged up the hem of her shirt and adjusted it to hide her loot, and as he did he glimpsed her pale smooth stomach, felt its heat against his hands, and wanted to embrace her, but she stepped back out of range.
“Aiding and abetting,”she warned.
He’d happily lose his job to win her again.
“So hey,”she said, “what happened? You kinda just vanished.”
“Me?”
Ignoring his shock she twirled her liquorice whip like a lasso. “You drawing?”
Drawing? What was she talking about? “Yeah, some. Sure.”
“You’re an artist, man. You should draw.”
“I’m not an artist,”he said, grimly. “I’m just some guy who draws.”
She frowned. It was as if an unresolved question had been answered, and Cyril immediately regretted his maudlin statement. She folded liquorice into her mouth then chewed and swallowed and said, “Then that’s all you’ll ever be.” She stated this as if it was a simple if sorrowful fact. For a full minute neither spoke. The muzak drifted down like nerve gas and the fluorescent lights hissed. “Anyhow,”she said with exaggerated offhandedness, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”She painted a horizon with a slow pass of her palm, “The distant land of Holy Wood calls to me, kemosabe. I must cross many mountains and fight many battles.” Then her shoulders sagged and her eyes grew moist and she reached and stroked his cheek. “Besides,” she whispered, voice thickening, “if I stay here I’ll never get away, I’ll never make it.”She quickly walked off up the aisle. Before going out the cold glass door with its poster advertising two-for-one frying chickens she turned and aimed her finger at him like a six-shooter. “Draw.” Then was gone.
Cyril stood there until Norm tapped him on the back. “Yoo hoo. Chef Boyardee ain’t gonna stack himself.”
His shift ended an hour later and he went straight to Connie’s. The evening was still warm, traffic had lulled and downtown throbbed with a tarnished glow. He walked back and forth in front of her house then went in the gate and up the steps and knocked. The sisal mat said WELCOME. The door opened and a small dark figure appeared on the other side of the screen door. Her grandmother pushed it open and looked him up and down.
“Elle pas d’ici.”
“Where is she?”He strained for the French. “Ou est-elle?”
“Haw-lee-wood… da da da da da Haw-lee-wood.”
Cyril ran all the way down the hill, through the cemetery, past Broadway, across the Cambie Bridge and along to the bus station opposite the armoury. Darting amid the buses he read the destinations: Calgary, Prince George, Seattle. He stepped up into the Seattle bus but she wasn’t there. He checked the waiting room. Families with suitcases, solitary men with duffel bags, a cat creeping along the wall by the washroom. He dropped to a bench and shut his eyes and counted to ten, thinking that when he opened them she’d be standing there. She wasn’t. He did another round of the station. Train. She was going by train. He jogged across the viaduct, in and out of the light of the widely spaced lamp posts, and along Main to the railway station and searched the waiting room and the platforms and even the park across the street and then the station again. No sign of her. He stood with his hands on his hips. He waited there, unmoving, for ten, fifteen, twenty more minutes. If not bus or train then how? Air? It took him an hour to get out to the airport. A flight had left for San Francisco forty minutes earlier—could she have been on it? Or was she hitch-hiking? He imagined her out on the highway, charming a stranger all the way down the coast.
His mother regarded him with eyes as solemn as gravestones. “You will survive.”
He didn’t want to survive, there was no point to surviving, surviving was not living it was subsisting, a half-life not worth the effort. He shrugged and said nothing. What was his pain compared to what she’d endured in the war? Anyway, he wasn’t merely heartbroken he was bewildered and embarrassed and even a little ashamed because clearly he wasn’t enough for Connie, or—and this was a shock—maybe he was too much, and would smother her career before it even had a chance to grow.