Watermelon Syrup: A Novel (Life Writing)

Watermelon Syrup

LIFE WRITING SERIES In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes life writing and new life-writing criticism in order to promote autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives. Life Writing features the accounts of ordinary people, written in English, or translated into English from French or the languages of the First Nations or from any of the languages of immigration to Canada. Life Writing will also publish original theoretical investigations about life writing, as long as they are not limited to one author or text. Priority is given to manuscripts that provide access to those voices that have not traditionally had access to the publication process. Manuscripts of social, cultural, and historical interest that are considered for the series, but are not published, are maintained in the Life Writing Archive of Wilfrid Laurier University Library.

Series Editor Marlene Kadar Humanities Division, York University Manuscripts to be sent to Brian Henderson, Director Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

Watermelon Syrup a novel

Annie Jacobsen

with Jane Finlay-Young and Di Brandt

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Jacobsen, Annie, 1946–2005 Watermelon syrup : a novel / Annie Jacobsen ; with Jane FinlayYoung and Di Brandt. (Life writing series) ISBN 978-1-55458-005-7 IV.

I. Finlay-Young, Jane, 1958– Series.

PS8619.A255W38 2007

II .

Brandt, Di

III .

C813'.6

Title. C2007-902873-X

Text © 2007 Estate of Annie Jacobsen Foreword © 2007 Jane Finlay-Young Afterword © 2007 Di Brandt Cover design and cover photograph by David Drummond. Text design by Pam Woodland. Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

' ● This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled). Printed in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 - 893-5777.

For Eric and Susie

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Foreword by Jane Finlay-Young

Watermelon Syrup is a fictionalized account of Annie Jacobsen’s family story. When Annie’s mother, Katherine Becker (née Goerz), was dying of cancer and Annie herself was fighting the same disease, she began writing vignettes to entertain her mother. The vignettes were based on stories Annie had heard about Katherine’s Mennonite childhood in Russia and Saskatchewan. These small stories grew and became this book. Annie came from a line of storytellers and writers. Both her grandmother and her uncle kept extensive journals, even though they belonged to a predominantly oral, traditionalist community. Annie’s grandmother, Helena Goerz (née Regier), wrote an account of Mennonite life in Russia, of the family’s journey to Canada, and of settling in Saskatchewan. John Goerz, Annie’s uncle, wrote a more extensive account of the same events. Much of what is recounted in Willy’s notebook in Watermelon Syrup is cited directly from John’s journal. Both Helena’s and John’s writings are alive with detail and passion for the lands they worked and lived on and the communities they lived in. Katherine recorded stories of her childhood on tape with the help of her daughter, Kate. Susie Jacobsen, Annie’s daughter, conducted considerable research for the novel. Thus, four generations of writers have contributed to the story you are about to read.

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Annie Jacobsen (née Dorothy Becker) died on May 17, 2005. Annie and I had known each other for about seven years by the time she died, and during those years writing was a huge part of our friendship. We developed The Mini Writing Career, a series of writing workshops; we wrote with each other and we were readers of each other’s worksin-progress. Two weeks before Annie died she finished the third draft of this novel. Before she died, she asked me to work with the manuscript on her behalf, should the novel ever be accepted for publication. I said yes because I knew the manuscript was already whole, had already found its voice and the story was already fully developed. But, as with most manuscripts before they arrive on a publisher’s desk, it needed further revising and polishing before it was ready for print. Eileen Mercier, Annie’s literary executor and long-time friend, found the manuscript a home at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Brian Henderson, director of WLUP, contacted award-winning author Di Brandt, who agreed to act as consultant during the revision process. Di and I worked closely together as I took the novel through two more drafts. Di provided generous and invaluable editorial feedback, including extensive information and insight on Mennonite history and culture. Working with Annie’s words has been a privilege, a pleasure and a most amazing journey. “Working with Annie,” I want to say, because there were many times during this last year of rewriting that I would close my eyes and invoke her—her laughing, sparkling, intelligent presence. It is hard now to let her go, to let this book go. I can only hope, Annie, that Di and I have done your beautiful book justice. I wish to thank Annie’s siblings, Kate Delmage, Helen Miskelly and David and Gordon Becker, who helped clarify many details and sent photos, family documents and support. And a special thank-you to Annie’s children, Susie and Eric, who enthusiastically supported the project throughout. On many levels, this book is about survival. It is the story of a family and a community and their dislocation from their homeland, and survival in the New World. It is also the story of individual survival, of a young woman’s fight for self-determination against restrictions imposed by her father and her religion. And, finally, it is the story of

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Annie’s survival. Annie wrote this novel as she was dying. Through pain and pain medication and chemotherapy and uncertainty, Annie wrote. Through her words, she survives still. Halifax, Nova Scotia May 2007

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Prologue Aleksandra pulls out the last of the old yellow notebooks as she waits for the nurse to call her in this kingdom of softly whirring machines. It had seemed a good idea to bring the notebook to pass the time, but now she’s not so sure. She glances, pen poised, at the pink waiting room wall. It’s the same colour as the watermelons she remembers from her childhood. White cake drenched in watermelon syrup. So sweet it made your teeth hurt. It made her think of her Oma’s garden in Blumenort, in southern Russia. The heavy board swing, the thick, frayed ropes burning her hands as she rocked back and forth, singing one of the many gorgeous spring songs they used to sing. Der Mai ist gekommen / die Bäume schlagen aus / da bleibe, wer nicht Lust hat / mit Sorgen zu Haus! May has come and the trees are blossoming. If you can’t be joyful now, keep your sorrow at home. Oma’s barn was so often filled with huge piles of watermelons, as well as baskets of apples and pears. She can still smell that sweet smell of fermenting hay and grain and fruit. Every summer she and her brothers celebrated the first juicy red pieces of watermelon with seed spitting contests. Aleksandra touches her chin. How clear her memory is of the feel of watermelon juice running down it. How clear all the memories are from those last few years, before they had to leave. Memories of prosperity, of their large homes and endless harvests. She was still so young when they left Russia for Canada, just nine, and her childish memories have mostly retained the beauty of 1

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the land and the joy of the community and the celebrations of their prosperity. But, like most things in this life, she thinks, and closes her eyes at the thought, like most things there’s another, darker side. It has never ceased to amaze and disturb her how something good can so rapidly turn sour. Like milk from one day to the next. Like her strong and beautiful body that is now crumbling. What was it that her Mama said as she was dying? Try to erase bitterness. Yes, it is a precious piece of advice that Aleksandra has clung to all these years. How tragic that bitterness got the best of Mama. She writes down, Watermelon syrup. Summer. 1919. This is the event that started everything tumbling. She looks around the waiting room, her hand trembling, and writes: The whole house drenched in syrup, the pottery smashed, bags of flour ripped open, Mama’s skirt stuck to the floor. She closes her eyes. She didn’t see any of that awfulness. She was only three then. But she knows it. She knows every unbelievable detail. She didn’t see any of it because she was hiding in the barn. Willy’s written words, God bless him, are what she remembers. It’s through Willy’s eyes that she sees those terrible moments. Willy was always the writer in the family. His notebook full of their life in Russia and their journey to Canada. She was seventeen when she read it, but she remembers the words still. She shivers, thinking of that long, unbearable winter, reading late into the night by the stove, trying to keep warm, trying to turn the pages carefully so no one would wake. Willy’s words had been so shocking. The summer of 1919, when the Anarchists raided their beautiful homes and Mama was… She lifts her pen from the paper. They had been quite well off. It had been such a hardship to lose it all. How had they survived all that chaos? White Army, Red Army, Black Army, Bolsheviks, Anarchists, robbers, Czarists, Makhno…all these names and the terror that comes with them running around in her head still, after all these years. All that fighting, and then the famine of 1921. Those few years after the famine were the years in Russia that she remembers best. The years of watermelon syrup and plenty. But

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then there was the abolition of religion that had finally driven her family out of Russia. She knows all that with her head, but not her heart. If she’s going to tell her story she must start with what matters most, to her. So, how to start? Coming to Canada? Perhaps she should start there? Their struggle to settle in this strange and lonely land. Papa not able to make a living as a farmer, losing the house and the land. It all seemed so hopeless until he was given his teaching job and they moved into that shack of a house a mile and a half out of town. They were so isolated. Mama was so unhappy. And then the Depression. The Depression had almost broken them. The Mennonites who had come to Canada in the 1800 s were of peasant stock, they had been poor forever, they suffered the Depression so much more robustly. But those that came in 1925, they were softer, more educated, used to an easier life. Could she write about that? Did she want to? Was that her story? Aleksandra lets her pen fall into the centre of the open notebook and laces her arthritic fingers together. No, it all feels more like Willy’s story, the story he’s already written down in his notebook. Mrs. Bauer? She looks up at the young girl in the maroon volunteer jacket standing in front of her. About sixteen or seventeen, she guesses. She’s wearing jeans and running shoes, a slim strip of slender white belly flashing in the gap between her jeans and her T-shirt. We’d like to weigh you now, if that’s, like, OK ? Before the doctor sees you. Aleksandra pulls herself up and slowly follows her to the scale near the clinic reception desk. The girl reminds her of someone. You’re quite young to be a volunteer, aren’t you? she says. Well, actually, I’m almost seventeen. Oh. Aleksandra smiles, noting how pretty she is. The girl, who has longish blonde hair and blue eyes, is blushing bright pink. She wonders if she’s a Mennonite. The name tag says Susanna. That could be a Mennonite name. Well, I think it’s wonderful that you can do this so young.

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The girl smiles and helps her on to the scale. Aleksandra automatically reaches up to adjust the weight on the bar, her old training asserting itself, and then stops. She’ll let Susanna do it. Do you want to be a nurse? she asks. No. I’m hoping to go to medical school to become a doctor. You have to have volunteer experience. She fiddles with the weight. You’ve gained half a pound since last week, she says brightly. Can I get you anything before you go in? No, thank you, Susanna. If only she could put her arms around her. Back in her chair, she watches as Susanna calls another patient to be weighed. A woman in her early thirties, in jeans and a sweatshirt, is reading a movie magazine. A middle-aged woman furrows her brow and speaks into a cellphone in a low voice. A young mother fusses over her baby, who has begun to whimper in his stroller. The mother’s older child reminds her of Sally Oliver. Sally was just about that age when Aleksandra went to work for the Olivers in Waterloo. The child whines something incomprehensible, and the mother grimaces before shoving a cookie and an orange juice box at her. So like something Cammy would have done, though this woman has none of Cammy’s splintered craziness. Not even Willy, whom she was so close to, knows the story of Gerald and Cammy Oliver. She’s put it away all these years, put it into a corner of her mind, just as she folded Cammy’s dresses and left them in a pile on the pink chenille bedspread when she left. Aleksandra looks at the blank pages of the tattered yellow notebook and picks up the pen. She’s carried a yellow notebook, one of the ones Papa brought from Russia, around with her since she first left home in 1933 to go and work for the Olivers. Since then she’s been jotting things down, small scraps of moments like pieces of cloth for a quilt. So many moments. And then she remembers that last line in Willy’s notebook, written in his flowing handwriting: After all, she’s only a girl. It makes her heart race, still. Even though she and Willy had talked about it many times afterwards and Willy had apologized for

Watermelon Syrup

having written it, even though they had, in the end, been able to laugh about it, even though those very words had, in fact, spurred her on to claim her life…still those words existed, and they had hurt so deeply. Well, if those were the last words in Willy’s notebook, they would be the first words in hers. She would write that young girl, that innocent, into her life. She had to, for her children and grandchildren. But also for her Mama. She still had time, she was seventy-eight, the doctors said she was healthy enough, yet.

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one Waterloo, Ontario. 1933. She was only a girl. A seventeen-year-old girl on a hot, still day, standing at the threshold. The sweat trickled down her back. A thin woman wearing an orange shirt and white pants stood staring at them, holding open her front door and flicking her limp brown hair away from her face. She didn’t look like a Christian, more like a strange, twitchy bird. And when she smiled and raised a lipstick-smudged cigarette to her lips, Lexi could barely contain her shock. A Jezebel. “Ja, Frau Doktor, you remember me?” said Tante Gertie, her voice nervous, her German accent stronger than ever. “Gertrude Peters? I am bringing Aleksandra…we call her Lexi…to work. Ja?” Tante Gertie’s fat cheeks were flaming like the towers of Babylon. Lexi’s cheeks were beating up into red too. “Sure. Come on in.” The woman’s voice was slow. Deep and gravelly. On the edge of a cough. But she didn’t move. The three of them stood there, the Frau Doktor’s eyes burning into Lexi’s battered cardboard suitcase, then relentlessly making their way from her black shoes and stockings to her ankle-length gathered black skirt and plain blouse, her tightly pulledback hair. Her slanted green eyes stopped when they met Lexi’s. “Aren’t you hot in that outfit?” she said. Lexi opened her mouth to speak but there were no words in her head. There was nothing in her head. She couldn’t even remember the Frau Doktor’s name. 7

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“I always wonder how you Mennonites stand the heat in those clothes. All those layers in those black skirts of yours!” Her mouth gashed into a grimacing smile. “Oh, never mind.” She laughed, looked down at herself and flattened her orange shirt against her belly. “You’re just what the doctor ordered.” Lexi stared at her, at the thin, frail hands against all that orange. The hot end of the cigarette was dangerously close to setting the woman alight. Sweat was crawling under Lexi’s arms. She could smell its tart sweetness. Oliver, that was it. Could Mrs. Oliver smell her? She turned to Tante Gertie, who seemed to be unable to stop smiling like a village idiot. Neither of them knew what to say. “Ja, well, I am going now.” Tante Gertie’s plump breast was fluttering. She patted Lexi’s arm. “See you in church on Sunday,” she whispered. Lexi nodded, making a huge effort to look confident and calm even though something about Mrs. Oliver was making her want to turn and run. “Ja, go,” she whispered back. What was Mrs. Oliver thinking of them? Two Mennonite peas in a pod in their long, heavy skirts. For the first time in her life, Lexi felt uncomfortable in her clothes. Mrs. Oliver led her up to a tiny garret on the third floor of the house. A narrow iron frame bed covered with a threadbare pink chenille bedspread stood with its head under the window. A battered dresser leaned crookedly against the opposite wall and over the dresser hung a picture, geometric shapes in yellow, red and orange. She stared at it. It was a naked woman, arms and legs and breasts like a crazy quilt, stuck together at random. Mama and Papa would be horrified. She imagined her father ripping the picture down from the wall in a fit of righteousness. Mrs. Oliver went over to the one small window and tried to pull it open. “I had no idea it would be so boiling up here,” she said. “I’ll have to get Gerald to open it when he comes home. Unless you can.” Her hand with the cigarette rested on one hip, stuck out at an angle, and the other rested at the top of the windowsill. Lexi walked over to the window and, after a couple of hard pushes on its top sill, shoved it open. “You don’t look that strong,” said Mrs. Oliver, exhaling a long

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stream of smoke and again surveying her from top to bottom. “You’re so slim, not like the rest of them. Do you have any sandals?” Sandals? She shook her head and had a sudden thought of Jesus and the disciples. She’d never seen real sandals. “Well, at least get out of those awful stockings. Bare feet are fine for today. It’s too hot for shoes.” Mrs. Oliver looked down at her own bare feet, at her widely spaced toes. Her toenails were the colour of red currants. Mama’s face rose before her. A withering look. Mennonite women could get in trouble with the elders if the material in their sleeves was too thin. And painting nails, like lipstick, was strictly verboten. She had secretly wondered what it would be like to put on lipstick, but had never thought of painting her toenails. It would be like desecrating nature, like painting the tops of stones, like some uncouth farmers did to mark the corners of their fields. “It’s so much healthier, you know,” said Mrs. Oliver, puffing on her cigarette. Lexi glanced at her shoes. Taking them off seemed impossible. And yet she’d been given this order. And Mrs.Oliver was waiting. As she sat on her bed and unlaced her right shoe, she said a small prayer, asking Jesus for understanding. She glanced up at Mrs. Oliver. Was she going to stay and watch her take off her stockings too? “In a few minutes, after you’ve unpacked, I’ll send the children up,” Mrs.Oliver said, turning to leave. “I want you to call me Cammy. None of that Mrs. Oliver business.” As she descended the narrow stairs to the second floor, Lexi heard her mumble something and then gasp out a small laugh. Lexi closed the door, one shoe on and one shoe off, and swatted a tear off her cheek. Where had that come from? She could not allow herself to cry. She’d make herself laugh instead. Mrs.Oliver was like the skinny orange cat that used to slink in and out of their garden at night. She imagined the cat leaning against the fence by the cabbages, smoking a long cigarette, and smiled. There was a tree outside the window. A huge tree. The biggest tree she’d ever seen. Its leaves were green and plump. There was nothing like this at home, especially now with the drought. Last year they’d had a plague of grasshoppers, and now everything was such a

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wasteland, with dust and Russian thistle blowing across the fields and piling up against fences. Cattle and horses were dying in the fields because they were so hungry they had eaten the thistle, which then tore their poor insides out. They died in agony. There were giggles outside her door and scratching, as if a real cat were trying to get in. She took off her left shoe, got up off the bed, and opened the door. A little boy with red curls, who appeared to be about five, stood there with his hands on his hips, and a smaller child of about three in a mustard yellow sundress crouched in the corner of the hall, her panties showing. “Come in. My name’s Lexi. I’m just unpacking.” “You’re our new maid,” said the boy, whose name was Simon. She nodded and opened her suitcase. Both children now stood in the doorway as she took out her three blouses, two white and one purple, a long black skirt, and her two flowered summer cotton dresses. She laid them on the bed and then flushed when she realized that the children could see her underclothes lying in the suitcase on top of her yellow notebooks. She dropped the lid closed. “Aren’t you going to put those clothes away too?” asked Simon, staring at the suitcase. “What kind of suitcase is it, anyway? It looks old.” “Well, ja, it is old. It came from Russia.” “Where’s Russia?” “It’s very far away, on the other side of the world. There was a war and my family and I had to run away.” “We run!” exclaimed the girl, Sally. She had brown ringlets and a square face with small, deep-set blue eyes. “Outside, when Daddy plays tag with us. We run away, too.” “Ja?” she said, looking at their expectant faces. They were probably sweet children, like her sisters at home. Hildy, now four, and Renate, who was six, had been born in Canada, the last of her seven brothers and sisters. Maria had been born in Russia. She was only three when they’d left Russia and now was going on thirteen. Lexi had carried all three of them around when they were babies, in some ways more of a mother to them than Mama was. But Papa would certainly never play with them, let alone run

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around and play tag! Sally would no doubt follow her around just as Hildy did. And Simon too, although she wasn’t sure about him. She’d never looked after a small boy before, and it looked as if Mrs. Oliver was going to give her the job without even asking one question. That was a relief. A stone of terror lay in her stomach as she looked at these strange children. This job was to be her escape from Saskatchewan, the beginning of a new life. Perhaps years of housework and looking after children loomed ahead of her, just as they had at home, but then she sternly reminded herself that here she was going to get paid. And, one day, in spite of having to send most of the money home, she was going to have enough saved to finish high school. And then, perhaps… “I want to go outside. Now!” said Simon. She stared at him, shocked at his impetuous voice, and said firmly, “We’ll go outside when I’ve unpacked.” She shooed them out the door as if they were unruly chicks and closed it, ignoring their surprised looks. She held her breath as she rolled her stockings down. Her legs and feet did feel cooler and freer as she stepped back and forth on the smooth wooden floor. At home she would have worried about getting slivers, but this floor was as polished as a table. Before she left the room, she placed one of the empty yellow notebooks under her pillow. The children were shuffling outside the door with subdued yet expectant faces. “Where do you want to go?” she asked, taking their hands. “Ice cream!” shouted Simon. Did he always shout? “Well, I…” “Mommy said we could,” he whined. “Well, then, let’s find your mother,” she said, surprised by the lamb’s wool softness of the thick rug between her toes as they descended the main staircase. During the children’s afternoon nap, Mrs.Oliver showed her the broom closet, the kitchen cupboards and the fruit cellar in the dark, mildewy basement, its earthen floor flecked with yellow mushrooms in the corners. Taps and sinks everywhere, even a tap in the basement wall. No more hauling in snow in buckets in the winter. Three bathrooms, one of them hers. No more trips to the outhouse. And an icebox and a

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gas range. Instant hot water and a Hoover carpet sweeper. She’d never before imagined that people could have so many instruments and gadgets and live in such a palace. So much gleaming chrome and silver, all of it alive and useful. Of course, it was sinful to have so much. Think of everyone back home scraping out a living. Not enough money for food or doctors or gas for the cars. But Mama and Papa had once been wealthy, hadn’t they? Before Lexi was born, Papa had made so much money teaching that he had been able to buy a house on the south coast of the Black Sea. And Mama had had a maid. And then they lost all that in the First World War. Of course, she couldn’t tell Mrs.Oliver that. Mrs. Oliver plugged in the Hoover and Lexi jumped at its horrible noise. It drove itself across the carpet like a dragon, sucking up dust and making wide, pale streaks in its wake. Mrs. Oliver shouted over top of it, made a big point of explaining that the carpet was oriental, very expensive, and that Dr. Oliver wanted it cleaned every day. She imagined that Dr.Oliver would be tall and thin and, like her father, terribly severe. As Mrs. Oliver whizzed about, confiding how much she detested housework, which was obvious since there were spiderwebs in the corners, Lexi was fascinated by the constant stream of smoke pouring out of her nostrils and mouth. She was like the seven-headed, tenhorned beast rising up out of the sea in Revelation: Upon his heads the name of blasphemy. The tour ended back in the kitchen. “I guess we have to think about supper,” Mrs. Oliver said, sighing. Lexi stared at her. Didn’t she think about supper every night? Mrs. Oliver opened the icebox and they both peered inside. The dried edges of sliced salami showed through an open brown paper package, and a can of peaches, with floating blue mould, sat next to it. Partly finished bottles of milk with curdled yellow cream on top were crowded in beside a half-eaten pie and several slender re-corked bottles of something. Mrs. Oliver slammed the door shut and looked around. Most of the food in the icebox, thought Lexi,was only fit for pig slop. Perhaps even these people didn’t have enough money for food. A basket of carrots sat on the floor beside the cupboard. “You can

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cook these for supper,” Mrs. Oliver said, brightening. “And bring up some potatoes from the basement. Do you know how to make potato salad?” She nodded. What kind of question was that! Mrs. Oliver looked around, pensive. “Then I’ll get us a roast of beef!” she said, hurrying out of the kitchen as if she were setting out on some reckless adventure. In a few minutes she returned wearing a crumpled short-sleeved pink cotton dress and red high-heeled shoes, rattling keys. Her lips were painted bright red, too. “Be back soon,” she said over her shoulder, walking out the back door to the garage. Lexi watched out the window as Mrs. Oliver backed a gleaming yellow car out of the garage, its long pointed nose like a collie’s. At the end of the nose on the flat hood, between two dish-like lights, was a silver flying fish that looked as if it were about to leap into the road ahead. Wide, graceful fenders swept from the running board over the back wheels, and behind the large box-like saloon a single whitewalled tire perched like a doughnut over the trunk. Lexi had never imagined a car so beautiful. It was nothing like the Bennett buggies back home that made her laugh the first time she saw them. When there was no money for gas, people had their horses pull their cars around. When Mrs. Oliver got home, almost two hours later, it was too late to cook the roast. She shoved it into the icebox. “Well, at least Gerald loves salami,” she said, looking up at Lexi and the children, who stood watching. She pulled out the brown paper package and slapped it down on the counter. “Doesn’t he, Simon?” Simon nodded. “But I don’t,” he said, pouting. “Oh, never mind! You’re having carrots and potato salad. And peach pie. You like pie, don’t you?” Simon shook his head. “I like punkin pie,” said Sally. “Well, Lexi will fix everything,” said Mrs. Oliver, dismissing them all. “Cook the beef tomorrow, Lexi,” she said, and swept out of the kitchen.

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The slam of the back door made her jump. She’d been setting the kitchen table for supper for herself and the children, and when she turned around, her heart beating wildly, there was a man in the kitchen. He frowned when he saw her. For a fleeting moment, when she saw that he was stocky with wavy brown hair and pink cheeks, she thought it was Onkel Hermann, come to fetch her home. “Daddy!” squealed Sally. She jumped up to hug his leg. “You must be Aleksandra,” he said, looking at Lexi. He picked Sally up, quickly kissed her cheek and set her down again. Lexi nodded, feeling her face grow warm as he approached her. He was like a mahogany-coloured spaniel with dark liquid eyes, his hair parted in the middle and swept behind the tops of his ears. His teeth were wide and even, small white squares shining dully under his moustache. He was nothing like her lean, hollow-faced Papa. “Are these fresh?” he asked, moving past her and sniffing the pot of carrots on the stove instead of shaking her hand as she’d expected. “Ja,” she said. “I suppose Cammy has shown you everything by now?” He stood very close to her. He smelled sweet and strange, almost nauseating. She nodded. “Lexi made potato salad,” said Simon. “Really?” He moved around her and placed his hand on the icebox handle and then turned again. She felt his eyes taking in her clothes and her bare feet. “I see she’s made you take off your shoes.” He laughed. “She’s got a sort of fetish about bare feet, you know. It comes from having to wear corrective shoes when she was a child.” Lexi wanted to die. Her feet were like snail flesh, white, soft, exposed. His pale sweet smell swirled around her. “And what do we have for dessert?” He opened the icebox. “Ah, leftover pie, I see. Nothing like cold peach pie, right, Simon?” Simon scowled at the table and shook his head. She was shocked that Simon dared to not answer his father, but Dr. Oliver didn’t seem to notice. Papa would never have tolerated such behaviour. Simon would have been spanked and sent to his room without supper. “You’ll be remedying the pie situation tomorrow, I expect. We hear

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from your aunt that you’re an excellent baker,” he said. He looked at her and smiled. She was suddenly embarrassed. What else had Tante Gertie told them? And Tante Gertie wasn’t even her real aunt, just a family friend. “Good,” he said briskly, and left the room. Lexi liked Dr. Oliver’s brown tweed suit, white shirt and deep green bow tie with the white polka dots on it. And his face looked kind. And he’d remembered that she was a good baker. Strange, she thought, for a man to care about pies. He was so different from Papa and her brothers, who wore nothing but black, though her dear brother, Willy, told her once how much he hated black. He loved intense colours, he said. Brilliant greens, especially, he’d told her. She could still see his eyes sparkling behind his glasses as he talked. After the children had been put to bed, she stood at the sink, washing the supper dishes. Snippets of conversation floated in from the living room where Dr. and Mrs. Oliver were sipping their coffee and a golden alcoholic drink out of strange glasses with fat rounded bottoms. “…an excellent surgeon. Long overdue. We need men like him… especially now…” “…new Mennonite maid…” “…can handle all the TB cases we’re getting…” Mrs.Oliver coughed. “… told her she would be doing the meals and eventually the shopping…do you think she could learn to drive the car?” Lexi gasped and stood motionless, holding the pot she was scrubbing. “Why not?” he said. There was a long pause. And then Mrs. Oliver’s voice. “Don’t look at me like that!” “Like what?” “You know like what, Gerald. I’m simply exhausted. I can’t do all the shopping. The children run me ragged now that you’ve ruined another…what more do you want, for godsake?” Her voice rose. “If you think… just because I go out now and then that I’m falling back into…”

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“…never said anything about your going out. Did you go out?” “I went out to buy the roast beef.” “Did we have beef for dinner? I thought we had stale salami. Couldn’t you even get the maid to…?” “Shut up!” Silence. And then her voice. “…always bring up the past…that I’m just some…” “… haven’t said a word about the past, as you call it. I seem to remember marrying you.” “You imply…” “Well, there’ll be no more shopping for you, Cammy,” he said firmly. “I’ll teach her to drive. She seems fine…quite pretty…not the usual Mennonite pudding.” Lexi waited, heart racing. “Pour me another brandy, Gerald.” How strange to hear them calling each other by their given names. Cammy. Gerald. It wasn’t until Lexi was twelve, perhaps, that she even knew her mother’s actual name. Her parents addressed each other as du. And how shocking that she would ask him to serve her. Later, lying in the early September heat, covered only by the thin pink chenille bedspread, Lexi listened to the crickets through her open window and then to the sudden, mournful sob of a far-off train whistle. At first it took her back to the train coming here two days earlier, sitting up all the way from Saskatchewan to Ontario, drinking her first Coca-Cola, surrounded by strangers. But then she was on that other train, the Russian train, taking them all from Russia to Latvia. Seven days from Stulnewa to Riga, where they caught the boat to England. Seven days squeezed into Boxcar No. 8, watching the beautiful open plains of southern Russia become thick pine forests, the trees pressed up close to the tracks. Trees that Papa said were probably planted by the Mennonites long before the Revolution. Lexi shivered, though her third-floor room was hot and close. She’d been nine years old when they made their escape. Well, it had felt like an escape back then. She knew now that it was all planned;

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the Canadians had arranged their passage. They had to leave. There was no more religious freedom there. It had become an impossible place to live and worship. And Papa, being a schoolteacher, lost his job because he insisted on teaching religion. If they’d stayed, he would have been taken away. Where to? To Siberia, where people say her Oma and Tantes probably went? Her Mama and Papa had never said. No one knew where Oma and the Tantes were. Though the trip had been eight years ago, she remembered it so clearly. Her knees pulled up under her long skirt, leaning against the rocking wooden wall of the boxcar crammed with twenty-five people and all their belongings. The endless clicking of the wheels. Men talking and talking. The smell of burning coffee. All around her, swaying trees of black woollen pant legs and long skirts. They had left Oma and her Tantes back there. All alone. They hadn’t passed the medical exams. In the train, with her eyes squeezed shut, she would think of Oma standing in her orchard, baking bread in the outdoor oven. Tante Tina and Tante Mary were standing there too, crying and holding their arms out to her, but they were quickly becoming dots on the horizon as the train sped away, faster and faster across the lush open plains, rushing towards the forests, clacking and rocking north towards Latvia. Lying there, in her bed, in Waterloo, in the heat, she couldn’t hold on to the beauty of Blumenort in southern Russia; the swing and the blossoms and her Oma’s soft, smiling eyes. She slid back into the destroyed Blumenort, six years before they left on the train. The Blumenort that Makhno, the anarchist leader, and his men had swarmed through: killing and robbing and turning everything upside down. She slid back to holding Mama’s cold, cold hand at the funeral, smelling the putrid mixture of earth and flesh and blood as they stood over the grave full of heaped bodies, the women and children weeping softly as the minister prayed hushed prayers. Twenty-one dead. That included her Opa and two Onkels. Opa had been tall and important, the mayor of Blumenort. He’d never tired of bragging to Lexi and her older brothers that his father had been elected the official representative of all the German Mennonites in Molotschna Province, had once even gone to the parliament of Czar Nicholas the Second.

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The twenty-one bodies hastily laid in a mass grave, because there weren’t enough coffins. Everyone jumped at any sound, terrified that Nestor Makhno and his men might come back before the bodies were buried. Opa’s eyes were closed, as if he’d simply gone to sleep, his mouth sad, but one of his arms stuck out of his body at a funny angle, twisted backwards. Onkel Hans and Onkel Peter had been thrown in beside him, the scorched bullet hole in Onkel Peter’s forehead clearly visible, even in the dark. Soon the Red Army, the Bolsheviks, the army of the new people’s regime they called it, rounded up the Anarchists and executed them. But then the Red Army fought the White Army. The White Army represented the ruling class of wealthy landowners and some of the men in the family were drafted into it. The White Army were supporters of the deposed Czar Nicholas the Second, who was banished to Ekaterinburg and murdered there. It was all so confusing. Lexi wished she had been old enough to remember all the goings-on so she could make up her own mind about the whole thing. The Bolsheviks got rid of the men who killed her Opa and Onkels but her family were against them, too. In the summer of 1920, the Red Army and White Army fought. The Mennonite villages became a battleground. Lexi was just four but she can remember a few flashes of details. The fighting left craters in the gardens. The sounds of cannon and rifles popped and banged so often they became as familiar and ordinary as birdsong. Willy tells the dramatic story of witnessing real hand-to-hand fighting. It was a hot summer day and the Reds were fleeing through the main street of their village. It was a cavalry regiment, with horses, and the riders were covered with sweat and grime… Lexi can remember the light that was always there in Willy’s eyes when he told her this story. For all his gentleness he loves excitement. He loves to tell a story with vivid colours and words. Thinking of him now makes her miss him so much. …The cavalry stopped in their yard and gathered around their well. They made Papa pull the water up for them. And all the while, above the neighing of horses and screaming of desperate men, came the booming of cannon and rattle of machine guns and rifle fire. “But we were safe,” Willy would always add, because he could see the fear in her eyes. “Our house had solid brick walls, eighteen inches

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thick, and we hid beneath the windows. No one in our village died because of that battle.” He’d pinch her cheeks and make a silly face, and she would laugh. And then, after life settled into an uneasy routine, there was a crop failure and drought in 1921. Oma said that it was because of God’s judgment, but Lexi never knew what that meant, and once, when she asked, Mama’s face paled and she turned away. The rains didn’t come. God’s mills grind slowly but very fine. Lexi remembers those words from that time. Mama would often murmur to herself God’s judgments begin in nature, and Lexi would wonder what they were being judged for. The drought was so severe that the surface of the earth split into finger-wide cracks. Nothing grew. The potato harvest that first summer amounted to one pailful, and those few potatoes had to be saved for the following year’s harvest. Mama foresaw the hard times, made sure nothing was wasted, and managed to store away supplies. She turned every leftover bread crust into a dried cracker, and when there was no flour left that was what they ate. Mostly they ate a thin soup made from one onion and a little starch or flour for thickening. In the spring and summer, they scoured the woods for wild sorrel. Most of the Mennonites in the village had at least some food, but most of the poor Russian peasants did not. Their plight became desperate and many of them became vagrants and beggars, and they began to knock on the doors of the Mennonites. Lexi can vaguely remember sitting down to eat with a group of beggars standing at the window, watching. Papa stood up, slowly, and drew the curtains to shut out the view. When the famine was at its worst, there were six months during which they ate only thin soup made from weeds. The children’s bodies began to swell; their skin turned grey and became hairy. The famine lasted for two years. The relief organizations of Germany, England, France, the United States of America and Canada began to send food and other necessities of life. And Papa wrote to some of their Onkels who had left before the Great War and emigrated to the United States of America, asking for their help. It was not long in coming. As young as she was, Lexi can still remember seeing the look on Papa’s face when he brought home a telegraph message that said: Hilfe kommt.

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We fight back with prayer and patience, Papa would say, we bow our heads and ask for help. Hilfe kommt, he would say. Help will come. After all that there had been a few years of prosperity. Oma, tiny in her flowered babushka, was always full of hugs and laughter. Her maiden Tantes loved little jokes, like setting the table with bread knives and wooden spoons instead of cutlery. They were a family full of hope and riches then. They were well known and loved. After they came to Canada, and ever since, she can fall asleep only by remembering the apple blossoms floating down over the swing in Oma’s garden in Blumenort. Those few beautiful, beautiful years before they left for Canada. Before they left for Canada. They were forced to leave Russia, to leave everything they’d worked so hard for, because they were not allowed to practise their religion. Papa taught Bible studies, he would have been put in jail if they’d stayed. And now, here she was. In Waterloo, Ontario. Already seventeen years old. A maid for a rich family. A scared maid working for a rich family. Quite pretty, Mr. Oliver had said. She thought of the man on the train with the grey teeth, who’d touched her hair and frightened her half to death with his fawning smiles. Pretty. No one at home had ever said that about her. She’d been taught to avoid looking into mirrors. All is vanity. She was good at baking and cleaning and babysitting. Ja. She’d already had a whole lifetime of practice. But was she really quite pretty? She was named after a princess, Mama told her that. She was the only one in the whole family with a Russian name, the name of a princess. Mama had named her that because the crowning of Nicholas the Second and Queen Aleksandra, she who had been Princess Alix of Hesse, in 1896 in St. Petersburg, when Mama was young, had been one of the most exciting events of her life. Mama had told her how the whole colony of Molotschna had been robed in garlands of flowers, how they’d built a huge arbour in front of the big farmhouse and covered it in roses.

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two Lexi lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house on Saturday morning. Her sixth day there, and it was still strange to hear the gurgling of water running in pipes through the walls. Someone’s feet padded along the carpet in the hallway below. She heard the soft click of the bathroom door handle and then the toilet flush. Even up on the third floor, safely in bed, she blushed, thinking it might be Dr. Oliver. One good thing about an outhouse, you never heard anything. The feet padded to another door and she heard it close and then the low rumble of voices. What time was it? The early light shone brightly. She remembered the driving lesson. Heart pounding, she leapt out of bed. Ten minutes later she ran down to make the coffee and, while she was measuring it out, the dream she had in the middle of the night came back to her. She was wobbling among the chickens on a bicycle in the backyard at home, Mama glaring at her out of the kitchen window. Then the bicycle turned into a yellow car with her in the driver’s seat. The car was reckless, as if it had a mind of its own. It swerved around and around in the yard and then headed towards a wall of the house, towards Mama. She’d woken with a jolt and had taken a long time to fall back to sleep. The aroma of the bubbling coffee calmed her a little. As she got the breakfast ready, she remembered Willy’s bicycle. Mama had been adamant. Mennonite girls did not ride bicycles. But she’d been adamant too. She sneaked out at night to practise, stumbling and tottering around the dirt yard on the rickety old bike with its dangling fender. When she rode out of the yard a few days later in full view of the kitchen window, Mama refused to speak to her for days. Papa threatened the strap even though she was already fourteen. She’d committed the sin of all sins. She’d been too independent. She had deliberately disobeyed. When Dr. Oliver came into the kitchen a few minutes later, her stomach fluttered with anxiety and she busied herself with the porridge instead of looking at him. The children came in, still in their pyjamas, and she placed steaming bowls in front of them.

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She had the courage to look at him while his face was hidden behind the morning paper. He was wearing a hand-knitted maroon sweater with a yellow border around the V-neck, and under it a white shirt and matching yellow bow tie. A flat tweed cap and leather gloves lay on the table. He looked like a picture out of one of the fashion magazines Mrs. Oliver left lying around the living room. Dashing, as the advertisements said. She was sure that Mrs.Oliver hadn’t knitted that sweater. And what would people think when they saw a Mennonite maid sitting beside the glamorous doctor, driving his car? “Ready, Aleksandra?” he said, after he’d taken an eternity to read the morning paper, eat his toast and bacon and drink his two cups of coffee. She’d begun to wash the dishes, her back to the table. “I should finish…” “Never mind those. You can finish them when we get back.” He got up and headed to the back door. “See you in the garage.” “Cammy?” he called. When there was no answer he sent Simon and Sally up to find their mother. “Don’t worry about the children,” he said. “Cammy was getting up when I came down.” Lexi quickly dried her hands, glanced guiltily at the dishes piled in soapsuds, and ran upstairs to her room to get her old leather purse. She had no idea why she needed it. It held only a few cents and a handkerchief. But it seemed terribly important that she have Mama’s purse with her. Dr. Oliver was standing beside the car when she got to the garage. He put on his gloves and held the door of the car open for her. She slid cautiously into the driver’s seat and placed the purse in her lap. He slammed the door shut behind her with such a bang that she jumped. When he got into the passenger side of the car, he handed her a key dangling from a silver chain. “This will be yours,” he said. “When you graduate.” He smiled. Lexi tried to smile back. “Put it in there.” He pointed to the ignition. “But don’t turn it on yet. We have to get your feet lined up.” He moved closer to her. His smell enveloped her as if someone had taken the lid off a boiling pot.

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“Left foot on the clutch, over there.” He leaned into her and pointed between her knees at the floor. “Your feet are bare.” Lexi looked at him briefly, and then away at the jumble of tools and boxes inside the garage. “Next time you will wear shoes.” She nodded. It was so confusing. Take them off. Put them on. How would she ever understand what these people wanted from her? At home the rules were so clear. “Right foot on the brake, then, next to the clutch. Good. Now, left hand on the wheel, near the top. Good. Turn the key, push the starter button and then put your hand on the gearshift.” He wiggled the ball at the top of the stick that stuck up into the middle of the car. Her hand trembling, she turned the key in the ignition. A churning sound. And then the steady hum of the engine. The leather scent of the seats mingled with the smell of hot oil. The car was shaking. “Good,” he said. “Step one completed. Now comes the difficult part. You have to put it in reverse.” He turned and looked out the car’s small oval back window at the narrow garage door through which she was going to have to steer the car. “I guess I should have backed it out first, made it a little easier for you. Oh, well. You’ll be fine. Keep your foot down on the clutch, move the gearshift towards you, and then pull it down and back.” She took hold of the ball at the top of the stick. It jumped in her hand. She pulled it towards her thigh. Another surprise. It was soft and greasy at the core, as if it could easily flop in any direction. Clenching her teeth as well as her fingers, she pulled the gearshift towards the back of the car. A horrible grinding noise. The car shuddered. Dr. Oliver’s gloved hand immediately covered hers. “Keep your foot down on the clutch,” he said, his voice steely. He wrenched the gearshift into position. “Now give it some gas. Slowly. As you let out the clutch.” She froze. Which foot? She pressed down a foot, lifted the other, and the car shot backwards. “The brake! Hit the brake!”

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Which foot? Dr. Oliver’s arms were steering the car onto the lawn. “Your other foot!” She slammed her right foot down as hard as she could and her chest smashed against the tangle of his arms and the steering wheel. He immediately reached for the key and pulled it out. The car jerked and went quiet. They sat for a moment in stunned silence. When she looked out the window, she saw that she’d run over a small hedge. They’d been headed for a tree. She hung her head, unable to look at him. Father, forgive me… His arm was sliding around her. A new shock. No one had put an arm around her in her whole life. Every nerve on alert, she sat motionless. Blinking. “Well, Aleksandra,” he said, “that was quite a ride.” His fingers were heavy on the top of her arm. “We should have gone more slowly, practised the gearshift without the car running. I thought you’d catch on.” He squeezed her shoulder. She wanted to pull away, but that would be rude. “Cammy was used to cars when I taught her, so I just thought…” One hot tear crawled down her cheek. “Now, Aleksandra, don’t cry. Here.” He took his arm from behind her, pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and handed it to her. “We’ll practise using the clutch,” he said matter-of-factly when she’d wiped her eyes and blown her nose. “As soon as you’re ready.” He put his hand under her chin and turned her face towards his. Cigar smoke on his breath jangled with his hot, sweet smell. The leather glove felt soft on her cheeks. “You know the old saying, my dear. Right back up on the horse.” “Now? You want me to try again?” He nodded and then laughed and waved to a neighbour who stood watching them from the road. Lexi felt fire spread across her cheeks. “Come on, then. I haven’t got all day.” Over and over she ground the gears while the motor hummed impatiently, like an enemy. A small gathering of neighbours stood and watched her, stranded on the front lawn, whispering amongst themselves.

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When he finally let her go, she ran up to her room and threw herself on her bed. She was a total failure. He and Mrs. Oliver would laugh their heads off at the Mennonite pudding-head. She was a Dummkopf, just as her brothers always said. In the Erb Street Mennonite Church the next day, sitting beside Tante Gertie, she bowed her head with true humility. The minister was preaching from Proverbs, chapter 9 : A foolish woman is clamorous. She is simple and knoweth nothing. She saith to him, stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and they are guests in the depths of hell. No more thoughts of Dr. Oliver and the car. She shook off the strange sensations she’d felt when he put his arm around her, of the feel of the smooth leather-gloved fingers on her skin. She concentrated instead on the familiar prayers, the familiar rhythms of the service, the hymns that flowed out of her without having to think of the words or their meaning. There is a place of quiet rest, Near to the heart of God, A place where sin cannot molest She was still shaking from her walk to the church. Mrs. Oliver had laughed at her concern over getting there, saying it was just a few blocks away and what was her problem. She had disappeared up to her room with a few short shakes of her hand in the general direction of the church, leaving Lexi all alone as she walked out the front door and turned right. Lexi had found church by hit and miss, running most of the way, pulling up her skirt as high as she dared, terrified of being late, down one wrong street and then another, past staring people and laughing children and the honking of cars. Up Belmont Avenue where it stopped at a dead end. Right, when she should have gone left. Park Street and William Street. Oh Willy, she’d almost called out, standing there on the street, trying not to cry. She kept looking at the trees, their leaves bobbing heavily in the hot humid air, her heart aching at the thought of the familiar long walk she’d made Sunday after Sunday to her own church with her family around her. Euclid Avenue and Dawson Street and then, miraculously, Menno Street. Menno! A street

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named after her people. She almost laughed. She almost cried. And then Erb Street West. West? A street could have a west and an east? She’d never thought of a place divided up like that, a place so big it had to have pieces. At home she was always just there, in the centre. She always knew where she was. At home she was never alone. She always felt safe. She missed her family more right then than she had since Papa waved her off at the train station. It felt like years ago. Why had she wished to leave all that? God was punishing her. As she prayed, she tried to relax. She looked around as she sang. The familiar growl of German was such a comfort. Tante Gertie’s church was so much finer than her Papa’s. So many people, and all dressed in such fancy clothing. Papa would have scolded them; he would have preached about it in his Sunday sermon. She felt holier and better than them in her shabby things, though she knew she shouldn’t. Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. By the end of the service, she felt calm again. Renewed. Full of God’s grace. She walked with Tante Gertie and the rest of the family back to their house for the noon meal. “Ach, I wish you Penners had made this your home instead of moving so far away from us. It’s hard on your Mama, Lexi, she writes me such difficult letters.” Lexi could feel the calm of the service leave her. Her heart began to beat in her throat. She nodded as if she knew what Tante Gertie was talking about. “Ja, Lexi. Your Mama will never get used to such a harsh life, will she? She was used to finer things, to a big community around her. She came from an important family, ja?” Lexi nodded. She knew only vaguely about her mother’s family. Opa had been the mayor, and… “Ja, important and loving and full of life, that family. And our whole community was that way. We did everything together. And we had educations, Lexi. Fine ones. Your Mama went to grade eight. That was far for a girl in those days, ja? But now…ach, now…” Tante Gertie stopped and placed her hand on her chest and closed her eyes.

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“Now she is surrounded by peasants, isn’t she?” Lexi didn’t know what to say. She was used to her neighbours at home in Saskatchewan, they were good people, simple people who worked the land. Many of them they couldn’t understand because they spoke different languages. Finnish, Swabian, French and English, of course. They didn’t understand what a Mennonite was. They thought of them as Doukhobors. Lexi and her sisters thought this funny, but Lexi knew her Mama did not. “She has so little to say to those people. And she says you are such a distance from other Mennonites, ja? “It’s not so far, a few miles, but Mama doesn’t have much time to get out and walk, and in the winter, of course…” “Do you remember how it was in Russia? How all the villages had one main street with our homes on it? And then the farmland out behind that? We were all together then, we were one big family. Ja, ja, I can see your eyes sparkle at the thought of it! Do you remember your Papa’s school? And our church? And May Day, when you children would go into the woods to gather greenery and make wreaths? Oh, the parties we would have!” Lexi remembered all of that, yes. It filled her up and made her warm. Suddenly she had in her head a picture of Mama’s oven, built out of blue and white Dutch tiles. She would help feed the oven with straw. And the brick wall, across from the house, against which she would sit for hours and watch the world go by. “Yes,” Lexi said, “if only we had enough money to move closer to town, then perhaps Mama would be happier.” Tante Gertie was breathless and turning red-faced. She reached over and touched Lexi’s arm. “Ach, I’m sorry, I do go on. Your Mama is so dear to me and I hate to see her suffer so. She says that the Mennonites there are all so much stricter and your Papa has turned more that way, too. Of course we keep to the Mennonite ways, Lexi, we don’t dance or go to the picture shows, we don’t play cards, we don’t wear makeup, we don’t drink alcohol, of course, of course. But we enjoy what God has given us, Lexi. He wanted it that way, didn’t he?” Lexi nodded. She was expected to nod and so she did. But she didn’t know what she thought about Tante Gerdie’s words. She found them almost blasphemous.

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Sitting at the table later on, eating freshly baked Zwieback buns and Pluma Moos, Lexi pushed away what Tante Gertie had said and allowed herself to become enveloped in a warm bubble of goodness: Mennonite goodness. Such a relief. Tante Gertie and her family were a happy bunch. There was laughter around the table, which there never was at home. Especially on Sundays. Her family was so sullen. Tante Gertie was right. Willy said once, as they were walking into town together, that it was because of Mama that the hardships in Russia had closed her to happiness. This had unsettled Lexi, she’d never really thought of Mama being happy or sad, she was just Mama. The thought that her Mama had suffered, the realization that her Mama had been deeply touched by the outside world, was a new and disturbing one. Lexi shook off her thoughts of her family and looked around the table at this other, very different family. Onkel Rudolf was round and red-faced. He was was a tool and die maker. And there was their youngest son, the last child at home, Jascha, a gentle boy, she could tell. He reminded her of Willy. She didn’t dare look at him, though she caught glimpses of his strong hands curled around his knife and fork. “I heard a joke at the hardware store yesterday,” Onkel Rudolf said. His hands rested beside his plate even though he wasn’t finished his meal. “A carpenter was fixing the church roof when he hit his thumb,” Onkel Rudolf said. “‘Damn it, I missed!’ he cried.” Tante Gertie drew in a loud breath at the swear word. Onkel Rudolf went on, a small determined smile on his face. “The minister corrected him, saying, ‘You shouldn’t say such a thing in church.’ The carpenter continued his work and hit his thumb again. Again he cried, ‘Damn it, I missed!’ Once more the minister corrected him. When the carpenter hit his thumb a third time and again yelled, ‘Damn it, I missed!’, the minister was really angry. ‘What’s going to happen?’ asked the carpenter. ‘Is a bolt of lightning going to strike me dead?’ The minister replied, ‘As a matter of fact, it will.’ And just as he said that, a bolt of lightning came through the roof and struck the minister dead. A large booming voice was heard saying, ‘Damn it, I missed!’” Lexi’s heart stopped. She stared at Onkel Rudolf. Never would

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Papa have told such a joke. He would never have told any kind of joke. Especially on a Sunday. There would be prayers. But even Tante Gertie was laughing. “Ach, Rudolf,” she said, as she wiped the tears from her eyes. Lexi felt her face beat up bright red and lowered her head. The world was such a strange, strange place. Nothing seemed to be as she thought it would be. Nothing seemed to be in its place. Mama was always upset if things in the house got out of place. It would upset her so much and she would be angry until everything was put back where it belonged. Lexi stood up to help Tante Gertie with the dishes, and her eye caught Jascha’s and he blushed. She blushed too and looked away. Suddenly her heart swelled with something that felt almost like happiness. What a strange being she was becoming, upset one moment, happy the next. She was used to being the same from moment to moment and now, now she was so changeable, shifting like grasses in the wind. But when she got back to the Olivers’ house, and no one was home, her happiness fell away and she felt restless, lonely for her little sisters, for the familiar sweet smell of Summa Borscht, her favourite soup, filling up the house; even for the constant sound of the wind blowing across the dried-up wasteland of prairie. Baking bread, collecting eggs, weeding the garden, washing and mending seemed now, after a week of learning how to use all of Mrs. Oliver’s gadgets and appliances, somehow more real, closer to who she was. Yet who was she? She unpinned her hair, took out her braids and let her blonde hair hang halfway down her back in kinky ripples. For the first time since she had come to the Olivers’, she let herself look closely in the mirror. How often had Papa preached from First Corinthians: But if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God. But the woman is the glory of the man. She’d never questioned how she dressed, she never questioned how she lived her life. A woman was to be obedient to husband, brother or elder, it was a sign of humility and faith. As she slowly braided up her hair, she had an image of hundreds of Mennonite women sitting

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with their heads bowed on church benches. She imagined Mrs. Oliver striding into their midst, wearing a brilliant orange dress and red high heels, smoking a cigarette and holding the Hoover. Mrs. Oliver was beckoning to her. Then she and Mrs. Oliver were flying, shooting upward, it seemed, into flames. She walked slowly down the back stairs to the kitchen and put on her apron to make supper. Sally and Simon ran in. Simon, still dressed in his navy Sunday suit, white shirt and red bow tie, was brandishing a toy sword, and Sally looked a mess, as she usually did, her white blouse and green velvet skirt all untucked. Lexi didn’t know whether they’d gone to church, but she was horrified by the thought of such show-off clothes in a place of worship. “We’re going to our Auntie Louise’s,” said Sally, vigorously scratching behind one of her knees. Lexi already knew that she hated the itchy white wool stockings. “You are?” “Yessiree,” said Simon, trying out a new word he’d picked up recently from some riff-raff, as Mrs. Oliver said, on the street. He jabbed his toy sword at Sally. “And where does your Auntie Louise live?” Lexi opened the icebox door. “London,” said Sally. “Oh, yes, Lexi,” said Mrs. Oliver, sweeping into the kitchen in a black silk dress and high heels. “I forgot to tell you. You could have stayed out with your Mennonite friends. We’re going to my sister’s in London tonight.” Mrs. Oliver’s skirt was so short that it almost showed her knees. “Take the night off,” she said with a grand gesture of her hand. She took a long drag of her cigarette and smiled at Lexi as if from a great height. “We’ll be meeting some very famous actors.” Gazing at Mrs. Oliver’s tight red lips, at the neckline of her dress which showed the ridges of her breastbone, at her ever-present cigarette, she heard her Papa: City of the damned. Blasphemers, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. They which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins.

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“Come on, let’s go,” said Mrs. Oliver, pushing the children in front of her out of the kitchen. “Your father’s already in the car.” Simon was pretending to be a pony and kicking up his legs. He scampered out of the door. “Bye, Lexi,” said Sally, peering around her mother’s hip. Lexi turned and slammed the icebox door shut. Yes. Captive silly women, laden with sins. She began to shiver and couldn’t stop. After the noise of the car had faded from the driveway, she slumped into a kitchen chair. Only the clock ticked on in the empty house. She felt abandoned again, like some insect doomed to toil away in a dark tunnel under the world. Be ye in the world but not of it, the Mennonites preached. Was she destined never to enter the real world? To be stuck in kitchens washing dishes and doing laundry instead of meeting famous actors in London? Were Papa’s words to her on her last day of school really going to come true? Four years ago, on the last day of grade eight, she’d stayed to help Papa tidy the classroom, not wanting to leave the rows of desks with their inkpots and the familiar smells of chalk and books. The question she’d wanted to ask him all year thumped in her head as she wiped off the blackboard with a wet rag. Finally, she took a deep breath and turned around. “Papa, can I…?” Her Papa was sorting through a pile of textbooks on a table at the back of the room, his back to her. “Papa…” She had to find the courage. “Papa, can I go on to grade nine?” Her words fell onto the floor with the dustballs. She knew they couldn’t afford to buy the books she would need and that she was expected to stay at home and help her mother until she got married. So many people in the community believed that education was harmful for women, that too much reading led to becoming mentally unbalanced. But Mama had an education. She’d gone all the way to grade eight. And then she’d apprenticed as a seamstress and tailor. Her Papa ignored her and continued to put textbooks into a cupboard at the back of the room. “Please, Papa. I’ll work hard.”

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He shook his head, still not looking at her. “I did so well. All A’s.” She couldn’t help her voice rising even though it sounded like whining. “I was a good student…” “Ach! For what?” His voice was full of exasperation. In a moment of great weakness she would always regret she knelt down on the floor, clutching at her skirt. She heard the clock ticking, saw a bird flit by the window. “Papa,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “I want to be a nurse, to help people…to travel…like Florence Nightingale, to save people’s lives, to…” He whirled around. “Get up! Get off your knees, Aleksandra,” he said, in a terrible harsh voice. “Ye worship ye know not what. This is blasphemy.” “But I …” She couldn’t move. “Get up! You will never be a nurse.” She felt stuck to the floor. “There are plenty of people that need your help right here. How do you think I could send you anywhere else? You are now ein Verantworlichkeit. A liability!” She looked at him, stunned. “Until you get married, you will only drain me.” She’d never heard his voice like this, so cold. “But Papa…” He strode up to the front of the classroom, grabbed her by the arm and stood her up. “Have I not fed you? Have I not given you a roof over your head?” She forced herself to nod. “Then you will pay me back this debt. You will not ask for more.” His eyes narrowed and she thought he was going to shout at her again. But he dropped her arm and turned away. “We can’t afford you,” he said, picking up a pile of old textbooks on his desk. He turned again and glared at her. “Why do you think your brothers had to leave? At least they can get real work and send home a few pennies.” She felt all the blood drain out of her face. The walls of the classroom seemed to sway. “Now go home and help your mother.”

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She ran out of the school and into the field, threw herself down in the tall grass to let the tears come. The earth smelled rotten, full of stinking weeds. Flies buzzed around her as she cradled her head in her arms. Worthless. She was worthless. She opened her eyes in the Olivers’ dark kitchen. Papa’s words had never gone away. They had hardened, become more pointed like sharp sticks. She’d never forgotten that word, liability. The coldest word in the world. And then last year Papa had begun to look for husbands for her. Horrible old farmers like Heinrich Willms. Over twice her age and missing his front tooth. The worst thing of all? Mama had never said a word. She’d be married off to him now if she hadn’t put up a fuss and if Tante Gertie hadn’t written right around that time to say that there was work in Waterloo, if she wanted it. Her parents were so desperate for money they agreed. They agreed that she could go away to work, but she had to send some of the money home. Most of the money. Just like the boys did. There were still five of them at home: Papa, Mama, Maria, Renate and Hildy. So many mouths to feed. And the transportation debt, the Reiseschuld, was not yet paid off. With most of the church members suffering from the Depression, there wasn’t much to give Papa for his teaching. His preaching, of course, was never paid for. She should have compassion for her family and their situation. And she did, but still it wasn’t fair. They let her be like the boys and come out here to make money for them, but she wasn’t allowed to be like the boys and go on in school. Whatever was best for Papa had to be best for her. Her cheeks were burning.

three Monday morning Lexi ploughed the deep fur of the living room rug with the Hoover, thinking that it was so much easier than trying to sweep up dust with a broom. She loved that the dust just disappeared,

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never to be thought of again. Often at home, when she threw dust out into the yard, the prairie wind swept it right back in. A whiff of burning tobacco floated by. She pretended that she didn’t know Mrs. Oliver was there. “Lexi! Stop.” She looked up. Mrs. Oliver was dressed to go out. Beside her stood a girl about her own age. Mrs. Oliver blew a stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth and the girl instinctively turned her head away. Lexi turned off the Hoover. “Lexi, meet Georgie.” Georgie had curly brown hair spilling out from the scarf tied around her head, and she wore a pair of men’s denim overalls and a checkered shirt. Lexi had never seen a girl in overalls before. Was she pretending to be a farmer? The girl was smiling broadly, her front teeth all jumbled together and protruding slightly. She had bright blue eyes. “Georgie, this is Lexi,” Mrs. Oliver said, moving beside her and taking Lexi’s hand. Lexi stood, rigid, amazed at the thin cool hand holding hers. “Georgie comes to help with the spring and fall cleaning,” Mrs. Oliver said, dropping Lexi’s hand and flinging her arm out to encompass the whole room. “She washes the drapes and the walls and cleans the basement. You both can put the storm windows on too, now that there’s two of you. And rake the lawn. And sweep out the garage.” Georgie’s eyes were narrowing and Lexi felt a sudden wild urge to laugh. She clamped her lips tightly shut. “And of course the flower beds need to be cleaned up for the winter.” Mrs. Oliver now had a look of deep concentration on her face as she stared at her cigarette. “And Gerald wants applesauce,” she said. Georgie’s mouth twitched and she looked away. “In any case,” Mrs. Oliver said, her voice now artificially bright, “I’ll leave you to it. If there’s anything else I think of, I’ll let you know. Georgie, you know where everything is. I must rush. I have an appointment.” Mrs. Oliver hurriedly gathered up her bag and jacket and in a moment they heard the engine of the car starting in the garage. Where did she go each day?

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They both watched from the living room window as the yellow car roared out of the driveway. The moment it was gone they looked at each other. “Want one?” said Georgie, slowly unwrapping a stick of gum she’d dug out of a pocket. Lexi looked at the gum and then shook her head. “I’ve heard about you.” “You have?” Lexi was astounded. Georgie was obviously not a Mennonite. How could she have heard anything? “Yep. Cammy Oliver told one of the regulars, this rich old lady who comes into the restaurant because she’s bored, that you’re the best girl she’s ever had, that she could eat off the floors.” Georgie squinted at the Hoover and the rug. “All I can say is, if Cammy Oliver loves you, you must be a saint. Or as crazy as she is. So which is it?” Lexi stared at her. Georgie chewed her gum so vigorously that the only sounds in the room were the small snaps in her mouth. How did she do that? “You look OK to me,” said Georgie. “So what do you think of old Cammy?” “I …don’t know.” She felt a blush coming on. “Well, you probably know by now that she’s loony tunes.” “Loony tunes?” “Crazy.” Lexi had known of only one crazy person before, Bernie in the congregation at home. He’d begun hearing voices after the trip over from Russia. No one spoke directly of it. Bernie’s mother dressed him up each Sunday for church and held his hand as they sat close together on the bench, his lips moving and his eyes vacant. Papa always looked directly at them when he preached on the theme of God loving fallen sparrows. But that wasn’t the same as Mrs. Oliver, was it? “Well, I guess we’d better get these friggin’ things down,” said Georgie, surveying the heavy maroon curtains. Lexi gasped at the sinful word, her hand going straight to her mouth as if she herself had uttered it. Two hours later, Lexi, Georgie and the children sat in the kitchen eating cookies. The children drank milk and the girls drank tea.

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Georgie had galvanized both of them into action, whipping down the curtains as if they were just old pieces of cloth. They got the washer going, and together pulled yards and yards of heavy material through the wringer in record time. Both clotheslines in the backyard were now weighed down with flapping velvety maroon. “Definitely enough work for today,” said Georgie, taking a second cookie. “Hey, these are good! Strange taste. I like it.” She smiled her rickety fence smile at Lexi, and Lexi shyly smiled back. “I’ve got to get back to the restaurant. My mom cooks at the Cat’s Eye Café down at the other end of King Street. Ever been there?” She’d never been to a restaurant in her life. Mama and Papa shuddered at restaurants. Paying prices like that for food that could be cooked perfectly well at home. Besides, restaurants were of “the world.” In Russia, sinners ate in restaurants, spewed blasphemy and hatched revolutionary plots. “No, I haven’t.” “You and the rest of the world. The Depression’s ruining my mom’s business. Everyone used to come into the Café and now…” Georgie shrugged and looked down at her red and rough-looking hands. “Now it’s only the rich and I have to be doing extra things, like putting up with Cammy Oliver, to bring in a few extra pennies.” Lexi didn’t know what to say. It surprised her to hear that there were money problems in Waterloo also. It was a surprise and also a comfort to think that she and Georgie had that in common, having to work for Mrs. Oliver in order to help the family make it through. “When’s your day off, Lexi?” “Sundays…I go to church.” “Oh, too bad,” Georgie shrugged. “Well, kiddo, I’d better get going. Mom’s going to wonder where I am. I’m on evening shift.” Georgie sighed and pulled the scarf off her head. Her curls sprang out. “Again!” How long exactly was the evening shift? Was Georgie going to get any sleep? “See you tomorrow.” Georgie pushed herself up from her chair, slowly. She looked like she didn’t want to go. “Ja. Tomorrow.” Lexi hurried over to the counter and wrapped a

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small pile of her cookies into a tea towel. “Here,” she said, handing them to Georgie. “For you and your parents.” “Oh. I don’t have…” She took the cookies. “It’s not exactly like that, but thanks.” She got up early the next day to bake an upside-down peach cake. She’d thought of it the night before. A treat for Georgie and herself and the children when they’d finished the next batch of curtains. Dr. Oliver came into the kitchen just as she was taking it out of the oven. He was down earlier than usual, before the children who usually ran down in their pyjamas. She turned the cake out of the pan on to a plate, the still steaming peaches succulent and dripping with brown sugar. She smiled at Dr. Oliver. “Mmm. Hot off the press. I’ll just take a little piece of this while it’s still warm, if you don’t mind,” he said, moving close to her side. “Could you cut me one?” She sliced into the soft cake and handed him a large piece on a plate with a fork. “You’re going to make me fat, Aleksandra!” She glanced away. Of course she noticed his belly, protruding like a pumpkin under the gold silk rope of his maroon dressing gown. And the thick reddish-brown chest hairs curling around the silk lapels and up under his chin made her think of a bear fattening up for winter. A happy, pleased bear. And she, and her cooking, had made him feel that way, and.… She felt herself reddening. She’d been so full of pride when she rushed to serve him the cake. Pride was a terrible sin, especially for women. She needed to grind it under her heel, as Papa would say. “Coffee ready yet?” It wasn’t. She’d been so busy thinking about Georgie coming back, and the cake, that she’d forgotten to put the coffee on until ten minutes ago. She shook her head. “Not quite.” He put a forkful of the peach cake into his mouth, and smiled. “This is wonderful.” She smiled back at him, forgetting the nervousness she always felt when he was close.

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“So, Aleksandra, tell me about yourself. What else do you do besides such excellent baking?” He sat down at the table and looked at her. She felt herself blushing even more deeply. “I…don’t do anything. I…don’t know.” “Oh, come now. Surely you did other things at home, when you were in school?” He took another forkful of cake and watched her while he chewed. “I imagine you were a tomboy.” Her cheeks were flaming now. She desperately wanted to give him the right answer. “We, the girls, that is, weren’t allowed to do sports. Our mother wouldn’t let us wear shorts. And my Papa wouldn’t allow me to go on…in school. I wanted to, though.” What was she doing, going on like this! Talking nonsense. Men didn’t want to hear such things. “Really? And why did you want to go on in school?” Her heart was pounding. Why was he asking her these things? “I wanted to be a nurse.” “Is that so?” She nodded. “I read a book about Florence Nightingale and…” He was smiling a strange, laughing sort of smile. Did he think she sounded foolish? She bumbled on. “And I thought that maybe I could do something like her. Be a nurse and go to other places…” “Well,” he said, his face serious again, “I think you’d make a very good nurse.” He put the last of the piece of cake into his mouth. “Jesus, this is good cake. Cut me another small piece.” Wincing at his blasphemy, she sliced another piece. “You know, it’s not exactly like that. The Florence Nightingale story, I mean. Nurses don’t usually go far away. Not my nurses, anyway. Do you think you’d like cleaning up bedpans and changing bloody bandages?” She’d never thought much about bedpans before. “Well, I…I guess. But I was thinking more of…the operating room.” “Ah, yes. Specializing.” He took a sip of coffee. “Of course. I could see you in an operating room. You have to be very quick, you know. Anticipate the surgeon’s every move.” She knew she could do that, put the right instrument into his hand at just the right moment.

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“Does it take a long time to get to be an operating nurse, to specialize?” She loved the word. Specialize. “You’re not afraid of seeing people cut open, seeing throbbing organs, blood and guts?” She shook her head. Dr. Oliver looked at her. His face seemed to say that he believed her. “It takes three years to train and then another year of operating room work.” “Oh.” She mentally added on four more years of high school and her heart sank. “Well, look at the time,” he said, pushing his plate away and standing up. He pulled the belt of the dressing gown more tightly around his belly, patted his stomach and quietly belched. “Lexi!” A small wail wafted down the stairs and she ran up. Simon had wet his bed again. She picked him up and carried him to the bathroom, where she took off his wet flannel pyjamas. She’d have the extra load of washing, including her now soaked apron, into the machine before Georgie arrived. Noon came and went. Hadn’t Georgie said she’d come back today? Mrs. Oliver was still sleeping. She couldn’t ask her. She heard the telephone ring in the front hall. Three long and two short rings. It was for someone else on the party line. She stared at the brown wooden box on the wall. For once she wished that it was their ring. Ever since she’d arrived she’d been nervous about answering it, afraid that it might be an emergency for Dr. Oliver and that she wouldn’t know what to say. Mrs. Oliver had told her to say, “Dr. Oliver’s residence.” But then what? Now she was dying to answer it. “Yoo-hoo!” Georgie’s voice floated in from the back door. The children had come in from the backyard with her and now sat at the kitchen table, waiting expectantly. “What happened?” asked Lexi breathlessly. “What do you mean?” Georgie casually smoothed Sally’s hair, experimented with holding it in a ponytail. “Well, I thought you were coming to do the upstairs curtains today. And…” “I’m here, aren’t I?” Georgie laughed. “I’m not about to get up at

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the crack of dawn when I’ve worked late the night before, now am I?” She snapped her gum. “Gosh, when’s a girl going to get her beauty sleep?” “Oh…” “Come on, kiddo! Let’s get the whole darn kit and caboodle in the washing machine so you can relax.” Lexi moved over to Georgie and whispered, so the children wouldn’t hear, “Mrs. Oliver’s still sleeping up there.” Georgie clamped her lips together as if thinking hard and then grinned a mischievous grin. “Well, I guess she’ll wake up then,” she said, pulling a scarf out of her string bag and tying it around her curls. Lexi felt queasy. “Let’s up and at ’em.” Georgie moved towards the stairs. “Can we help too?” asked Sally. “Sure,” said Georgie. “You two can hold the curtain hooks when we take them out.” As they marched up the stairs, Lexi carrying the dry mop and duster for the walls and shushing the children, she felt, in spite of her worry that they were going to wake up Mrs. Oliver, something new stirring. This strange and shocking girl, this Georgie, could become her friend. What would Papa say? He would never allow it. Such a worldly girl with a sinful tongue. But Georgie didn’t seem to be a bad person, did she? She seemed to have a kind heart. With Papa nowhere near, it was Lexi who could allow or not allow this Georgie to become a friend. The thought sent a shiver through her. For the first time since she’d come to Ontario, almost a month ago, she had the feeling that something good might happen.

four Lexi was in the middle of brushing the braids out of her hair before going to bed when there was a knock at her door. She jumped up, her heart pounding, holding the brush in front of her. A memory of Russia flashed through her mind. Dark men on horses, approaching.

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“Open the door, will you?” Mrs. Oliver said, in an exasperated voice. Breath sluiced out of her lungs. She put down the brush and hurried to the door. Mrs. Oliver had a cigarette dangling from her mouth and her arms were laden with clothes. “Here,” she said, tossing the clothes on the bed. The dull red glow of her cigarette swam around her face in the dimness. “I thought that since these are a tad too big for me these days, you could use them.” She gestured with her cigarette at the pile of clothes. “You’ve been here almost a month now, and I’m tired of those same two skirts you always wear. People will think we don’t pay you enough.” Lexi stared at the clothes. Refugee. They’d been given other peoples’ clothes when they were first in Saskatchewan, when Papa was unable to make enough of a living to both feed and clothe them. In Russia they’d never had that problem, except during the famine, of course. “I haven’t worn any of them in ages. No one will recognize them.” A sour laugh. “So you needn’t worry about that. And you can wear your other outfits to church, of course. If you still want to.” She took a long contemplative drag. “I think you’ll be much more relaxed with the children…” Was this like the bare feet on her first day? A strange requirement for the job? Like a uniform? “You can wear trousers for playing outside and doing the shopping. I don’t know how you can run in those long skirts.” Refugee. Refugee. Refugee. She looked at Mrs. Oliver and then at the clothes, remembering the bundles Mama and Papa had been sent by American relatives in Newton, Kansas, when they had first come to Canada in 1925, how Mama had worked to make them over into “new” clothes that would fit. Mama was a skilled seamstress and tailor. She could work miracles with cloth. People in Millheim would talk behind their back about them when they walked down the street because Mama would always add a bit of lace or embroidery to the things she made. Long black quilted skirts and black blouses with lace trim, that’s mostly what she made. People were jealous, people said: if you’re so poor, why are you dressed so well?

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Lexi hadn’t been able to dredge up a single ounce of gratitude for all the work Mama put into making things beautiful. She’d secretly hated the stained underarm patches, faintly emanating other people’s old sweat no matter how many times they were washed. She’d despised the telltale faded lines of former hemlines. And now she was being given clothes that looked like they’d never been worn. Brilliantly coloured clothes. And still they made her feel like a refugee, like she was being asked to put on a foreign skin. Why was she never satisfied? Why could she not accept what God handed her? “Thank you,” she managed to say, her cheeks flushing. “You can model something for me tomorrow.” Mrs. Oliver tossed her hair back and took another drag. “Gerald will think there’s two of us!” She laughed, a strange edge to her voice, and then coughed. Lexi took a quick, alarmed breath. “Oh, you’ll be the prettier one. As well as the more competent.” She stood back, her head tilted as if she were going to take a picture. “Especially if you leave your hair down like that. Turn around.” She obeyed. “By the way, you don’t have an ashtray, do you?” “No.” Did Mrs. Oliver think she smoked! “I’ll have to get one for up here.” When she turned around, Mrs. Oliver was gone. When it was clear that she wasn’t coming back up, Lexi closed her door and sat down on the bed beside the clothes, holding back from touching them or even looking at them. Vanity, all is vanity. Mennonite women at home were working in their kitchens and gardens, their skirts and long-sleeved blouses hiding their sinful flesh from the eyes of man and God. She waited a few more minutes, staring out of the window at the rising moon, thinking of Oma’s garden in Blumenort, where she’d kicked out her heavy black shoes on the swing when she was five, never happier. The sweet taste of watermelon syrup filling her small mouth. She turned to the clothes. They lay there, innocent pieces of wool and silk and leather. Beautiful constructions. She touched a pair of

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trousers, marvelling at their woolly softness, sharp creases and the precision of the turned-up cuffs. Slowly, as if she were gently caressing a small child, she leafed through the blouses, skirts and dresses. No stained underarm patches. She drew in her breath when she found two brand-new satin brassieres hidden in the middle of the pile. A deep blue wool sweater with a square neckline lay on top, like a patch of night sky. She reached out, almost afraid to touch it, and when she did, its softness was like the underside of a kitten. She held it up to her face. Then she looked back at the bed and saw the navy skirt that was meant to go with it. The skirt was one of the fashionable ones Mrs. Oliver often wore, cut on the bias so that it rippled around the hemline and swung gracefully. Her hands trembled as she unbuttoned her nightgown. She lifted the brassiere to her chest, unable to look at herself in the mirror, and slipped her arms into its smooth straps. The cups felt strange against her breasts, like small soft cages. When she reached her arms around to her back to try to do it up, she had to struggle to find where the hooks slipped into the eyes, even though she’d been sewing on hooks and eyes since she was seven. She pulled the sweater over her head and stepped into the skirt, not yet daring to look. Finally, after smoothing down the skirt and adjusting the sweater, she turned to look in the mirror. All the bulkiness of her Mennonite clothes was gone. She hardly recognized herself. She looked like one of the models in Mrs. Oliver’s fashion magazines. The dim lamp shone on her hair, which hung almost to her waist, making it a coppery gold as she slowly turned. Later, tossing and turning in bed, she tried to pray. But the words got lost in the pile of clothes, in a heap on the floor under her window, illuminated by the light of the moon. They were like a rotten tooth her tongue couldn’t help touching. She dreamed of Mama digging in the garden, looking for new potatoes and finding none. In the dream she watched her mother without lifting a finger to help until her Mama finally made a desperate gesture with her arms. She woke up sweating and full of dread. Mama hovered in the room. It was still dark outside. The tree outside her window shivered against a deep plum-coloured sky.

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In the morning, she dressed in her usual skirt and blouse, barely glancing at the clothes piled on the floor. When she walked by, she kicked at them half-heartedly and then felt stupid. She thought of putting them out in the hall, but couldn’t. She pulled her hair into a bun so tightly that it hurt, and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. When Dr. Oliver came into the kitchen for coffee, she busied herself with the porridge. “Cat got your tongue?” he asked as she poured him a cup of coffee. She shook her head, her lips firmly shut. She knew her expression was just like Mama’s. If only she were back home in the kitchen with little Hildy and cheerful Renate and serious, studious Maria, calmly making porridge. Even Mama’s stern quiet would be better than the raging voices arguing inside her. Dr. Oliver’s tailored suit, his Old Spice and silly purple bow tie were suddenly annoying. Simon and Sally ran in. Their childish chatter grated on her nerves, too. Why did Simon always have to shout or pout? And Sally’s doughy face had taken on the sullen look that often came over it. Her little eyes had almost disappeared into her childish frown. She wanted to run upstairs and shake Mrs. Oliver out of her sleep, to ask her if she really could keep the clothes. In spite of her prayers for forgiveness, she couldn’t help wanting them. She wanted them, she wanted to be able to put them on and…and then she saw her Mama’s hard and disappointed face and raged at herself for her sinfulness, for even thinking of it. All morning she dropped things, made extra messes for herself which she cleaned up with huge, sloppy strokes. She snapped at the children when they demanded cookies and ignored their surprised, hurt looks. In the early afternoon, when Mrs. Oliver came down dressed to go out, she was sitting at the dining room table and pretending to help the children make puzzles. “Well,” said Mrs. Oliver, with a flick of her hair, “I see you’ve opted for the tried and true.” Lexi lowered her eyes, shame rising in her chest, and then felt her throat choking up. She had no words of her own. Only Mama’s. She looked up at Mrs. Oliver again, her cheeks burning as Mrs. Oliver put on her coat and pecked each of the children’s cheeks.

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“I guess Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Mrs. Oliver said breezily as she swept out. A few moments later they heard her start the car. The moment Mrs. Oliver left, Simon broke up the puzzle and swept it to the floor. Sally wailed. Lexi barely stopped herself from spanking both of them. She’d never spanked her sister, but she’d come close. Mama spanked them. She spanked the girls but never the boys. She lost her temper so easily. Papa never hit any of them. He raised his voice and that was enough. When Georgie appeared, ready to go on with the fall cleanup, Lexi was as puffed up as a milkweed pod. “Look what she’s done!” Lexi said, running ahead of Georgie up the stairs to her room. “Holy Toledo!” Georgie rifled through the pile of trousers, skirts, blouses and dresses jumbled on the floor, tossing them one by one on to the bed. “Even brassieres!” Georgie held one of them up to her body and whistled. “Isn’t this the cat’s pyjamas! Put something on.” “No.” “Oh, don’t be silly. You don’t have to keep them. Just see if they fit.” How could she tell Georgie that she knew they were all the perfect size for her? Already she was a liar. “Come on, Lex. Be a sport. Just for fun.” Lexi shook her head, but hesitated by the bed. Georgie shooed the children out of the room and closed the door behind them. “I won’t look,” she said, staring out of the window with her arms folded over her chest. Lexi wanted desperately to show Georgie how wonderful the clothes were, how they changed her, how they made her look like another girl completely. The emerald green silk blouse fell over her like water. Her fingers trembled as she slid the tiny loops around the row of covered buttons up the front. Her arms felt white and bare, exposed by the scalloped half-shell sleeves. She’d never before worn trousers, and she felt shaky and awkward as she slid her bare legs into the wide black wool legs and fastened the gold belt buckle. The belt was almost too big for her slender waist. She undid her bun and let the huge curl of her blonde hair fall down her back.

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“OK, you can turn around now,” she said, her voice barely audible. Georgie’s mouth fell open. “Jesus! You look like Ginger Rogers!” “Who?” She couldn’t help but be offended by Georgie’s swearing. “A movie star. Turn around.” She slowly turned and Georgie whistled again. “Gosh, with a bit of lipstick… boy, what I wouldn’t give to look like that for just five minutes.” “Oh, don’t say that. I…” “You’re a knockout, kiddo. Face it.” She frowned at herself in the mirror and turned around again. She suddenly had the idea that Georgie should put on something too so she wouldn’t feel so strange and guilty, but the children were knocking impatiently at the door and Georgie opened it. “Lexi, why are you wearing trousers like Mommy?” asked Sally, staring. “Daddy says you dress funny because you go to church.” “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” said Georgie. Lexi took a few experimental steps around the room. “I can’t wear these,” she said. Georgie slowly unwrapped a new piece of gum. “Gee, if it was me, and I looked like you, I’d sure take them.” “It says in the Bible that material things … distract us from God …” “Mommy used to wear this to go out at nighttime,” said Simon, holding up a slinky black dress. “If that’s what you want to believe.” Georgie smacked her gum loudly as she continued to survey Lexi. “It is what I believe.” Papa’s voice was suddenly in the room, quoting Revelation: And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. “Well, kiddo, it’s your funeral,” she said smiling. “So what are you going to do? Give all this stuff back?” “I …don’t know.” Suddenly she couldn’t bear to part with the clothes. Having put them on, they’d become hers. She walked over to the window. The trousers let her take longer strides.

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“Lutherans say that stuff too, you know. They all do. But nobody really does it. They’re all hypocrites. That’s why I quit.” “You quit?” “Yeah.” Georgie popped a bubble. “Didn’t your mother…?” “My Mom didn’t care. She never really went in for that sort of thing. I did for a bit in my teens but it got kinda stale. She was just happy that I could work in the restaurant on Sunday mornings.” It had never occurred to her that she could quit being a Mennonite even though others had done it, like Rudy Friesen. He and his family had crossed with all of them from Russia in 1925. Two years ago, when he was twenty, he went to Winnipeg and they heard that he drank. Lexi heard about it from Willy; he told her not to mention it to Mama and Papa. She’d felt a thrill at first, thinking about it, but that had quickly turned to fear when his name was never mentioned again. Such a happy, lively person disappearing so completely like that. His parents closed their faces as if he was dead. She quickly began to unbuckle the belt. “Well, I gotta get some work done,” said Georgie. “Come on you two, let Lexi change in peace. Let’s go dig up the garden.” Closing the door after them, Lexi slowly took off the clothes, folded them neatly and placed them on her bed beside the crumpled cotton skirt and blouse she’d tossed there a few moments ago. Her own almost threadbare clothes were like rags beside the wool pants and silk shirt. Her fingers fumbled with the hooks and eyes on her blouse and with braiding her hair. Her heart was beating hard as she curled up her braids and jabbed in the bobby pins. Three days later, Mrs. Oliver smirked at her as she was going upstairs and said, “You know, Lexi, clothes really do make the woman.” Georgie asked constantly if she was really going to give them back. Lexi couldn’t stand it another minute. The next morning she came down to breakfast wearing the emerald silk blouse and the wool trousers with the wide belt. The clothes were her new uniform, she told herself, as if she were a waitress in a restaurant. Dr. Oliver, to her surprise, didn’t say a thing as she stood at the sink with her back to him, her heart beating wildly. When she turned, he took his cup of coffee from her shaking hand as usual, smiled a quick smile, and then buried his head in his newspaper.

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Later that morning as she was running up the stairs, carrying a pail and mop, Mrs. Oliver emerged from her room, fumbling with her first cigarette of the day. “Stop!” she screamed. Lexi stood in front of her, wondering what she’d done wrong. “Put those things down,” Mrs. Oliver ordered. She put the pail on the floor and leaned the mop up against the wall. “Turn around.” When she had her back to her, Mrs. Oliver took Lexi’s hair from behind and smoothed it down her back. Then she put a hand on her shoulder and turned her again. “Well! You sly thing!” she said, grinning. Lexi felt a wave of nausea. “Has Gerald seen you yet?” She nodded, feeling her cheeks getting hot. “And?” said Mrs. Oliver, looking her up and down. “He didn’t say anything.” Her face was burning. “Really.” She took a long drag. “Well, you fit in now. It’ll be much better. Much better.”

five After the seventh driving lesson, Dr. Oliver went to the police station with her to get her beginner’s permit. She was now to do all the family shopping. She’d come to like the driving lessons and was sorry that they’d be over now. From the second lesson on she’d made quick progress. The surge of power as she shifted the gears from first to second to third excited her. She liked mechanical things. Braking and gearing down as she turned corners became effortless, yet full of a sense of control. Such deep satisfaction in the crunch of gravel under the tires as they sped along country roads at thirty-five miles an hour. Once she’d gone even faster than that on a straight stretch, and Dr. Oliver laughed and put his hand on the dashboard. She laughed too and kept her foot on the gas.

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But it wasn’t just the driving. It was talking to Dr. Oliver, hearing about the operations he did, about patients and diseases. He seemed to enjoy the fact that she was so interested, that she wanted to hear all about how he opened up a body, how he cut and stitched living tissue. They sat in the car to talk, and she was aware of her long hair falling down her back, the deep green silk blouse and the tweed trousers. Her new clothes weren’t really visible under her coat, but she felt them as if she’d grown a new skin. The slippery silk against her arms and chest, the tightness of the leather belt cinched around her waist, the scratchiness of the tweed against her legs where she’d only ever felt wool stockings. She felt almost naked and yet more fully clothed than ever before. The first time she crawled down King Street on her own in the expensive yellow car, she was terrified she might crash it into something. Or see Tante Gertie walking with her shopping basket. Or, worse yet, run into one of the Old Order horse-drawn buggies filled to overflowing with women in bonnets and men in wide black hats. She imagined a frightened horse rearing up, its hooves crashing down on the hood. She’d noticed only a few such buggies in the couple of months she’d been there because they belonged to people who lived out of town. Each time she saw one, though, she’d turned away, she’d blushed with shame. She couldn’t look the Old Order Mennonites in the eye. They would see who she really was. Aleksandra the Terrible. But by her second solo excursion, her confidence returned. She was proud of the baskets of apples and potatoes, brown paper packages of roast beef, ham and butter, jars of syrup, apple butter and cooking oil that emerged from the trunk of the car when she got home. The icebox was no longer a disaster. Cammy was pleased to be relieved of all the shopping. Cammy. Yes, Cammy. One day she woke up and just thought of her as Cammy. Not Mrs. Oliver. The first time she spoke the name out loud, Cammy had laughed and then congratulated her. When Lexi and the children walked into the Cat’s Eye Café one Saturday afternoon, heads turned and she almost ran back out. What was she thinking! What was wrong with her! This new life she was living

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was like a dream, sometimes bad, sometimes good. It took her down sinful paths. Again the new clothes she wore made her feel naked. She pulled the children to her side as if they might protect her. She was about to turn back and leave quickly when Georgie emerged from the kitchen carrying a small notepad and a rag, wearing a black uniform with a white apron and starched scalloped cap. She looked different. Tidy and anxious. “Lexi! What are you doing here?” “Cammy told me to come downtown to Goudie’s department store to buy some linen napkins for the party they’re having in a couple of weeks. I parked on King Street and then I saw the restaurant. I’m sorry, I should never…” Georgie glanced at a door with a small window in it halfway down the room, which appeared to lead into the kitchen. “Come in. Sit down. Of course you can come in here.” She led them to an empty booth and swiped the table with her cloth. “What can I get for you?” The children looked expectantly at Lexi. She’d spent all the money Cammy had given her on the napkins. Her own money was in the bank. And in Papa’s pockets. “Well, I don’t think that we can have anything…we just dropped in…” “Milkshakes?” Both children nodded vigorously and smiled at Georgie. “But I don’t have…” “Coffee, then,” Georgie said, and disappeared through the door at the back of the restaurant. Sally propped her doll beside her on the bench and whispered something to it. Simon grabbed a handful of toothpicks from the small glass container and stabbed at the button in the leatherette seat. Lexi looked around at the rows of dark wooden booths beside the windows. Every seat in the place was covered with cracked winecoloured leatherette. A counter, curved at either end, ran along the length of the room. Its round seats, perched on metal poles, were like overgrown mushrooms. The mirror behind the counter made the room look twice as large, as if it were receding into an endless horizon. Aromas of coffee, cigarette smoke, boiling fat and frying meat mingled in the air. The few people in the place were sipping coffee from thick

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white mugs, talking quietly and eating. So this was a restaurant. It didn’t feel wrong or sinful. There didn’t seem to be people plotting evil things. In fact, the few people in the place looked bored more than anything else. They looked normal. When Georgie appeared with two tall vase-like glasses with brown bubbles on top, straws and long-handled spoons sticking out of them, the children’s eyes widened. “I guess I shouldn’t be giving you these so close to suppertime,” Georgie said, carefully placing a glass in front of each of them. “Don’t tell your mother.” “We won’t!” they chorused together as they stretched up to reach their straws. Georgie slid into the booth beside Lexi after another furtive look around the restaurant. “I can just sit down for a minute.” She reached into the apron pocket where she kept her cigarettes, but didn’t take them out. Instead, she dug deeper in her pocket, found a Chicklet, brushed the lint from it and popped it into her mouth. “Look, you want to meet my Mom? She’s in the kitchen. I told her you were here.” Lexi nodded, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Georgie’s mother sounded so unlike how a mother should be. A mother who worked in a restaurant, who didn’t care if her daughter went to church. It was wrong to befriend such people. Papa would demand that she come home immediately if he knew. “Come on, then,” said Georgie, sliding out of the booth. “You children stay here. Lexi will be right back.” Georgie led her through the swinging doors behind the counter and into the kitchen. It was surprisingly small. A gigantic icebox took up almost all of the back wall and a huge metal sink, piled high with dirty dishes and pots and pans, was jammed diagonally into a corner too small for it. A girl with blonde braids and a soiled cotton dress, her back to them, scrubbed away at pots and pans. A tiny woman with corkscrew strands of grey hair falling over her forehead from under a blue polkadot bandana looked up from a pan of sizzling sausages. Her small pointed face and tiny, alert eyes made Lexi think of a weasel. She

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wore a long dirty apron over baggy trousers, and a frayed grey shirt with its sleeves rolled up over her elbows. “Mom, this is Lexi. Lexi, this is Mom, Mrs. Schumann.” Mrs. Schumann wiped her hands on her apron and held one out to Lexi. Like everything else about her, her fingers were tiny. And greasy. Mrs. Schumann looked her up and down, her lips pursed. “She drove here on her own,” said Georgie. “Isn’t that something?” “That doctor’s a fine one, teaching women to drive. I always say it’s a man’s job to drive. Dangerous to put a woman in the way of traffic.” “Lexi’s a good driver, Mom. Real careful. I’ve seen her. She does all the grocery shopping.” “That right?” Mrs. Schumann expertly flipped the sausages over, browning them perfectly. “Turn off them potatoes!” she barked at Georgie, glancing over at the bubbling pot cooking on the stove and then back at Lexi. “So, I hear your mother taught you how to work.” Mrs. Schumann looked up from her sausages and smiled at her, her small teeth as crooked as her daughter’s. “I …suppose so.” Lexi smiled back. “Georgie tells me you’re cleaning that house up good. About time. Last time they hired me, before they started getting Georgie to work for ’em, it was a regular pigsty. Not so’s you’d notice from just looking, but when you got down into the corners and under the cupboards.” She nodded. She knew exactly what Mrs. Schumann was talking about. “Miss!” A man’s voice from the restaurant. “I’ve got to run.” Georgie hurried out of the kitchen. “So, you like working for the Olivers?” She shrugged. “Guess you don’t have much choice, eh?” Mrs. Schumann again looked her up and down, smiling slightly, her eyes resting for a moment on Lexi’s legs, which were encased in brown cotton stockings under a short skirt. Lexi could feel her cheeks reddening. Georgie had no doubt told her mother about her wearing Cammy’s clothes. “Georgie tells me you’re a real good baker.” Mrs. Schumann turned back to the sausages and rolled them out of the pan onto a plate. “That so?” “Dr. Oliver likes my pies. And my cookies.” She felt her face going beet red.

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“He does, does he? Well, I bet they’re a sight better than anything he’s had in that house for a while. If that wife of his didn’t spend all her time gallivanting around…she’s damn lucky he rescued her. One of his patients, you know. Crazy as a bedbug.” Georgie burst into the kitchen. “One special and one pork chop.” Mrs. Schumann pushed the plate with the sausages, potatoes and cooked carrots into her daughter’s hand. “Here, this one’s ready.” Georgie gave Lexi a small pleading look, then shrugged her shoulders as if her life were hopeless and went back out into the restaurant, carrying the plate. “I’d better get going,” said Lexi. “I have to get the children home. Thanks for letting them have the milkshakes…” “They had milkshakes, did they?” said Mrs. Schumann, going to the icebox and bringing out a pork chop. “Don’t be a stranger now, hear?” “I won’t,” said Lexi edging towards the kitchen door. “Now, if you ever need a job…” Mrs. Schumann glanced over at the girl scrubbing pots, who hadn’t once turned her back since Lexi entered the kitchen. “And you’d work up to serving customers.” “Thanks.” She could imagine how the girl felt. Mrs. Schumann’s beady eyes boring into her back every day. No thanks. She almost ran into Georgie as the kitchen doors swung closed behind her. “I’ve got to get the children back,” she said. “See you Monday?” “Yeah, see you Monday.” Georgie glanced at the small window in the kitchen door and then back at Lexi. “You two have a…talk?” she said in a low voice. “I guess so…” “Did she tell you that you could work here?” She nodded. “I knew she would. She tries to get every girl I ever meet to work here.” She smiled apologetically. “But don’t pay any attention. She just thinks that if I’m happier at the restaurant, I’ll stay out of trouble. Even though it’s kind of late for that.” Her mouth twisted into a sad smile. “Well, kiddo, see you Monday,” she said, heading back into the kitchen, her shoulders slumped.

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six The Olivers’ party was only two weeks away, the day before Halloween. Cammy had invited her sister, Louise, and her brother-in-law, David, as well as the actors she’d met at a party in London a few weeks earlier. The actors were in the middle of rehearsals for a play, called The Greener Pastures, at the Grand Theatre, which was to open the week before Christmas. And one of them, Richard Berry Harrison, Cammy told her, a Negro man who’d been born right in London, was world famous. A Negro man? Lexi had never seen a Negro; well, not up close so that he might seem real. On the train ride out, she’d seen some from a distance. Lexi’s face must have registered her surprise because Cammy laughed. “He told me he also played ‘de Lawd’ in The Greener Pastures, at the Mansfield Theater on Broadway. Can you believe it? It’s a play about the Bible.” Lexi was shocked. A man playing God. A Negro man. Papa would… she wasn’t sure what Papa would do or say, it was so shocking, so…unusual. Cammy sat in the kitchen while Lexi worked, as she often did. She’d talked on and on about the actors for the last three weeks, but had done nothing to prepare for the party. She sent Lexi on silly errands, such as buying another twelve very expensive new linen table napkins at Goudie’s department store when they already had dozens of perfectly fine ones. She’d also begun chewing her fingernails and constantly popping up in odd places, smoking furiously. When Lexi went down to the fruit cellar for more apples or a jar of canned peaches or pickles, she would hear Cammy behind her on the basement steps and, when she turned, Cammy would laugh a silly laugh and wait to follow her back up like a child. Or she’d come into the bathroom as Lexi was bathing Sally and sit on the toilet seat, reading a children’s book in a loud voice. A week before the party, Lexi was standing at the kitchen window laboriously drying dishes, the children perched on two kitchen chairs

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beside her, when a black, beetle-like car rolled into the driveway. A tall woman with very thin legs got out. She was wearing a dark fur coat and a blue feathered hat folded around her curled auburn hair like a claw. The woman walked with an exaggerated stride, swinging her hips from side to side. The front doorbell rang. Cammy ran down the front stairs. “Louise!” The children immediately jumped off their chairs and ran into the living room. Lexi watched from the doorway as the sisters kissed each other on both cheeks. Simon and Sally ran up to their aunt and she kissed each of them loudly on both cheeks too. “Hi, darlings!” “Auntie Louise, did you bring us anything?” asked Sally. “What do you think, poppet?” “I think you did!” said Simon. “Well, you’ll see, won’t you. Look in my bag.” She tossed her large leather purse onto the sofa and the children ran to it. Louise threw her coat on a chair in the foyer, and she and Cammy sank down side by side in front of the fireplace. The children had found a paper bag in their aunt’s purse and were noisily sucking on sugar candies from inside it. “Upstairs, darlings,” said their aunt with a wave of her hand. Crestfallen, the children slowly left the room. Lexi had hung up the fur coat and was about to follow the children upstairs when Cammy motioned her over. “Lexi, come here. I want you to meet my sister, Mrs. Atkinson.” Cammy took her sister’s hand. Mrs. Atkinson drew back slightly. “Louise,” Cammy’s sister said. She walked towards them, acutely aware that she was wearing a pair of Cammy’s pants and one of her cotton blouses. “Well, nice to meet you, Lexi.” Mrs. Atkinson pried her hand away from Cammy’s grasp and held it out to her. It was cool and slim and slipped away in an instant. Mrs. Atkinson glanced at Cammy. “Lexi, could you get us a couple of scotches? You know what bottle that is,” said Cammy, slouching more deeply into the couch, her mouth in a pout.

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As soon as Lexi left the room, she heard Mrs. Atkinson say in a low voice, “I see what you mean.” She crouched down to look through the liquor bottles in the large wooden sideboard in the dining room. Of course she knew what scotch was by now. “I hate her.” Lexi’s heart seemed to stop and leave a hole in her chest. Were they talking about her? “Now come on, Cam, you don’t hate her.” “Yes, I do. She spoils everything. Every time. Going on like that about her dancing. As if anyone cared. Except maybe you. You were the only real dancer in the family. Or at least you could have been if you hadn’t married David. I could just see Mona’s eyes rolling that time at your Mardi Gras party. And Herbie yawning. It was so obvious.” No, Lexi realized, it wasn’t her they were talking about after all. What a silly, self-centred person she was. “Well, we were all getting pretty drunk by that time. I doubt if anyone really noticed.” “I’d like to see just one social event where Mommy doesn’t go into excruciating detail about dancing in the Paris Opera Ballet. After all, she was only in the corps and Daddy had to rescue her from poverty. You don’t hear Daddy going on about the fact that he regularly meets with the Prime Minister. And, of course, I have nothing of any interest at all to say to anybody. I’m merely the doctor’s wife.” “I get the point, Cammy. We’ve been over this a million times. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about Mommy. If we invite her she’s going to get high as a kite and blather. Speaking of which, are we going to get our drinks?” Lexi clanked a bottle against the edge of one of the crystal glasses and poured unsteadily, shocked by the idea of a mother who drank too much. Cammy had shown her the day after she arrived how much scotch to pour. Three fingers. “She’s not used to pouring liquor,” Cammy said in a low voice. “But what about Mona?” said Mrs. Atkinson. “Didn’t you think she was absolutely divine? That dress!” “Oh, I thought she was disgusting. That ridiculous platinum hair,” said Cammy. “She must get it done every three days. It looks solid as a rock.”

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Lexi walked into the room, carefully carrying two glasses. “Really! Well, you certainly gushed on about what a great actress she is. Without ever having seen one of her plays.” “I did not!” “You did. And isn’t Herbie a cutie? He could put his shoes under my bed any day,” Louise groaned. “I thought he was a pretentious bore.” “But you think all men are pretentious bores.” “Not Mr. Harrison. In spite of the fact that he’s a Negro.” Cammy’s eyes caught Lexi’s as she said the word. Mrs. Atkinson laughed. “I guess playing God for a few years rubs off. By the way,” Mrs. Atkinson looked Lexi in the eye, “speaking of men, I hear Gerald taught you to drive. I hear you’re quite the little pupil. In spite of a few ruined shrubs.” “Oh, Lexi’s a star. She does all the errands with the car now.” Cammy squinted at Lexi through a haze of smoke. She wondered if her face was turning purple. Mama always said she could see a person’s shame in their dark colour. “So I take it the shrubs have recovered?” Mrs. Atkinson laughed. “Oh, and since you’re here, Lexi, we must talk about this party that my sister is throwing next Saturday. Cammy, what still needs to be done?” “Well, we have enough napkins. Finally. And I’ll use the cream linen tablecloth Mommy gave us for our wedding. And…” She has enough napkins to serve the Russian army, Lexi thought. “But what about the food, darling? What are you going to serve?” “Gerald suggested salmon, but where am I going to get salmon in this town these days? With the sorry state of the world most can’t afford it, so we are doomed to eat like the rest. Really, Louise, it can be such a bore. Bratwurst would be more like it.” “So I take it you have no idea what the menu is going to be.” Cammy blew out a mouthful of smoke and looked at Lexi. “Doesn’t she look good in my trousers?” she said. “Gorgeous. Better than you. But for heaven’s sake, Cammy!” “What if we made it a German night?” Cammy sat upright on the couch, her eyes alive. “Lexi could cook some of her German dishes. Gerald’s mad about all those German Tortes and pies she makes. We

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could have Sauerkraut and sausages. Make it a little Oktoberfest!” Cammy flung her hand in the air scattering ashes all over the carpet. Louise bowed her head as if she were in deep thought and then raised it with an inquisitive look. “Well, they are all Brits. It could be quite the little novelty, Cam.” She smiled a conspiratorial smile at her sister. “What do you think, Lexi? Could you make a German dinner for ten?” Her mouth went dry. What exactly was German food? She thought of the suppers when her brothers were still all at home. Ten at every meal. Of course, she could cook that much food. But German? “I’m not sure what you mean.” “You cook German for us, no?” Cammy said. Lexi shook her head, uncertainly. Now she wasn’t so sure. She was becoming more and more unsure about everything. “I cook what Mama taught me. It’s just our food.” “Tell me what your food is, then,” Mrs. Atkinson said. She sounded bored or irritated. “Borscht, Warenijke, Holobsej, farmer sausage…” Lexi stopped. Did they want to hear more? There were hundreds of things. “Good. And dessert?” Louise had finished her drink and was holding her glass out to Lexi for more. “Maple walnut cake, Shoofly pie, Torte, Portzelkje…” “What?” “It’s fried with raisins, a kind of cookie, and the pie has a lot of molasses and…” “Good, that sounds unusual enough. Well then that’s settled. Can you do that for us?” Mrs. Atkinson pushed her glass towards Lexi again and Lexi reached to take it. They wanted all of that? Should she ask? “Maybe, if Georgie could…” “Who’s Georgie?” “She helps out with the fall cleaning. Her mother’s a cook at the Cat’s Eye Café. Georgie’s a waitress there,” said Cammy. “Perfect.” Cammy drained her glass and held it out to Lexi. “Could you get me another little drinky, too?”

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As she again poured three fingers into the two glasses, she heard Mrs. Atkinson’s low voice. “God, Cammy! She’s certainly not what you described. Aren’t you just a teeny bit worried about…?” There was a small silence. “Of course not. She’s a Mennonite, for God’s sake.” “Well, a Mennonite should look like a Mennonite, as far as I’m concerned. The last thing you need in your marriage is any competition, Cammy. You know Gerald and…Remember your last two girls, especially that dark one…what was her name?” “Shhh!” hissed Cammy. “That was her fault. She was a little hussy and hysterical.” “You can’t be too careful, you know,” said Mrs. Atkinson. “Louise, you know I can’t stand…oh, you know, Gerald and all his attentions…he has his little bit of fun, I know that…a bit of flirting never hurt, did it. That’s all he does, you know. A tease and a flirt.” Mrs. Atkinson mumbled something. “I know for a fact, Louise, that he’s not capable of…” There was more mumbling and then Cammy’s high, nervous laugh. “He hasn’t been able to for years. I’ve asked him to speak with his doctor, but, well, you know Gerald. You can’t tell him anything.” Lexi waited, poised by the sideboard until there was another moment of silence, and then walked in with the fresh drinks. Mrs. Atkinson smiled at her. “I’d love to taste some of your famous baking,” she said as she took her drink. “Do you have anything we could nibble on, Lexi?” She hurried into the kitchen and let out a long breath. As she placed an assortment of her cookies and squares onto one of Cammy’s good plates, she caught a glimpse of her slender figure in the darkening kitchen window. She glanced again and straightened her shoulders, still taken aback, even after a month, by her new silhouette. And in spite of her best resolve to speak less to Dr. Oliver, in spite of Mama’s disapproving face always hovering over her, in spite of the fires of hell which were probably getting closer and closer each day, she smiled at her own beautiful reflection.

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seven The Friday evening before the party was balmy. A sudden warm spell, unusual for this late in October, had come. A good omen for tomorrow night’s party. Six of the actors, including Mr. Harrison, had accepted invitations and, after hours of heated discussion with her sister, Cammy had decided not to invite her parents. Lexi was relieved. She didn’t want to meet a grandmother who drank too much. She could hear Cammy’s animated voice down in the living room. When Cammy read to the children after supper, she went up to her room, glad for half an hour’s rest. Usually she leafed through Cammy’s old Vogue magazines or, before she was called to put the children to bed, tried to read one of the Mennonite devotional booklets that were regularly tucked into her parents’ letters. There was always a strange lurch in her belly when she switched from one to the other, but the uncomfortable feeling didn’t stop her admiring the beauty of the girls and their clothing. She wasn’t sure what it was that interested her so much, but often she wished she’d been born one of them instead of having the heaviness of the Mennonite ways and laws weighing on her. She wanted to be just a person. She wanted to walk down King Street as just a person. What would that feel like? Who would she be? Sometimes she reread letters from her brother Willy, who was at the Tabor College Bible School in Hillsboro, Kansas. She loved Willy so much and yet she envied him, first because he was allowed to finish high school, and then because the rich relatives in Newton paid his way at Bible School. No one would ever dream of doing that for her. Willy had such beautiful handwriting. Sometimes he drew little pictures in the margins of his letters, illustrations to go along with the descriptions in his writing. A caricature of a teacher he disliked, for example. In his latest letter there was a drawing of a girl. Emma in the Library, he called it. Most of her face was in shadow and her head was bent, reading. She looked intelligent. She looked so content. Lexi yearned to be that girl sitting in the library, reading. Were there actually girls at the Bible College? She found that impossible to believe. Here in Waterloo she was too restless to read. She often thought of writing something in one of the yellow notebooks but nothing ever

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happened and the pages remained blank, white as the prairies in winter, empty. Vast and empty. One pale pink ribbon of cloud floated across the deep purple sky. Something about the inevitable fading of that pink cloud made her jump off the bed. She threw on a sweater and tiptoed down the back stairs to the back door. She would go for a walk and enjoy the night air. It was a thrill and it was scary to have such freedom, to have to answer to no one. The dim yellow light coming from the garage window made her think of the coal oil lamps at home, how they made even their poor house seem cozy and warm. She walked by the garage window, peeped in and saw the back of Dr. Oliver’s head wreathed in smoke. She was startled. What was he doing in there? After a few steps across the lawn, she turned back to the garage, as if pulled by an invisible cord. She turned the door handle. Afterwards, she would remember how cold the steel ball had felt on her fingers. Dr. Oliver was leaning against the hood of the car, smoking a cigar and holding a drink in his hand. He turned when he heard the garage door open and stood up straight, the cigar still in his mouth. “I…I…” she stuttered. Already she knew her face was beginning to go pink. She pulled her sweater more tightly around her. “Sorry.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at its glowing end for a long moment. The lantern hanging on the wall hissed slightly. She glanced at it and then at him. The hood of the yellow car stretched between them, gleaming lemon. “Well, Aleksandra?” “I was going for a walk and I just wanted…to see…I mean, to know…” She was trembling now… “You wanted to know what, my dear?” She was silent, shivering even more violently, and yet her legs would not take her away. What crazy impulse had brought her in here? He tapped the ash of his cigar on a paint can lid, put down his drink and walked around the front of the car to where she stood. When he got very close, she stepped back.

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“Aleksandra,” he said softly, “you look different in this light. It becomes you.” He continued to study her, his face serious. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and they stood as if he were also balancing himself by holding on to her, as if he were keeping them both from toppling over. She stared back into his eyes, dark as coal in the dim light, at his nose with the ever so slight reddish bulb at the end, at the plush curve of his bottom lip where it almost met the dark hair curling over his top lip. “You know, Aleksandra,” he said, his voice soft, almost pensive, “there’s something about you…” Her breath was ragged as she inhaled the smells of his cigar and the oil and gas of the garage. The hissing yellow light of the lantern seemed suddenly menacing, not warm and inviting. She shook her head. “I…just wanted to…” He bent towards her until his lips were touching hers, until she could feel the softness of them, like tender, dry parchment. She let herself feel his lips for a second and then pulled away, suddenly shocked by what was happening. She should never have come in here. It was all her fault. She wriggled her shoulders out from under his hands and he seemed to fall back on to the hood of the car. She could hear his breathing; it was jagged and tight. “Aleksandra…” he said, trying to smile. His face was fiery. “I’m sorry!” she called, running out of the garage. Inside the house Cammy was looking for her. “Where were you?” she asked, annoyed. “I sent the children upstairs ten minutes ago. I called …” “Taking a walk,” she said, looking at the carpet beneath her feet. She could smell his cigar on her clothing. She stepped away from Cammy, afraid that she would smell him on her, too. Cammy stared at her but she said nothing. Lexi’s face burned the whole time she bathed the children. Cammy had followed her up and was hanging around as she sometimes did, smirking and rolling her eyes as Lexi dried off the children and put them into their pyjamas.

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“They’re all the same, aren’t they?” she said. Cammy took a long drag and squinted at her as if she were studying how neatly she folded the children’s clothes and put them on the chair beside the bed, ready for the next day. “Aren’t you, you little rascals! You’re all the same!” She snorted smoke at them. “Little pains in the buttinsky.” She laughed. “What’s a buttinsky?” asked Sally after Cammy had left and Lexi was tucking her under the covers. “Oh, it’s nothing. Your mommy was just joking. Making up silly words.” “Mommy’s silly a lot,” said Sally. “Lexi?” She looked up with solemn eyes. “You’re not going to leave, are you?” She stared at Sally, suspended by the very question that had been hammering in her head since she’d come flying in from the garage. “Why do you say that, Sally?” “Because Frankie left and then Mabel left and I was sad. And I like you the best.” “I’m not going to leave,” she said. But she’d left her sisters. She sat with Sally a long time, holding her hand, until Sally’s eyes fluttered and closed for the night. After a few moments, once she was sure Sally was asleep, she extracted her hand, turned out the light and walked slowly up the back stairs to her room. As she lay wide-eyed in her bed, alternately sweating and shivering, she heard Cammy and Gerald laughing downstairs, loud and slurry, drinking. “Shhh!” hissed Cammy, suddenly closer. They were coming up. Cammy giggled and coughed and the bedroom door slammed shut. Lexi burrowed into her bed, hiding her head under the pink bedspread. But whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. No! Dr. Oliver was good! He operated on people and saved lives. He hadn’t laughed when she told him she wanted to be a nurse. He and Cammy trusted her, believed that she could do the cooking for their big party. And he’d just wanted to kiss her because…

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And even though Cammy smoked and drank and acted like a loony, she sometimes wept bitterly when she thought no one else could hear. Lexi felt sorry for her. And what about the clothes? Weren’t they a gift? Hadn’t they made her see herself completely differently? And she and Georgie laughed and talked in a way that no one at home ever did, except maybe Willy. Tall, skinny, short-sighted Willy, always able to make her laugh, always able to know when she was sad and needed cheering up. And now Georgie, her first real friend. Lexi loved how she said exactly what she thought. She curled her body into a ball under the covers and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. What would Willy think of Dr. Oliver? Lexi closed her eyes and tried to think of something else. Molotschna Province, in Russia, with its endless fields of waving grain, its patches of shiny watermelon, its golden sunflowers. The meringue Tortes were in the oven by seven-thirty the next morning, and she’d just finished making the coffee when Dr. Oliver came in. She stared through the window over the kitchen sink at the tangled black branches of the almost bare trees in the backyard, her eyes wide and scratchy from a sleepless night. “Good morning, Aleksandra!” He sounded more jovial than ever. “Coffee almost done?” She nodded, still not turning around, and began to slice a loaf of bread for toast even though the children and Cammy wouldn’t be up for another half hour. “All ready for the big night? It smells wonderful in here. What’s baking?” “Meringue Tortes.” Suddenly he was behind her. She held the breadknife in mid-air. “Aleksandra,” he said, his voice calm. “What happened last evening is just between us. And it won’t happen again.” She turned to look at his face. His eyes were bloodshot, fiery. He was making a weak attempt to smile. Her bottom lip trembled but she bit down on it. She looked down at her hands, one of them still holding the knife, listening to his breathing so close to her.

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“You’ve got a big day ahead,” he said, moving away and pouring a cup of coffee. “We all do.” When she looked up at him again, he was rolling up his newspaper under his arm. “See you tonight,” he said cheerfully, and left the kitchen. She heard him marching up the stairs, calling loudly, “Cammy, wake up, dearest!” Lexi turned to the menu that Mrs. Atkinson had written out. Lexi had dictated the menu and Mrs. Atkinson had written it down. Perhaps she thought that Lexi couldn’t write? Her handwriting was large and loopy, nothing that would have passed Papa’s approval. Borscht, Zwieback, Warenijke, Holobsej and farmer sausage. And for dessert: maple walnut cake and Shoofly pie.

eight The guests began arriving for the party just as Georgie finished tying the bow of Lexi’s starched gingham apron. Both were wearing black waitress dresses with scalloped white collars. They’d spent the last hour primping, now that everything was baked and cooked, or ready to be cooked. They tied Georgie’s curls into a becoming little ponytail with springs of curls hanging over her ears and forehead, and brushed Lexi’s hair down her back until it shone. Georgie had brought lipstick and Lexi marvelled at its sticky smoothness, at its soft, chemical scent as she experimented with the exact amount of pressure it took to apply it. She smiled and pouted into the mirror with her bright red lips and then quickly wiped most of it off. But she could still taste the traces of red that lingered; it made her feel grown up and sophisticated. At the sound of the doorbell, Georgie gave Lexi’s apron bow one last tug and ran to peer out of the slightly opened kitchen door into the hallway. “Jeepers!” she hissed. “You should see her dress!” “Whose?” “Mrs. Oliver’s.”

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She squeezed up beside Georgie at the kitchen door. Cammy was wearing a slinky black dress, beaded on top with no back, plastered to her thin body. Lexi could clearly see the outlines of her buttocks and her childlike breasts, her hipbones and the little mound below which the skirt fell swirling to the floor. With a shock, Lexi realized that she must be naked under it. “Mona, darling!” Cammy slouched towards the door, one hip protruding, and held out a hand to her first guest. Lexi and Georgie glanced at each other and then quickly looked back to the front door. Mona’s platinum hair did look solid as a rock. She wore a long white fur coat and a long purple silk scarf. “She’s an actress,” whispered Lexi. “She looks as phony as a three-dollar bill,” said Georgie in a low voice. “These people disgust me, Lexi. While most of this town barely has enough to eat, these people are playing dress-up.” Dr. Oliver appeared in a tuxedo, holding a drink. He looked so handsome and upright, and she watched, transfixed, as Mona smiled up at him and blinked her long lashes. “Welcome, Mona,” he said in a deep voice, helping her take off her coat. Lexi couldn’t watch anymore. “We’d better get going,” she said as she closed the kitchen door. The party had to go perfectly. She picked up two platters loaded with pickles, cheeses and Zwieback and walked into the living room. Cammy’s cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke immediately enveloped her. “Fill the champagne glasses!” she hissed, pointing with her cigarette to the silver platters of tall glasses on the sideboard. “Quickly! They need drinks. They’re obviously not going to drink that awful beer!” Cammy shuddered with an extravagant show of horror as she glanced at the wooden keg of beer that had arrived that afternoon, a wide yellow ribbon tied around it, in keeping with the Oktoberfest theme that Louise had insisted upon. Lexi put the trays down, hurried into the dining room and grabbed a bottle from the row of deep green champagne bottles that had mysteriously appeared on the sideboard. Its silver papered top seemed

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impenetrable and, after glaring at it for a moment, she ran to the kitchen. Georgie was bent over the oven, checking on the cabbage rolls. “How do you open these?” “Here,” Georgie said, coming over and ripping off the foil to reveal the little wire noose tied around the cork. “Unwind it.” She did as she was told. “Now push the cork up with your fingers. Slowly, or it will explode.” Explode? She pushed tentatively at the cork. Nothing. “I’ll do it,” said Georgie, grabbing the bottle and expertly working up the cork until suddenly it popped out and flew halfway across the room. White foam dribbled down the sides of the bottle. Lexi laughed in surprise. “You’ve never seen anything, have you?” said Georgie. “You better get out there. There’ll be ten more of these to open before they even get to supper.” An hour later, after having circled around and around the living room with her tray of champagne glasses, listening to the rising talk and laughter as the guests drank glass after glass, she realized that she’d become completely invisible. The only person who seemed to see her as more than a pair of hands carrying a tray of glasses or pickles and cheese was Mr. Harrison. He’d arrived late, his white silk scarf emphasizing the darkness of his wide, expressive face. She had to stop herself from staring. She’d never seen a black man up close before. She marvelled that anyone so different could be so unruffled. He was like a black bear. He thanked Lexi for hanging up his coat, and took a glass of champagne. She hurried back into the kitchen to fry the strings of sausages. A huge pot of borscht was simmering on the back of the stove. Georgie had laid out the good silver, crystal and new linen napkins on the table earlier in the afternoon and was now running back and forth with additional wine glasses and dessert forks. Dr. Oliver’s laugh boomed out frequently. Each time she heard it, it rang in her like a dark bell. Sally danced around in the kitchen, getting underfoot. Her sturdy little body was stuffed into a blue velvet dress and white stockings, her hair curled into ringlets around her square face. She looked like one

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of her own kewpie dolls. Simon was stranded on the couch, his legs stuck out stiffly between Mona and another cooing woman, who was trying to engage him in conversation. “Tell Mrs. Oliver we’re almost ready,” she said to Georgie, wiping the sweat off her face with her sleeve, feeling exhilarated. She could whip up a supper for ten any day. “You sure?” Georgie looked out the kitchen door. “They’re getting really noisy out there. They could go on drinking for hours.” She looked at the clock. Five to eight. “Mrs. Oliver said eight.” “OK. I’ll tell her.” In a moment she heard Cammy’s voice, an octave higher than usual. “Dinner, everyone!” Georgie raced in and out of the kitchen with the plates. Surprised “oohs” and “ahhs” came floating in when the first plates went out. A man’s voice said something about appeasing the Hun by eating his sausages. Mona exclaimed, “I think German sausage is very diplomatic of you, Cammy.” Everyone laughed. Why were they laughing? She felt herself turning red. Were they laughing at her because she spoke German? Perhaps they thought she supported Hitler. Well, she didn’t. When he became leader of Germany earlier in the year, Papa had said he was worried for the German people because he had too much power. Nothing comes to any good when all a person wants is power, Papa said, slamming his fist on the table and looking at his three daughters. “Pigs!” hissed Georgie in the kitchen as she uncorked the bottles of wine. “Rich, ungrateful pigs. They come from away, from Toronto, most of them, and then walk all over us.” “Nothing good comes from hatred, Georgie,” Lexi whispered. Georgie turned and looked at her. It was a curious look. And then she smiled. “You’re right, kiddo. You’re right and you’re smart and you shouldn’t be a slave to idiots like the Olivers.” Lexi shrugged. “You don’t have to be if you don’t want to be, Lex. You’re not like me, you’re beautiful. You can do whatever you want to do. If you’ve got it, use it.” The kitchen was hot, the air thick and barely breathable. What was Georgie saying?

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After the food had been served and the wine had been poured, the two girls leaned against the cupboard. Georgie reached into her uniform pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes, glanced at Sally and Simon, who were playing with their dinners at the kitchen table, and put them back again. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, flicking a wad of curls back from her forehead. “Want some champagne?” She looked over at the glasses they’d collected up from the living room. Several of them were more than half full. Simon was sliding out of his chair, leaving his dinner half eaten. “What if Dr. Oliver comes in?” Lexi glanced at Sally, who’d also left the table and had settled with Simon on the floor in a corner with a few toys. “You kidding? He’ll never come back here tonight.” She reached for one of the half-empty glasses. “And what if he does?” She lowered her voice. “He’ll be too drunk to care.” She downed the contents of the glass in one gulp, reached for another and handed it to Lexi. “Try it. It doesn’t bite.” She sipped at the pale gold liquid and held it in her mouth a moment before swallowing the bubbles gathered in her throat. So this was champagne. She was surprised by its bitter sweetness. She’d expected it to taste like peaches or the sweet, sweet pears from Oma’s orchard. “Here.” Georgie handed her another almost full glass. Lexi turned the glass to avoid a lipstick smudge and drank it down. “Like it?” “Hmm. It’s so…fuzzy.” She burped and they both laughed. “I’m going to put the kids to bed,” she said, “before dessert. Come on, you two.” The children seemed glad to sink into their pillows, and she was back in the kitchen in a few minutes. Her head felt light and floating. An intense happiness had invaded her. She picked up another half-full glass of champagne and drank it down. “Aleksandra!” came the call, muffled through the kitchen doors. She set the glass down with a trembling hand, composed her face, which wanted to grin a silly grin like Georgie’s, and went out into the dining room. As she strode quickly to stand beside Dr. Oliver’s chair, she saw with absolute clarity that the people at the table were

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actually a flock of huge birds devouring the entrails of a dead pig. She’d read recently in a Vogue magazine about a party where the women were described as “mermaids paved in sequins.” But these women in their dark green, maroon and black satins, with their beady eyes and dresses, were exactly like overgrown speckled starlings, necks craning and jerking. The men with their starched white chests were puffed-up old roosters with thinning hair. And she was a Mennonite crow in a black dress. They were squawking and jabbering and laughing at people she’d never heard of. Even Mr. Harrison, a magpie, had a strange croaking laugh. The conversation had moved from politics to theatre gossip and, in spite of the fact that something strange was happening in her brain, she tried to remember some of the words that these people tossed around like confetti. Who was Noel Coward? Zelda? Dr. Oliver motioned for her to bend down so that he could whisper something to her. “I think we’d all like more wine and it seems that we’ve almost run out. Be a good girl and go to the basement and get some more.” “What kind?” she whispered back. “Bring up six or seven bottles of the Cabernet and a couple of bottles of brandy.” She turned to go but he tugged at her sleeve and motioned for her to bend down again. Cammy’s eyes at the other end of the table were flitting around the room. Cammy was a lark with all these starlings, looking for a window to fly out of. “Aleksandra…you look…terribly, terribly…beautiful,” he whispered, slurring the words slightly and reaching to touch her hand. She instantly pulled back, glancing at the woman on his right to see if she’d heard, but she was facing away and laughing loudly. They were all roaring and looking towards Cammy, who was fluttering her hands in the air and then gulping more wine. Dr. Oliver kept staring at Lexi, his mouth slack. Suddenly, he turned back to the table. “Cammy never could tell a joke!” he shouted into the general laughter. “What’s he want now?” asked Georgie when she flew into the kitchen. Georgie was holding an empty champagne flute in her hand and whisking away cigarette smoke with her other hand. “More wine. I have to get it from the basement.”

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“I’ll help you.” Georgie jumped up and bumped into the table. They couldn’t stop laughing as they scrambled down into the basement and picked their way to the wine cellar. Suddenly Georgie’s face went still. Right in the middle of all their laughter she looked like she was about to cry. “I gotta tell you something, Lexi.” Lexi nodded. The shadows across Georgie’s face made her look old and strange. She wanted to laugh. “Last year, I fell for this guy who used to deliver bread to the restaurant. We talked all the time and I thought he was so nice, and then he asked me out.” She studied the ends of her fingers for a long moment. “Did you …fall in love?” Lexi could hardly say the words. They were hard and foreign-sounding. They made her angry. Mennonites never talked about falling in love. It seemed almost a sin. Only people in novels, people of the world fell in love. “I was an idiot.” She looked at Georgie’s tired eyes, at the curly hair slipping out from under the starched waitress’s cap, at her stained apron. Had Georgie felt the same things about the delivery man as she felt about Dr. Oliver? It was hard to imagine. There was a bitterness in Georgie’s voice she’d never heard before. “Well, let’s just say I paid the price.” “What do you mean?” “I got pregnant.” Georgie looked away. Lexi felt her stomach constricting, as if someone had thrown a stone into it. She’d never known any girl who’d actually committed fornication. She looked at Georgie’s grim face as she stood across from her, smoking, and tried to imagine her naked. The word harlot popped involuntarily into her mind. She pushed it away. Nothing more was said, and the two of them walked slowly up the stairs with the bottles. The rest of the evening was a blur. She and Georgie poured more wine, served the Tortes and maple walnut cake and Shoofly pie, all of which had come out beautifully, although no one noticed, then the coffee and liqueurs. Around midnight, after the last of the coffee had been poured,

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she and Georgie finally slumped down on kitchen chairs, ignoring, for the moment, the piles of dirty dishes. They’d finished all the champagne. Lexi felt fuzzy all over and knew that she would fall asleep if she put her head down for a second. But Dr. Oliver was again calling for her, his voice loud and insistent. Georgie giggled, and said in a loud voice, “What’s hiss majesty want now?” “Shhhh! He’ll hear you!” She stifled her own giggle. Quickly she smoothed down the apron, hoping that no one would notice the grease stains from the sausages. She walked as steadily as she could into the dining room. “Ah, our little chef ! Come here, Aleksandra.” Dr. Oliver waved her over to his chair. In a moment she was standing at his side, once again staring down the table at Cammy’s glassy eyes. “Has anyone ever seen such a gem?” He looked up at her, his eyes crinkling, and for a second she felt a hot rush of gratitude. His eyes were like this when they were alone in the kitchen. “Not only can she cook but she’s a hell of a little housekeeper, aren’t you, Aleksandra? But then she’s a Mennonite. Wonderful workers, the Germans.” “I’m not German,” Lexi blurted out, immediately horrified that she had spoken. Even the bubbles in her head didn’t protect her from the shame. She glanced down at the table. “You’re not?” Dr. Oliver seemed genuinely confused. Lexi shook her head but was afraid to speak. “Don’t be silly, Lexi dear,” he said, “Of course you are. Isn’t she, Cammy?” He looked down the table at Cammy and Lexi looked, too. Several of the women were catching each other’s eyes. Mr. Harrison’s face had gone stony. Cammy shrugged and began talking with the woman sitting next to her. “Damn fine worker, whatever she is. Even helped me in the garage the other day.” He winked at her and turned back to the table, which had become completely silent. “Didn’t you, Aleksandra? A hell of a little…” He grabbed her hand and held it tightly. Her arm was taut, straining, but he didn’t let go.

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“Did you know that she can drive? Taught her myself.” He raised his glass and took a drink. “Highly recommend…” he waved his free arm around the table and stopped it in mid-air when he saw Louise glaring at him. One of the men said, “Hear, hear.” The woman beside him gripped his arm so hard he winced. “Just wanted…” Dr. Oliver said, his voice faltering, “to thank…” He looked around the table. She managed to pull her hand free. Someone raised a glass and then they were all holding up their glasses, nodding their dark bird heads and smiling too-bright smiles. “To the chef.” Mona laughed and took a drink. Mr. Harrison had not raised his glass. He sat with his hands in his lap. Trembling, staring at Mr. Harrison’s grim face—he now looked like a bulldog—she backed towards the wall. The lights of the candles shimmered off the crystal glasses. The room was a blurry kaleidoscope. Somewhere, hovering in the room, was Georgie’s baby, an ugly evil thing, born out of wedlock. Lexi felt ill. She thought she might be sick. Cammy lurched from her chair and put her glass down. Staring at Dr. Oliver, she motioned with her cigarette for Lexi to go back to the kitchen. “Thank you, Lexi,” she said before she fell back into her chair. Back in the kitchen, Lexi stood behind the door for a moment, her hands covering her mouth . “Hey, kid! What’s the matter?” Georgie came and put her arm around her. Lexi pulled away. How could Georgie have done something so wrong. She had seemed such a lovable person, such a good person, but… “Oh, it’s nothing.” She fumbled in her pocket for her handkerchief. “It’s just that he’s so…” “Who?” She shook her head. “Dr. Oliver?” She nodded. “Oh, he’s just drunk. They all are. Drunk as skunks. And we’re not so good ourselves, are we?” She smoothed Lexi’s hair. “Don’t pay any attention to him. You know what men are like.”

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She didn’t know what men were like. At least not men like Dr. Oliver. He was so many things. Even in one day. Georgie’s arm slackened. “Let’s start on the dishes,” she said. “I’m bloody beat.” Lexi looked at the heaps of plates and serving bowls piled all over the kitchen. Mama would have finished all of the dishes by now. She got up and began running the sink full of water. “Lexi? Did I upset you with what I said in the cellar?” She wanted to cry. Everything seemed broken. Unfixable. It all seemed too much to understand. “Lexi?” She heard the familiar panic in Cammy’s voice even before she saw her wild eyes at the kitchen door. “Where are their coats?” “Upstairs. In your bedroom.” She dried her hands. “I’ll get them.” “Oh, thank God. I thought maybe we’d lost them.” Cammy laughed with relief and took a deep drag. Lexi stood beside the front door, holding two heavy armloads of coats as the guests slowly departed. No one looked directly at her. In spite of the fact that he was now stumbling, Dr. Oliver insisted on helping each woman with her coat. More than once his hand lingered on a shoulder or an arm. Cammy darted around, flinging her curled hair back from her face. “Good night, sweet Mona,” she sang. “Mona, Mona, Desdemona!” She fluttered off for a moment. “I always wanted to do Shakespeare, but Desdemona’s not Ophelia, is she? Poor, poor Ophelia. Or is it Olivia? O-LI-V- did we have olivia oil tonight?” She giggled. “No, we had those massive sausages. Germans don’t eat olive oil. And we mustn’t anger the Germans, must we? They say Hitler has a temper.” Mona avoided Cammy’s eyes and smiled up at Dr. Oliver as he helped her into her fur. Her face now looked blanched and wrinkled in the harsh light of the foyer, her lipstick mostly worn off, her small light blue eyes peering out of tiny folds of red skin and flaking eyeliner. She kissed him on both cheeks. “Night, darling. Marvellous party. Excellent food.” She glanced over at Lexi and mouthed, “Keep her!” They both laughed. “Thank you, Aleksandra,” Mr. Harrison said, as he relieved her of his coat and scarf. “I hope we meet again.”

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Cammy wheeled by. Lexi had a fuzzy thought that she should carry Cammy up to bed and tuck her in. When they’d all gone, she turned towards the kitchen door. Dr. Oliver hovered. “You did a first-class job, Aleksandra.… Sorry if I… embarrassed you….” He tried to catch her eye. “We’re proud of you, aren’t we, dear?” Cammy jerked her head, eyes half-closed, and flicked an ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. Lexi moved away, not wanting any more speeches. “I’d better get back to the dishes. Georgie…” “Oh, yes. A woman’s work is never done, is it!” said Cammy. “I, for one, am going to bed.” Dr. Oliver stood for a moment and watched Cammy slowly making her way up the stairs. He turned to look at Lexi once more, seemed to be about to reach out a hand, and then lurched away, his eyes suddenly confused. He reminded her of a bull she’d once run away from. Georgie, whistling softly through her teeth, had washed all the crystal and was piling cutlery into the soapsuds when she came into the kitchen. She stared at the rows of upside-down glasses laid out on tea towels, and picked up a towel that had been slung over the back of a chair. She intended to walk towards the kitchen cupboard, to carefully dry each of the thirty or so crystal glasses and put them away. Instead, she sat down at the table to rest her head.

nine Lexi slid into the booth at the Cat’s Eye Café and waited, her head pounding. She’d phoned Tante Gertie to tell her that she was sick and couldn’t come to church. Which was more or less true. When Georgie emerged from the kitchen, carrying a pot of coffee, Lexi tried to smile and curled her fingers into a small wave. Georgie seemed not to see her as she headed over to the only other customer in the restaurant and refilled his cup. On her way back, she slid into Lexi’s booth.

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“Hello, Lex,” she said wearily. “What’re you doing here so early? Aren’t you going to church?” “I came to thank you. Why didn’t you wake me up?” “Because you were a dead soldier.” Georgie’s eyes were bloodshot and tiny. “How long did it take you?” “I think it was about four when I left.” “I don’t even remember getting up to my bedroom.” Georgie smiled. “I remember the first time I passed out.” “Passed out?” “Yeah. I hate to break it to you, kid, but that’s what you were.” She looked down at the coffee pot she’d carried to the table. “Want a coffee?” Her head ached and her stomach felt full of rumbling marbles. She nodded and Georgie went to get them both cups. She tried to hold down the wave of nausea that was rippling through her body. Passed out. Drunk! Her Papa was probably at this very moment, on this Sunday morning, preaching against such sins. She imagined the announcement that she, Aleksandra, was an irredeemable sinner, no longer a member of the Mennonite church or even of his family. “Sure is dead in here.” Georgie returned with two mugs full of coffee. “Frank’s cooking this morning. Mum’s got the day off.” She glanced over at the customer, a fat man absorbed in his newspaper. “That was some humdinger of a party.” Lexi nodded. “Hey, you OK ?” She shook her head. Her eyes were stupidly filling up. “Hey, kiddo! Everyone passes out sometime. It’s only a matter of time.” “It’s not just that.” “Wait a minute.” Georgie jumped up. The customer was waving. By the time she came back, Lexi had wiped her eyes. “OK, what’s the matter, Lexi?” Georgie sounded so sympathetic that she felt her eyes welling again. “I want to leave.” “What? Leave the Olivers?” She nodded.

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“But what would you do?” Georgie hesitated. “Where would you get another job? This place is dead; there’s no work here, despite what my mom says.” Lexi’s face was heating up. “Come on, Lex. You’re a wreck.” Georgie cocked her head and waited. “What’s wrong? It’s Dr. O, isn’t it? It’s him and his silly behaviour last night. I’m sure he’s all talk and no action. He doesn’t mean anything by it. At least that’s what they say. I’ve heard nurses from the hospital talking.” “Talking about what?” “Oh, nothing. It sounds like he’s a flirt.” “Flirt?” “You know, a tease.” Lexi shook her head. “Oh never mind. Just don’t do anything sudden, Lex, or before you know it you’ll be in a dead end, just like me.” Another customer came into the Café and Georgie stood quickly and walked away towards him. Everything in Lexi was screaming as she watched Georgie lead the customer to a booth and take his order for breakfast. How was she going to ignore Dr. Oliver when he came down to breakfast and talked about operations and patients? As if they were real friends, as if she were smart enough to understand. Hearing about the hospital, laughing with him, was the best part of her whole day. And even though it had been terribly wrong, never would she forget how his lips felt. Or his hands on her shoulders. How she’d wanted desperately to throw her arms around him. Georgie came back and refilled their cups before she sat down again. She looked around the Café and then leaned in close to Lexi. “I had to give her away.” Georgie whispered. “Daisy. That’s what I named her. They probably call her something else now.” Lexi didn’t want to know any of it. It made her sick, it made her panic. “I made them tell me it was a girl. They hardly let me look at her before they took her away.” Her hands trembled . Daisy. The name fell on the table between them. Daisy. Baby. Screaming. Torn away. She looked at Georgie’s distorted mouth and

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felt her own mouth crumbling, her lip quivering, tears springing into her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Georgie…it must have been so awful…” “Yeah, well, it’s all water under the bridge now.” Georgie’s voice was raspy. “But you know the best part? The guy was married. He already had three kids.” A new wave of nausea pushed up into Lexi’s throat. Adultery! “Did your mother know…?” “Oh, yeah. She figured it out. Said she half expected it.” Georgie ran her fingers around the top of her mug.“But who’s she to talk? She did the same thing.” Lexi sat stunned. “She sent me away to my aunt’s in Owen Sound. I had Daisy there and then the Children’s Aid took her.” Georgie looked up. She should do something, touch Georgie’s hand, say something, but all she wanted to do was run. She shouldn’t be sitting here with such a person, she…Dr. Oliver wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a delivery man. He was responsible and educated. That was what she most loved about him: his intelligence, his accomplishment. And yes, of course, he was married, but he’d said he was sorry for kissing her in the garage, hadn’t he? He wanted to protect her. He said it would never happen again. And she was as much to blame as he was. He’d apologized to her about the party. He’d only wanted to thank her. Everyone, it seemed, got drunk sometimes. Even her. The important thing was that he’d said he was sorry. Nothing was ever going to happen again. That was all that mattered. Nothing was ever going to happen again. “Are you going to be all right?” Lexi asked. Georgie’s blue eyes had narrowed and her mouth smiled a terrible false smile. One of the customers was waving Georgie over. She got up from the table and straightened her apron. “Hey, kiddo…don’t mind me…” Her eyes were wet. Georgie moved away towards the coffee pot. Lexi stood up and didn’t know what to do, or where to go. As she walked down King Street back to the Olivers’ house, she watched the last of the red and yellow leaves drift down from the large

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maples that lined the street, aimlessly weaving towards the ground. The world felt empty. As if Georgie’s baby had cancelled everything else. Brittle and doomed to die. Did everyone feel this? Waiting for disasters that could happen without anyone ever even knowing they were coming? A baby girl in a faraway town that Georgie would never again see. Loving someone you had no right to love. Her family forced from Russia. People you loved that were alive one moment and dead the next. Did everyone feel they were flying alone in the world? She’d held Mama’s trembling hand so tightly that night as they stared into the hole full of bodies that contained Opa and her Onkels. The night after Nestor Makhno and his men broke into Opa’s house and took him and her two Onkels hostage, along with eighteen other men from the village. They looted the house and pissed in the stores of grain. They poured watermelon syrup over all the broken pottery on the floor. Oma had been hit on the side of her head with a rifle. She remembered seeing the blood running down her Oma’s cheek after she came out from hiding in the barn. She remembered Willy standing beside her and whispering to himself, My sweet little Oma, my sweet little Oma. Oma hadn’t wept as they stood by the grave. She stood like a small stone statue, her dark dress and babushka faintly illuminated by the lone lantern, her mouth a dark line across her shadowed face. Mama had sobbed though. And then had been hushed. And even though it was terrible, Lexi felt a closeness with her mother that night. She felt loved by her. Lexi looked up. Dr. Oliver was striding towards her. Her first thought was to turn down a side street and run, but she was in the middle of the block and it was too late. He’d seen her. From a distance, he appeared to be hurrying, marching along, but when they came close to each other she could see that he wasn’t really walking very fast. And his eyes had dark circles under them. “You’re back from church early,” he said. “I didn’t go to church today. Just a walk.” She couldn’t look him in the eye.

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“Oh.” He avoided her glance too, more ill at ease than she’d ever seen him. Was he going to say something about the party? “I’m going to the hospital,” he said finally as they stood there. “Would you like to walk along with me?” “Me?” “Yes, why not? You can give me some advice. I’ve been wondering how to tell my patient, Mrs. Wettlaufer, that…do you remember her? I talked about her last week at breakfast. I’ve been wondering how to tell her that she doesn’t have much longer to live.” Lexi nodded and began to walk with him. “She’s a very pig-headed woman. If I tell her she’s dying, she’ll probably just up and die. They always do, these Germans,” he said. “But she used to live on King Street and she had a son, Edgar. I remember him when he was about fifteen. A sullen kid. Looked miserable most of the time. Then he ran off. Married some girl in Toronto. She says she doesn’t even know his address.” “That’s awful…” “Sure. Boys, you know. They have to escape their mothers. Get away from the vagina dentata, as Freud calls it.” He smiled a strange smile and she felt her stomach flutter. She didn’t know what to say. Who was Freud? And what was a vagina dentata? But seeing Dr. Oliver, all she could think of was the night before. Drinking. A black wave of shame. “Well,” he said, smiling. “I thought you would have your usual words of wisdom…” He glanced at her and looked away. Was he making fun of her? After a block, she said, “Maybe you should take a chance and tell her…so she can find Edgar…” He looked sideways at her. “Of course, you’re right. I’m just not very good at it. After all these years. And you know how it is with mothers and sons. Sometimes it’s…complicated.” She thought of her mother and Willy, how Willy had always seemed to be her favourite. “I have to go home now,” she said. She was beginning to feel sick again. He slowed down, turned to her and smiled his real smile. “Well, nice to have your company…”

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She felt herself beginning to blush. “Thank you.” “And thank you for…last night, Aleksand—” He glanced away from her and looked at his watch. “I’m late,” he said. Watching him stride away, his head bent forward and his suit jacket flapping out behind him, Lexi wanted to run after him. She wanted to rush to Mrs.Wettlaufer’s room and tell her that she mustn’t die yet. She imagined herself looking for the son, finding him and bringing him to the hospital. She’d mentioned to Mama once that she wanted to travel to foreign countries as Florence Nightingale had done. Mama had looked aghast. “You never want to go to war!” she said. “Never.” “But I don’t want to go to war, Mama,” she’d protested. “I just want…” What had she wanted? Watching the figure of Dr. Oliver grow smaller and smaller, she realized that she’d just wanted to jump into her life. When Dr. Oliver walked into the kitchen the next morning, she turned from looking out the window at the bare trees. “Did you tell Mrs. Wettlaufer?” she asked, pouring him his coffee. “Ah…no. No, I did not.” He picked up the morning paper, which she’d brought in from the front door, and glanced at it before he put it down again. Coward, she thought. She felt a familiar gnawing in her stomach and had a strange flash of Papa. Such different people and yet… she couldn’t put her finger on it, but they were similar in some cowardly way. “Aleksandra, there’s something else. Mrs. Oliver’s a bit…” She already knew. Cammy had strolled into the kitchen an hour before, wearing an old gaping blue bathrobe. She’d been naked underneath and Lexi had been terribly embarrassed. “Waiting for someone?” Cammy had asked in an angry tone earlier that morning. “Dr. Oliver, perhaps?” Lexi blushed. “No…I mean…Dr. Oliver usually takes his coffee…” “I know what Dr. Oliver usually does.” Cammy tapped the ash

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from her cigarette into the saucer of the cup that Lexi had put out for Dr. Oliver. “Oh, God,” Cammy sighed, leaning her head on her hand. Lexi waited, listening to the coffee bubble in the percolator. “Have you ever been married?” Cammy looked up and snorted a breath through her nose. “Of course not. You’re a babe in the woods.” Her hands were shaking. She pulled a small brown glass bottle from her dressing gown pocket and placed it on the table. “Get me a glass of water, will you?” Lexi filled a glass at the sink and handed it to her, and Cammy gulped down two large yellow pills from the bottle. “But you do have a mother, don’t you?” “Ja.” “Is she a nice mother? Like the mothers in all the storybooks? The nicest mother in the whole world?” “No.” Lexi’s hand flew to her mouth. How could she have answered like that! But there it was, the image of her mother’s perpetually downturned mouth, the frequent rebuking silences that tortured everyone in the house. Her angry, unhappy mother. “I knew it. I bet she’s just like me.” Lexi almost laughed at the thought but she kept her lips firmly pressed together and shook her head. “Don’t think I don’t know all about you, Lexi. I know that you’re just pretending. Pretending to be so perfect…so that…” Lexi gripped the coffee pot. “Oh, don’t stare at me like that. ‘Mommy, is Lexi going to stay with us forever? ’ ” Cammy imitated Sally’s voice exactly. She took a long drag of her cigarette and stared at her bitten-down fingernails. “What I’d like to know is…” Tears were gathering in her eyes. “This is my house, Lexi, everything in it is mine, and…Oh, forget it.” She squashed her cigarette in the saucer, got up, turned abruptly and left the kitchen. A door slammed behind her. Dr. Oliver picked up his paper again. “Make sure she doesn’t drive the car today,” he said. “Ja.” She would take the car and the children out to do the shopping. She would try to stay out of the house for as long as possible.

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“It’s a temporary condition. I’m sure you realize how things are. The aftermath of the party and all.” He went back to reading his paper and then looked up at her as she poured his coffee. “I appreciate your help, Aleksandra. You’ve made quite a difference,” he said, standing up, “to…this house.”

ten “Thank you for letting me talk about Daisy,” Georgie said. They were down in the fruit cellar, clearing out old jars. “She will be almost two by now. Can’t you just imagine her toddling around on pudgy little legs?” Lexi nodded and tried to close her ears to Georgie’s words. She didn’t want to be talking about this. She’d been trying hard to forget what Georgie had told her. It made her so uncomfortable, so confused. “I try not to think about her, Lexi, but she’s always there, you know? I feel like such a fool, like such an idiot for letting myself…well, it’s no good, is it. What’s done is done, that’s what my mum says.” She couldn’t see Georgie’s face, only her back bending over the wooden shelf as she reached for the cobwebbed jars. “The social worker told me she’s with a good family.” Georgie straightened up and felt in her apron pocket for her cigarette package. When she turned, her face looked grey, and in the tiny flare of the match light her eyes were stony. “But I bet they always say that,” she said, blowing out a line of smoke. “Oh, I’m sure she’s in a good family,” said Lexi. “She must be. They don’t give children to bad families.” Georgie shrugged and said nothing. Lexi thought of the endless lugging of her little sisters, the pails of dirty diapers. “It would have been hard to look after her all by yourself.” “I guess.” Maybe Daisy was better off, even though she’d never say that to Georgie.

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“You can have more, Georgie, when you’re married.” Georgie shrugged again. “Nope. That’s it for me,” she said in a flat voice. “What do you mean?” “I mean, who’s going to want me now? My mother says I’m damaged goods.” “No, you’re not!” She would not cast the first stone. “You bet your sweet peepers I am.” Georgie forced herself to smile. “But I’ve got a plan.” “What?” “I’m going to Toronto. Start all over again. Just as soon as I get enough saved.” “But don’t you want to get married?” “Nope.” She took a long drag. “The last thing I want to do is to marry some poor guy and slave away to put bread on the table. Or even if I met some rich guy, which would never happen in a million years, I couldn’t stand being around the likes of Cammy Oliver’s socalled friends. ‘Oh, darling, what a divine frock!’” Lexi laughed. “They make me sick.” “But what are you going to do in Toronto?” “Get a job. Be a waitress or a secretary. I took typing in high school until I had to drop out to help at the Café. I can type pretty fast.” Georgie tapped her fingers on a shelf. “Well, at least I used to. But that’s just for money. I want to have fun. You can’t have any real fun in a place like Waterloo. All Germans and Mennonites—sorry, but you know what I mean—everything’s so damned dull. Everybody being good all the time.” The red dot of her cigarette waved. “And nobody cares where you come from or what you’ve done. You can just…be yourself.” Georgie picked up one of the quart sealers and held it up in the dim light from the small basement window. Its contents looked like swamp water with bits of dead animal floating in it. “Want to come to Toronto with me?” Georgie’s voice sounded less confident now, as if it were coming from far away. “We could take the train.” The long train ride through Russia came back to her, Boxcar No. 8

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filled to overflowing with five families, squeezed together like the dill pickles in one of these jars. The smell of urine and sweat becoming stronger and stronger each day as they crawled through the Russian countryside. And through it all, like Georgie’s dream of Toronto, the dream of Canada. The dream of Canada had been so much sweeter than the reality. Toronto would probably be like that, too. “I don’t know,” she said. “You said you want to leave the Olivers. Save up your pennies, Lex, and we’ll escape here one day.” They were quiet as they sorted through the rest of the sealers. Lexi remembered the excited conversations of the men as they drank the burned coffee from the small stove in the middle of the boxcar. Her Papa had believed that when they were free of persecution, they would build a new Mennonite community in the Canadian West. Sweet-smelling wooden houses, a church, and a schoolhouse where he would teach. Eventually it would be as beautiful as the smashed villages had been in Russia. Instead they’d landed up in an abandoned two-room log cabin with a lean-to kitchen. Six children in one bedroom and Mama and Papa in the other. Then two more babies. Sleeping in drawers in the kitchen until they were too big and had to sleep on the floor. “I don’t know,” she said again, looking at Georgie’s smiling face and wanting with all her heart to believe that she would get to Toronto and start a new and better life. “Well, think about it, kiddo. I’m going soon as I can. We could rent a little apartment together. What do you think? You don’t want to hang around here and get married, do you?” Not want to get married? The thought had never occurred to her. Was there actually a choice? Surely she wanted marriage and children. But she also wanted to be a nurse. “I don’t know, Georgie, I’ll think about it.” Though Lexi tried to push the thought of Toronto away, in the midst of dusting, vacuuming or cooking, the thought of leaving was like a diamond in the back of her mind, multi-faceted, glowing. Going to Toronto with Georgie was a possibility. Wasn’t it? Going back to Saskatchewan was out of the question. Heinrich

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Willms waited, or some other farmer if Heinrich got tired of waiting. Years of endless drudgery awaited her in either her parents’ house or her husband’s. But if she didn’t want to stay with the Olivers and she didn’t want to go home, what could she do? How could she make enough money to go back to school? As she washed Cammy’s silver and laid it out on a tea towel, she imagined that she was laying out sterile instruments in an operating room and then handing them to the surgeon, knowing exactly what to do, loving the precision of the gleaming surgical knives in the hands of the doctor. Her heart lurched with longing.

eleven A few days after Christmas, Lexi sat braiding Sally’s hair in the kitchen when Dr. Oliver strode in. His eyes were narrow and his mouth was grim. Her first thought was that something had happened to Cammy. She finished tying the ribbons around Sally’s braids and told her to go and find Simon. Sally ran at her father’s legs. He patted her hair. “Good morning, pumpkin,” he said in a flat voice. “Do I have to, Daddy?” she whined. “Do you have to what? “Do I have to go and find Simon?” She glanced at Lexi. “Yes. I have to talk with Aleksandra,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I’m leaving and we can say goodbye.” He pried her hands from around his leg and sent her off with a pat on the bum. Dr. Oliver poured himself a cup of coffee and stood taking rapid sips, occasionally wincing. He was wearing a brown tweed suit and a yellow blue-spotted bow tie. In another hour he’d be making his rounds at the hospital, a white lab coat over his jacket. The patients would look up to him, full of hope. Or despair. She smiled a shy smile at him. It seemed more and more as if they ran everything together. She was wearing the small pearl pendant that he and Cammy had given her for Christmas. Lexi was sure

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that he’d picked it out. Its tiny weight bounced in the hollow below her throat. “I’ve had a long-distance phone call,” he said. “Oh?” “From your father.” She felt her heart stop. “From Papa?” “Your mother’s very ill.” “What? Mama?” “Yes. Apparently it’s quite serious. Her heart. They’re not sure if…she’ll make it through.” “But Mama never gets sick. She’s so strong…” “Everyone’s susceptible, Aleksandra,” he said in his doctor’s voice. “But…even in Russia, she never…” “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s very ill.” No! Mama couldn’t be sick. She felt a hot stinging behind her eyes. “What did Papa say?” “He said that you’re needed. That he must go on teaching, that your sisters…” Lexi imagined Papa striding out of the house, all the Mennonite teachings under his arm, Maria and Renate scrambling in his wake, leaving her mother behind with little Hildy to try to look after her. “Oh, no! Poor Mama … she can’t die … she can’t…” Tears were welling in her eyes. She felt faint. Dr. Oliver took another sip of his coffee. She felt a nauseous grinding in her stomach as she looked at him. “But what about …this?” She flung her arm out to take in the kitchen. “We’ll manage. Georgie can help out until you get back.” “Georgie has a job and she’s not really…” She stopped herself. She shouldn’t be saying bad things about her friend, but Georgie wasn’t much of a housekeeper and…was she responsible enough? If she’d committed adultery, was she? Why had Georgie told her about Daisy? It complicated things so much. “Georgie needs the money. I’m sure she’ll make herself available.” “But I…” “I understand that this is a great shock for you, Aleksandra,” he said quietly.

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Tears seeped into her eyes. She saw Mama lying pale and thin in the narrow, sagging bed that she and Papa had always shared, her heart barely beating. Her sisters waiting and worrying. The thought of riding the train back to Saskatchewan made her go cold. She looked up at Dr. Oliver, willing him to come and put his arm around her. He didn’t move but took another sip of his coffee, his mouth firm. “I’m sure you’ll want to go home as soon as possible.” She nodded. Mama needed her. But selfish thoughts refused to go away. “You can leave first thing tomorrow morning. I’ve called the station. The train leaves here at seven and connects with the Toronto train going west at eleven. I’ll buy your ticket.” He took a cigar out of his inside jacket pocket and stared at it as if he were trying to decide something. Then he put it back into his pocket. “I’m very sorry about all of this,” he said, glancing over at her, “but I’ve got to go to the hospital now. Get Georgie to come as soon as possible.” The moment he left the kitchen, she slumped into a kitchen chair. Her tears made dark patches in the blue tablecloth. When Georgie arrived, Lexi was still sitting at the kitchen table. “Hey, kiddo,” she said, pulling her hat from her head. “She’ll be OK . You’ll see.” “No, she won’t. Dr. Oliver said she could die.” “Is my mommy going to die?” Sally stood twisting her doll’s hair by the kitchen table. “No, Sally dear.” Lexi swiped at her tears and motioned for Sally to come and sit on her knee. “My mother is sick and I have to go home to look after her.” Sally’s face crumpled. “Are you going to come back?” She held the girl closer with one arm and slid a finger under each of her own eyes with her other hand to erase the wetness. “Of course, I’m coming back. I wouldn’t leave you and Simon and your Daddy. Or your Mommy.” Georgie rolled her eyes and made a face. “Georgie is going to look after you until I come back. You like her, don’t you?”

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“No! I only like you.” Sally snuggled her head into her breast. “And maybe your Aunt Louise will come for a few days. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Sally looked up. “Will she bring us candy?” “Of course. She always does, doesn’t she?” Sally nodded. “Now, off you go. I think it’s time to tuck your dolly into her cradle for a nap. I’ll be up in a few minutes to see.” Sally walked to the kitchen door and turned back to give Georgie a suspicious look before she slowly trudged up the stairs, dragging her doll. Lexi was unable to stifle a huge, unexpected sob. “This is so…terrible! Just when I was getting to think that maybe…” “Oh, Lex, I’m so sorry about your mother.” Georgie handed her a handkerchief from her pocket and awkwardly put her arm around her. She let herself cry on Georgie’s shoulder. “And the worst part is that I don’t want…” She couldn’t say it. She could imagine nothing but cold and sickness at home. She was being pulled back out of necessity, not love. “You don’t want what?” “I don’t want to go.” Would Georgie hate her now? Georgie was quiet for a moment. “You’ll get through this, Lex. You’ll be a good nurse, and your Mama…” “But she’s not like your mother. She doesn’t…” She remembered Georgie telling her how her mother had given her money after Daisy was born and insisted that she buy some new clothes when she got her figure back. Georgie waited for her to go on. She shouldn’t say anything more. How could she sit there comparing the two mothers and find Georgie’s mother better? How could she! “You can always come back, Lexi.” She looked around the kitchen, at the light streaming in from the window, at the gleaming coffee pot. “I’ve got to come back,” she said, wiping a last tear away. “You going somewhere?” Cammy sauntered into the kitchen wearing her bathrobe. A cigarette hung from her mouth as she headed

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straight for the coffee pot. The cigarette almost dropped from her lip as her attempt to smile turned into a grimace. “You’re here early, Georgie. Were you supposed to come today?” “Uh, no, I came because Lexi…” “Well, Lexi does tend to organize. I never know what’s happening.” “I guess Dr. Oliver didn’t tell you,” said Lexi. “I have to go back to Saskatchewan. My mother’s very sick. She might die.” Cammy took the cigarette out of her mouth. “I knew there was something with your mother! I had a premonition. Did I tell you that I have premonitions? Gerald thinks they’re delusions.” She laughed a raucous laugh. “Little does he know how much I really know.” She folded herself into a kitchen chair and placed her cup of coffee on the table. Lexi and Georgie stared at her. “I know,” she said, squinting at Lexi in an attempt to look sympathetic. “A sick mother. It’s terrible.” She sang in a wobbly voice, “Stormy weather…,” then stopped abruptly. In a babyish voice she said, “So our little Lexi will be leaving.” “Dr. Oliver arranged for me to take the train tomorrow morning. Georgie’s going to look after Sally and Simon when she can, and…” “Doesn’t anyone ever consult me? This is my house. And they’re my children. Surely I can decide who looks after my children?” She looked from one to the other. “Can’t I?” Lexi felt exhaustion seeping through her whole body, even though it was only ten in the morning. “I think Dr. Oliver was just trying to make it easier…” “He was, was he? Well, I’ll be the one to tell Gerald Oliver how to make it easier.” She puffed furiously. “I’ll call Louise. And Mommy. I have a family too, you know. You’re not the only one who…” She suddenly looked stricken. “If Mommy was to die. Oh, God!” She ran her fingers over her eyes and then dropped her head to the table. Lexi looked at Georgie. Cammy always said she hated her mother. Georgie rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll be leaving early tomorrow,” she said, keeping her voice deliberately calm. “So if there’s anything you want me to do today… Especially, that is.” Cammy sat up. “I want you to wash and iron all the clothes I gave you and leave them folded in your room. You won’t need them where

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you’re going.” She stood up, pulled her bathrobe around her and walked out of the kitchen. Lexi’s throat constricted. “What a bitch!” Georgie said. “Georgie!” “Oh don’t be such a prude, Lexi, really! Call a spade a spade. Be honest, for God’s sake!” Georgie stood up and went to the kitchen sink, keeping her back to Lexi. They were both quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, Lex. I’m going to miss you. Even though you are a bit old-fashioned.” Lexi twisted her damp handkerchief, feeling her eyes getting prickly again. “Oh, Lex, it’s gonna be all right. You’ll see.” Georgie patted her hand. “Hey, kiddo, the children are going to miss you like crazy. They don’t want me. They want you.” Lexi could feel her heart begin to race. She wanted the kitchen to herself; it was her territory, it was the only place she’d ever felt the least bit free. Even if she was just a maid. Her breath began to fragment into small ragged shards. She stood up, brushed down her skirt. Something was hardening in her. She felt like a stone. She felt like Mama. “I’ve got to get packed.” “I’ll help you,” said Georgie. “No. I…could you get the children dressed? And start the cleaning?” Georgie’s face fell. “I’m sorry, it’s just that…” “Okey-dokey, kiddo,” said Georgie, looking as if she too were going to cry. Her small room looked dishevelled. The pink chenille bedspread pulled hastily over the blankets. The clothes she’d been too tired to hang up draped over the back of the chair. She’d never been allowed this sort of slovenliness at home. She stood for a moment, looking at the three pots of red geraniums she’d placed on the windowsill, and then turned to look at the roses. She’d taken down the painting of the patchwork woman that had so shocked her on that first day, and hidden it at the back of the third-floor linen closet. Over the bare space on the wall she’d tacked

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up a black fringed Russian shawl, embroidered with red roses, that Tante Gertie had given her. Tante Gertie! Oh no, she’d have to tell her she was going. She’d been so kind all these months. Christmas had been wonderful. And fun. Of course Lexi had hidden her real self from all of them. As far as Tante Gertie and her family were concerned, she still dressed in plainstyle, still worshipped, still thought the right thoughts and did the right things. She blushed, thinking of her deceptions. If any of her community found out about even half of what she had become she would be shunned, she would be cast aside and alone in the world completely. She couldn’t stand that. She hastily unbuttoned the blouse she was wearing, almost ripping off one of the buttons in her hurry. She threw it on the bed. She imagined Hildy, Renate and Maria waiting for her at the back door of the cabin. Shivering in the blasting cold. So happy to see her. In a few moments she’d piled all Cammy’s clothes that were washable on the bed, hung the several pairs of wool slacks on hangers on the hooks along the wall, and lined up in a row under them the sandals and shoes that Cammy had given her. Shivering, she stood in the middle of the room wearing only her own underpants. Slowly she pulled open the bottom drawer of the dresser. The purple and white cotton blouses, the gathered skirts, the stockings and cotton undershirts lay there, looking old and faded. The knot in her throat tightened as she buttoned a purple blouse over a baggy undershirt. It smelled like home. Without thinking, she took off the blouse and the undershirt and put on one of the satin brassieres. She’d have at least this one thing. She’d forgotten how the cuffs of the sleeves of her own three blouses had been discretely patched, how there were mended holes in the black wool stockings. The oxford shoes made her feet feel like the hooves of a workhorse. She couldn’t let her hair hang down in these clothes. As she braided her hair and wrapped it tightly into a bun, she glanced at her face in the mirror. She looked just like a younger version of Mama, her mouth downturned, her eyes empty. She and Georgie spoke little as they loaded up the washing machine with Cammy’s clothes. She caught Georgie and the children

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staring at her, but none of them said anything. They pulled each blouse and dress carefully through the wringer and hung them all on the drying racks in the kitchen. She didn’t feel like baking, so Georgie made cookies and burned them. The children complained but ate them sulkily while the two girls sat in the kitchen silently drinking tea, waiting for the clothes to dry. She’d also washed all the oversized aprons that she wore over Cammy’s clothes. The aprons hung over the backs of chairs like discarded ghosts. They heard the front door slam and the car’s engine starting in the garage, but didn’t bother to look out. “It’s going to be a disaster around here,” said Georgie, biting into one of her burned cookies after the children had left the kitchen. “Loony Tunes will go completely nuts and guess who’ll be picking up the pieces?” “You’ll write to me, won’t you?” asked Lexi. “Sure, kiddo. But I’m not too good at writing, even though I can type fast,” Georgie laughed. “That’s OK. Just tell me everything that happens.” Much later that evening, as she was ironing the last of Cammy’s dresses, she heard the low voices of Dr. Oliver and Cammy in the living room. They’d barely spoken to her all evening. They seemed afraid of her now, as if they didn’t know her. “…didn’t realize that the train fare would be so much…” “…Mommy for a visit…” “…Louise is useless…” “Shut up, Gerald…this is a disaster…” She nosed the iron into the gathers at the waist of the dusty peach crepe dress. Her favourite. She loved its puffed sleeves, swirling skirt and white scalloped collar. It had made her feel pink and golden. The next morning, shivering violently, she got into the car with Dr. Oliver, wearing the old black coat that Mama had made over for her several years ago. She’d never felt so cold, not even in Saskatchewan. Her hands were like icy iron carvings inside her brown wool mittens. They were silent for most of the ten-minute drive to the station. Watching Dr. Oliver’s gloved hands on the wheel, she remembered how he’d laughed when she sped down the dusty country roads. Just as they turned into the train station, he said, “Aleksandra, I

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want you to write to us, to let us know how your mother is doing. And you can always come back to us. When things improve.” She couldn’t look at him. “The children have become very attached to you,” he said. He stopped the car at the station parking lot and, after looking around at the still empty lot shrouded in the early morning darkness, took off his fur-lined gloves. He reached for her hands and pulled off her mittens. His warm hands covered her freezing ones. “We’ll all miss you,” he said, and then he leaned over and kissed her cheek. She sat, looking straight ahead, the whole of her seeming to rush out the car window and into the flat winter sky. “Aleksandra.” He let go of her hands and reached up and turned her head towards him. He put one hand on the back of her head, over the bun that was now covered with a heavy black wool scarf, and pulled her closer until she could feel the pressure of his lips on hers. Blood rushed to her lips, the only warm spot in her whole body. Then, suddenly, he moved away, leaned back, and smiled at her. When he touched the tip of her nose with his finger as if she were a child, her body reeled in confusion. But then he jumped out of the car, opened the trunk and took out her battered suitcase. Other cars were pulling into the parking lot. Someone waved at him. Holding the suitcase, he motioned for her to get out of the car. She put her mittens back on and followed him across the snowy parking lot to the station as if she were walking blind into a snowstorm. He was at the little grilled window, buying her ticket, when she entered the station. “Well, then, goodbye, Aleksandra. Have a good journey!” His voice was loud. He glanced around at the other passengers who were filling the small station. “And give my regards to your parents, especially your mother. I hope her health improves.” She nodded numbly. “Thank you,” she murmured, taking the ticket in her mittened hand. He pulled on his gloves, pumped her hand in a formal, almost Mennonite, handshake, and swiftly walked out of the station.

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twelve For most of the trip she sat huddled in the corner of her seat, shivering and then suddenly feeling hot as she remembered Dr. Oliver’s goodbye. But when she closed her eyes to try to remember his kiss, she saw the grim looks of her parents instead. During the last five months in Waterloo, she’d managed to push their faces further and further into the background. Now they were like huge posters on a billboard in a farmer’s field, coming closer and closer. In Union Station in Toronto, as she waited for the train west, her suitcase beside her, she watched the fashionable men and women hurry by. It was hard to believe that yesterday she’d looked just like any one of them. She draped her scarf around her shoulders, thinking of Mama and her Tantes in Russia saying goodbye to each other forever. The journey west, almost two full days of sitting up on the train, was a blur of black-armed trees and farmhouses, which gave way to the hypnotic patchworks of snow-laden pines of northern Ontario, which, in turn, slowly disappeared into vast white sheets punctured by wobbly rows of telephone poles and the tops of fence posts poking out of snowdrifts. So different from her trip east in August. Everything had been so ripe then, everything new. She’d been so new, hadn’t she? So innocent. She sat pressed against the window as if the slightest movement would make her even colder. She pulled off her mittens only to eat one of her sandwiches and then put them back on. She dropped into fitful bouts of sleep, where Cammy danced over the snow in bare feet and a backless party dress, lighting the fence posts like cigarettes with her lighter. Lexi woke to the fading daylight, bought herself a cup of tea in the bar car and then went back to her seat. Dr. Oliver stood gazing at her and then turned and walked away. She tried to chase him but he disappeared and she woke in a panic, an hour or two closer to Saskatoon. Papa was waiting for her in the station. He looked thinner than she remembered, even after only five months. His pale, papery skin seemed too tightly stretched over his cheekbones and the furrows in

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his forehead seemed deeper. How solemn he looked as he strode along the platform towards her, snowflakes splattered on the earflaps of his Russian fur-lined cap. He pulled his hat closer to his ears and wiped the snow off his round black-rimmed glasses with his gloved finger. Snow blew up into the air in a sudden gust of wind and her scarf flared like a wing as she struggled to get her suitcase down the steps to the platform. Icy needles pierced her scalp under her tightly pulled hair, and she had to grab her scarf to keep it from flying away. “Ja, come,” he said. He glanced down at her suitcase but didn’t take it. For a flash she resented him, thinking of Dr. Oliver taking her suitcase with such ease and swinging it into the trunk of the car, but then she remembered that Papa had a delicate back. She could barely keep up with him as they hurried into the momentary warmth of the train station and then out again. He opened the trunk of the black Model-T Ford and motioned for her to put her case inside. Even then he didn’t help her. Onkel Rudy Wiens’s car. She’d ridden in it a few times in her childhood, always in extreme circumstances. Usually they walked wherever they needed to go, which was never more than a mile or two; either to church, to school or into Millheim for supplies. There was no need to go farther. “How is Mama?” she asked as they began making their way through the snowy streets towards the road that led north to Hepburn and then to Millheim. Papa leaned forward over the wheel, peering out through the tiny fan of glass that the small windshield wipers were barely managing to keep clear. Though he was wearing thin wool gloves, Lexi could see how tightly clenched his fingers were. She thought of how calmly she steered the big yellow car through the streets of Waterloo and felt herself flushing in spite of the cold. “Not good,” he said. “Dr. Oliver said it was her heart.” “Ja. She has an enlarged heart. She has trouble breathing yet. And she can’t walk. Her legs are too swollen. There is danger of blood clots.” Lexi sat motionless, imagining her mother’s heart growing and growing until it burst, filling her body with blood.

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“Can’t she have an operation?” “We have no money for such things, Aleksandra, you know that.” “I could get another job. I’m sure I could…” She stopped herself. She almost said she could work in the restaurant. “She’s not strong enough. The heart can’t take it. We must hope that she can slowly get stronger with rest. And our prayers.” He glanced at her and then back out the window. “Ja,” she said. Lexi let her body slump into the seat. She’d been concentrating with Papa on the wipers working their arms to give them a dim view of the snowy road in the late afternoon darkness, almost willing her own hands to be steering the wheel. Now she pulled her scarf close around her head again, wiggled her freezing toes, and leaned against the window. She glanced at his hunched shoulders, at his hands gripping the wheel. Her eyes fluttered a couple of times and she heard him say, his voice sounding as if it were coming from a great distance, almost as if he were speaking to himself, “It’s God’s will.” She closed her eyes and gave in to the cold darkness. “Lexi!” Hildy, Renate and Maria stood in a row inside the kitchen when she entered the house after the two-hour journey, smiling shy smiles that could barely hide their excitement. All three seemed taller, and she’d forgotten how pretty they were. Glowing round cheeks and blonde braids. Renate had lost her two front teeth. She dropped her suitcase and kissed Renate and Maria, ignoring Papa’s surprised look at her excessive affection. Hildy, the youngest, threw her arms around Lexi’s neck and Lexi lifted her up. “Aleksandra?” A faint voice sounded from Mama’s bedroom. Lexi quickly kissed Hildy’s cheek and put her down. She took off her coat and boots and hurried through the kitchen into one of the two back rooms where Mama lay. Mama was terribly thin and grey. Her smooth pink cheeks had sunk into dark caves, becoming one with the purply blue circles under her eyes. One scrawny grey braid lay across the top of the blanket. Lexi had never seen her mother without her hair in a bun or neatly braided around her head.

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She almost leaned to kiss Mama’s cheek but stopped herself. No one in the family ever kissed each other. Instead, she took her mother’s cool hand, which lay limp on the patchwork quilt, into her own cold one and held it. “Hello, Mama. How are you?” “Ach, not so good.” Mama’s mouth was a grey sliver, a fallen half moon. “Well, I’m here now. I’ll look after things. Don’t worry.” Mama sighed heavily and a small groan escaped into the cold, metallic-smelling air of the small bedroom. Lexi tightened her hold on her mother’s hand, wishing that she could warm both their hands. “I’m here now, Mama,” she said again. A chimera in orange, with a long face and a wide mouth, holding several cigarettes at once, danced by. Lexi dismissed her with a flick of her head. “I’ll look after everything.” A pile of dirty clothes lay in one corner of Mama’s room and she’d already noticed the unwashed dishes on the kitchen table. She’d also seen, as she took her coat off, a basket of withered, sprouting potatoes going rotten in one corner of the kitchen. A stale odour filled the house and dustballs were gathered in the corners, flies stuck in old spiderwebs. “Ja, Lexi. You must do as Papa says.” Lexi turned to look at Papa, who had just come into the room, his Bible under his arm, the pale light from the coal-oil lamp glinting off his glasses. “I’ll read to Mama now,” he said. “You will get the supper.” He moved towards the chair beside the bed. She pushed the bedroom door closed behind her, stopping an unexpected urge to slam it, picked up three plates from the table and clattered them into the cracked washbasin. When she turned from the basin, which Papa had crudely fitted into the small wooden cupboard years ago, her three sisters were again standing in a row, watching her. She blushed. “Ja. Let’s do the dishes, before supper,” she said, grabbing the pump handle. The pump wheezed and a trickle of icy water fell into the basin.

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She pumped harder. “Renate, will you bring the kettle over? Have you been melting snow?” Renate nodded and hurried to the stove. She lifted the heavy kettle off with both hands. “Now Maria, you finish clearing the table and Hildy can dry.” Suddenly Hildy and Renate were quietly arguing over who would dry and who would put away and Maria was nudging both of them out of the way, asserting her superiority as the oldest as she rushed back and forth to the table to collect the dirty dishes. Her five months away seemed to vanish like the strings of smoke sneaking out of the cracks in the stovepipe. As she and Papa and the girls sat down to the thin stew she’d made of boiled potatoes, soggy winter carrots and a small piece of leftover ham, she could hear the wind. She’d have to make bread first thing in the morning, she thought, listening to fistfuls of snow being flung against the windowpanes. The woodstove was roaring but the heat was seeping out of the chinks in the poorly plastered log walls as quickly as it was generated. Though the table was barely three feet from the stove, it was almost outside its bubble of heat. She pulled her sweater around her tightly. She’d have to get used to being cold again. She thought of Mama buried under the pile of quilts and comforters in her cold bedroom. Was she warm enough? She looked at the place where Mama usually sat at the table. She should check on her. But when she glanced at Papa, she automatically bowed her head for grace. Papa rambled on and on in the Mennonite way, his prayer a daily meditation on God’s will that they must all share. A thought of Dr. Oliver and Cammy sitting down to dinner in the dining room, holding brandy glasses up to the light, entered her head and she tried to dismiss it, tried to concentrate on the prayer in which Papa was now thanking God for her safe return. But then she saw Georgie and Sally and Simon in the bright Waterloo kitchen, glasses of milk and a plate of cookies on the blue and white checkered cloth. She saw them as vividly as if they were standing just outside the log cabin, waiting for her to come back. In the lamplight, Lexi and her Papa and sisters began their meal

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in silence. The chipped plates and patched cotton tablecloth, the yellowed bone-handled knives and forks that had come with them from Russia, were as familiar to her as the bones in her own fingers. And yet nothing was the same. Everything had been exposed, every crack in every cup, every dint in the worn wooden floor. “I bet they have an extensive Bible School in Waterloo. Do they, Lexi?” Maria’s brown eyes flashed in the lamplight as she held her fork poised. Lexi looked at her in surprise. There was a directness in Maria’s eyes that she hadn’t seen before. And what was this big word? Maria would be turning thirteen in a few weeks and was now almost as tall as Lexi. Could she have grown up so fast? Lexi glanced at Papa and then at Hildy and Renate. Four pairs of eyes waited. “Well, I don’t know. I…never asked.” Papa’s eyes registered surprise that she wouldn’t know such a basic thing. Her face was warming. “But the Olivers, Dr. and Mrs. Oliver, are good people…” She shifted in her chair, thinking of how Cammy’s dusty rose dress felt against her skin, and of silk stockings, and of Mona’s platinum hair at the party, of Dr. Oliver in a tuxedo, of the brassiere that she was still wearing. “I have to work hard, of course.” She noticed that Papa nodded, seeming to approve. “They have a big house. A very big house with carpets and bathrooms and…” “Aren’t they Mennonite?” asked Maria. “I thought Tante Gertie knew them.” “She does. Well, not really. Someone she knew recommended them. They’re Anglican.” “What’s Anglican?” asked Hildy. “It’s…” She’d made that up. As far as she knew the Olivers never went to any church. “It is another branch of the Christian church,” said Maria, “originating in England.” “Oh,” said Hildy, looking perplexed. “Anglicans are not true Christians,” Papa said, harshly. His hand thumped down on the table. “They haven’t known suffering like we

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have and this has made them a frivolous people. They preach love but they don’t live it. Look at them, always at war! Consorting with Anglicans only leads to danger.” Papa stared at each one of them as he spoke. His gaze stuck on Lexi and she lowered her eyes. No one dared speak. They knew silence was required, a serious pondering of Papa’s words. The wind rocked the house and whistled through the rafters. After the solidity of the Olivers’ house, this place seemed frail and ready to be blown apart. “Why do they need more than one bathroom?” asked Renate. She was never able to maintain silence for long. Lexi glanced at Papa’s hands. They were agitated. “The house has three floors and there is one on each floor,” she said. All three girls looked shocked. “Three bathrooms,” said Maria with awe in her voice. Papa reached for the salt and pepper and shook both violently onto his food . “Where do you sleep?” asked Hildy after another pause. “I have a room on the third floor. It’s very small. But it has a window that looks at a big maple tree in the backyard. The trees there are so much bigger. You’d never believe how…” “Just like in our storybook?” asked Renate. “Ja, just like in the storybook,” said Lexi. “And do you have your own particular bathroom?” asked Maria. “Eat your dinners,” said Papa. The girls automatically bent their heads to their plates. “Are you going to sleep in our room?” asked Hildy. Lexi glanced at Papa, who nodded. “Ja, of course.” “I’m glad.” Hildy smiled at Renate, as if to say I told you so. Renate flashed her six-year-old toothless smile at Lexi before Papa motioned them all to bow their heads once more for a prayer of thanks. That night, lying in the sagging bed with Hildy curled next to her, Lexi couldn’t sleep. She’d gone into her mother’s room to say good night after the dishes were done and the girls were getting into their nightgowns. Mama hadn’t opened her eyes, even as Lexi piled another comforter on top of the three that were already there. Mama’s breath-

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ing rattled unevenly. The room smelled sour and medicinal and of old woodsmoke, and she’d realized then how sick Mama really was. She felt numb as she climbed into bed beside Hildy. When Renate asked more questions about Waterloo, she begged off, saying she was too tired after her long train trip, that she’d tell them more stories tomorrow. She could hear Maria’s and Renate’s even breathing from the other narrow bed across from hers and Hildy’s, and she could see a high pale crescent out of the small window. It had finally stopped snowing. The sky was black silk, covered with tiny diamonds. Something howled in the distance. A wolf ? Perhaps only a freezing farm dog. As she closed her eyes, she imagined the deep white silence of the prairie expanding until it circled the whole globe, leaving their small log house a dot no bigger than a pinprick.

thirteen “Lexi! Come!” Mama’s voice, weak though it was, had an angry edge to it. Lexi scraped the dough off her fingers, squished it into the ball she was kneading, then gave the loaf another small punch before she wiped her hands on her apron. She ran into her mother’s bedroom, her heart pounding. Papa, Renate and Maria had gone off to school and Hildy was at the kitchen table, playing with an old doll that had once been hers. Her mother’s cheeks were splotched with red as if the blood had been forced to the surface by her agitation. She seemed to be trying to get out of bed. “Mama! Don’t exert yourself.” She moved closer to the bed, not exactly sure what to do but wanting to pull the covers up around her mother more tightly, to keep her safely cocooned. Mama tried once again to get up and then fell back, exhausted. “What is it, Mama?” She touched her mother’s shoulder gently. Mama pointed at the large white enamelled chamber pot in the corner, and Lexi felt her face instantly flame up.

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“Let me help you up,” said Lexi, awkwardly taking one of her arms. Her hands were shaking. “Ach, I’ll do it by myself yet!” her mother almost growled, and shoved Lexi’s hands away. She made another huge effort to rise, pushing at the heavy covers as if she were rolling out dough. Lexi pulled the comforters back so that Mama could move. Her thick ankles and bunioned feet stuck out from under the nightgown like engorged claws. Mama awkwardly moved to a sitting position, dragging each of her swollen legs across the bed until they fell down to the floor. She allowed Lexi to take her arms to help her to walk to the chamber pot. When they had taken two steps, Mama scowled and motioned for Lexi to pull the pot out from the wall, to position it so that she could sit on it. Lexi’s arms strained to hold Mama’s body in position as she slowly lowered her onto the pot. At the same time, she clumsily lifted the nightgown up and tried not to look, but couldn’t help seeing how the red creases across Mama’s ankles, feet and shins made them look like sickening white sausages about to burst. She hated seeing the flat, withered buttocks. She held Mama’s hands to balance her as she sat on the pot. Neither of them could look into the other’s eyes. She waited until her mother nodded, and then handed her two pieces of newspaper from the pile in the corner. She held on with one hand, looking away, wincing at the sickly smell. Back in bed, Mama slipped almost instantly into sleep, eyeballs flickering underneath her closed eyelids, her breath a light, bubbling snore. Lexi tucked strands of her mother’s hair back behind her ears. The thumping of her own heart was finally subsiding. Mama’s loose grey hair made her look almost childlike and, at the same time, very ancient. Lexi stood and looked at the worn face. Mama was forty-three and yet she looked like an old, old woman. The lines in her skin were deeper and sadder than she’d ever seen them, and suddenly she couldn’t imagine her mother well again. Her earliest memory of her Mama, beautiful and young, was of her standing in a field in the sunshine outside their house in Russia, her golden hair wrapped around her head in braids. Lexi couldn’t have been more than three, swinging in circles on the grass. The memory evaporated, as if it had no right

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to life in this room. She thought of what Tante Gertie had said about her, how difficult life had been for her in Canada, how she suffered because of that. Lexi quickly put the lid back on the chamber pot, picked it up and went back to the kitchen. She’d have to put her coat and boots on to empty it in the outhouse, but first she’d better get the bread into the oven. She set the pot down by the back door, afraid to put it outside since it would freeze, and went to the pump to wash her hands. As the pump wheezed out a few cold trickles, Hildy looked up from the table. “Look, Lexi,” she said pulling at the doll’s old dress and holding it up for Lexi to see. “Ja.” Lexi smiled at her. “She needs a new dress, don’t you think?” She put down the bar of soap and glanced at the chamber pot, willing herself to ignore it. “I’ll help you make her a new one.” As the aroma of baking bread filled the house, Lexi scrubbed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. It was caked with dried, spilled food around the stove and sink. Wood chips blackened with soot and fly-filled spiderwebs clogged the corners. She scrubbed violently, slopping puddles around on the worn splintery wood. Surely Papa or Maria could have washed the floor even once! When she was Maria’s age, she’d been scrubbing the floors for years. Mama had depended on her. No questions asked. She threw the bucket of scrub water right beside the kitchen door on her way to the outhouse with the chamber pot. The black stain froze instantly on the hard snow. It looked like a crow’s wing, jagged and cut off. She hoped Papa would notice it when he came home. She moved on from the kitchen floor to the girls’ bedroom floor, scrubbing, tidying up everywhere, gathering up the musty-smelling clothes for the large load of washing she would do the next day. She’d have to melt several buckets of snow and then heat them up on the stove to fill the round wooden tub that Mama had always used to wash clothes in. In the girls’ room, she took the few toys and books down from the top shelf in the closet to dust, and noticed the black spine of a book wedged into a space between some boards in the corner, barely visible. She’d get that down one of these days. Her oldest brother, Gerhardt, had built these shelves when he, Willy, Henry and Jacob had

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shared that bedroom after they’d first moved into the house. She and Maria had slept on the daybed in the kitchen and Renate and Hildy, as babies, had slept in dresser drawers and cradles in their parents’ room until they were too big and it was obvious that the older boys had to go. Now it was almost as if her brothers had never been here. There was so little trace of them in the house. Gerhardt had gone to work cutting lumber in British Columbia. Henry and Jacob, the youngest of the four sons, were tool and die apprentices in a Mennonite company in Winnipeg. Willy, the second oldest and her favourite, had stayed home the longest to finish high school and had gone three years ago, on a church scholarship, to the Tabor Bible College in Kansas. The house had gone from being full of men to being full of girls and Lexi felt that she, as the oldest daughter, was somehow the link between her departed brothers and her younger sisters. She thought of Susa Reidiger, another oldest daughter who’d come over from Russia with them, who was an old maid at thirty, looking after her parents and younger siblings, cooking for her brothers when they came home. She shivered with revulsion. She’d always hated Susa’s pathetic smile, inviting the whole world to feel sorry for her. Having scrubbed and tidied the other two rooms in the house, she tiptoed into her parents’ bedroom with a pail of fresh water, determined to finish this spurt of cleaning. Papa and the girls had better take notice that the house was no longer a pigsty. Mama stirred a few times as Lexi scrubbed the floor, but she didn’t wake up. In one corner of the room was their old trunk brought from Russia and, as she came closer to it, she remembered the times Mama had allowed her to see the few precious things she’d brought from her village: a tiny yellowed embroidered blouse Mama had as a girl, the white leather-covered Bible she received at her baptism at the age of seventeen, a small black and white china dog with feathery hair like a collie’s, who sat about three inches high, smiling like a country gentleman. Mama, after carefully unwrapping it from the yellowed tissue paper, had told her that her father had been given it by her greatgrandfather. It was to be passed on to Gerhardt, the oldest son, when he had his first son. Lexi had always secretly loved the china dog and wondered why it couldn’t be passed on to her, the oldest daughter.

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Deeper in the trunk were embroidered pillow slips and sheets and baby clothes. Mama had kept one keepsake for each of her children. Lexi’s first knitted wool dress. The blue and white sailor suits her brothers had worn in Russia, Maria’s straw baby hat, a yellow rubber duck, bought in Canada, that had belonged to Renate, and Hildy’s pink and white baby shoes. Lexi remembered Mama buying them in Hepburn. After she finished scrubbing the floor around the trunk, she gathered up the clothes in the corner, some of which also belonged to Papa, and quietly closed the door behind her, relieved that she’d already, in one morning, made so much progress in restoring the house to Mama’s strict requirements. The house smelled of fresh bread and Sunlight soap. She was tired now and she had a flash of Georgie saying that first day after they’d washed all Cammy’s curtains, “That’s enough for one day!” If only she could stop and go home now, she thought, imagining the naked maple tree swaying outside her bedroom window in Waterloo. What a strange thought! That Waterloo was home, and this place, where she’d lived with her family, was…not. Not anymore. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. What sort of selfish girl was she that she preferred to be away from her family? That she preferred a life where she could do as she pleased? In her mind’s eye she saw a flash of herself in the mirror in her room in Waterloo. Her new clothes hiding nothing, showing her for who she was. Which was what? She closed her eyes and stared at herself. Her strong, beautiful body. Her blonde hair falling around her shoulders. The firm, round hollow at the base of her throat with the small pearl pendant nestled inside it. The pendent that now lay hidden in the drawer beneath her underclothes. Was that what she was? The question made her uncomfortable. It made her feel restless in this squat little house that huddled against the frozen prairie winds. Back in the kitchen, she surveyed what was left to do. The shelf high up on the kitchen wall that Papa had installed to hold the Bibles caught her eye. She would dust that and then she would stop. She’d heat up the leftover stew for their noon dinner. Perhaps Mama could be tempted by some fresh bread.

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She pushed a chair over to the shelf and dusted the Bibles first, the worn one that Papa read from every day and the larger German one, with gold letters deeply embossed on its hard leather cover. Beside the Bibles was a book on Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, and a familiar, well-worn collection of homilies. A couple of her brothers’ old high school books stood there too: Geography of the World and English Grammar, and The Iliad for Boys and Girls. She pulled the last off the shelf and caressed its frayed green cardboard covers. She’d read it while she was home, perhaps out loud to Mama. There were so many other books she’d rather read but this was the only storybook they owned. Just as she was about to step down from the chair, she remembered the book shoved in the corner of the closet shelf in the girls’ bedroom. Why not bring it into the kitchen with the other books? She hopped down from the chair, dragged it into the bedroom and, on tiptoe, yanked at the spine of the black book. Whoever had hidden it there had been strong. When she’d finally worked it out from between the boards, she saw that it was an old Bible. Why would anyone have tried to hide a Bible? She opened it. Slipped inside the cover was one of Papa’s old yellow school notebooks. Name, Subject, Date in bright red Russian letters on the soft yellow cardboard cover. The notebook was almost falling apart, the cover fuzzy and dog-eared. She didn’t recognize the handwriting at first, although something about it was familiar. Our Journey, it said in German script on the subject line. On the date line, Autumn, 1925. The year they’d left Russia. She’d been nine years old. She opened it. She remembered Willy always writing then, always scribbling away, Gerhardt teasing him and calling him Tolstoy. Everyone thought he was writing Bible verses. He’d gone on writing after they’d come to Canada, through the disastrous months when Papa had tried to become a farmer and failed, and then through the move to Millheim, to this cabin that had become their home after Papa got a job as a teacher and minister. But then he’d stopped. She couldn’t remember him writing in his last year at home, which was over two years ago now, even though he was so smart and knew all the Bible verses and was such an excellent reader that he was always asked to read in the services, or to make up the long extemporaneous

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prayers that were a part of every gathering. Surely, with all that writing, there were many notebooks? Why was there just this one here? Maybe he’d stopped writing because Gerhardt had teased him so much, not only about being Tolstoy but also for being a sissy because he always hung around the house, around Mama, because he liked books better than hard work. Because he was Mama’s favourite, although no one had ever said that out loud. Lexi glanced at Hildy, who was once again undressing her doll, and sat down at the kitchen table. She’d hardly touched her own notebook since she’d gone to Waterloo. Somehow there’d been too much to write at the Olivers’ and she never really got started. Her notebook was like that, full of skimpy beginnings. Patches that never got made into a quilt. She turned to the first page of Willy’s notebook, wrinkled and stained with a long brown streak. I, Willhelm Penner, age fourteen, am undertaking to write the truly disastrous story of what has happened to us Mennonites, to our brethren and to our own family. Everything has been ruined by violence and drought and now orders from the government to stop teaching our religion. Papa will be put in jail if he continues to teach and so, once again, we are running. I cannot live with myself if I do not write this. Mama and Papa think I am writing out Bible verses. It is September 25, 1925, and we are leaving our beloved home, our beloved village of Hierschau. I will try to give as much detail as I can so we will never forget. Our home is in southern Russia and we are leaving behind sweet little Oma and our Tantes and our fields full of watermelons, our orchards full of fruit, our feasts and our school. Papa says we must not be angry, anger leads to violence. Papa says it is God’s will that we are leaving. But I am angry. We are travelling in a boxcar, Boxcar No. 8, on our way to the port of Riga, Latvia, where a boat awaits us. We have the Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railway helping us make our way to Canada. We have much to be thankful for, Papa says. Lexi could feel the sway of the train, even now. She could feel the pressing of all their bodies in the crowded boxcar, the heat of them. Willy’s handwriting was wobbly on the page but his beautiful German

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script was still obvious. Everyone admired his handwriting. And his drawing. “Lexeee?” Hildy whined, her voice insistent. “When are we going to eat?” She sounded just like Sally. Lexi looked at the clock hanging on the wall. Almost one o’clock. She jumped up, slipping the yellow notebook into the cutlery drawer. She tackled the basket of mending after she’d made the noon dinner. Mama refused even a small piece of bread and slept on while Lexi and Hildy sat sewing. She was teaching Hildy to embroider, and gave her a small embroidery hoop with a large, simple flower traced onto the tightly pulled piece of white cotton. Hildy was awkwardly outlining the flower with running stitches. Later, they would appliqué the flower onto the new skirt they were going to make for the doll. Before she knew it Renate, Maria and Papa stomped into the house, their faces glowing with the cold. It was almost dark outside. “Lexi! We played a new game at school today. Checkers!” Renate’s exuberance filled the kitchen and Hildy, delighted that her sisters were finally home, hopped up and down beside Renate. “Sara and Abe brought it to school and we were allowed to play at recess.” Renate looked at Papa, who was brushing the snow off his coat and hanging it up on a hook beside the back door. “Papa? Can we get some checkers? Please, Papa, please?” Lexi thought of the toys in the Oliver house, drawers of games and books and dolls and toy trucks. “You can make a checkerboard,” he said after a moment, smiling one of his rare smiles at his daughters. “And I’ll saw up a small stick of birch for the checkers. I think we have some black paint left yet. You can paint half of them black. It will be just as good.” Disappointment flashed across her sisters’ faces as they realized that they weren’t going to have the smooth red and black board with its shiny, perfect squares, and that their checkers were going to be rough circles of wood. Then they gave their nods of acquiescence and resignation. She’d send them Simon’s checkerboard the moment she got back to Waterloo. “Can we do it now, Papa?” insisted Maria. “We need a diversion.” Diversion. Where did she get those words? Lexi could feel herself tense. There was something determined and clear in Maria, some-

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thing unbreakable. Lexi admired it, but…what? Perhaps she feared that she wasn’t as strong. That she might not be able to do what she wanted to do. What that was, she was no longer sure of. She was weak-willed, wasn’t she? Right now she didn’t even know if she still wanted to be a nurse. All her desire, all her wants had disappeared. Like the world outside the house, she felt snowed under. “Not tonight, Maria. I must sit with Mama, and after supper it will be time for school work and bed.” After supper Papa read from the Bible, a section from Romans: We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good edification. For even Christ pleased not himself… He looked at their four faces and bowed his head. They followed. “We thank God that Aleksandra is come back to us. We thank God that she will help us to bear Mama’s infirmities. We pray for her strength and rest in our abiding faith in the love and compassion of Jesus…” When he had finished the prayer, he smiled at Lexi and then at the younger girls.“We must all help Aleksandra, work extra hard to help her, to help Mama.” The three younger girls smiled shyly at Lexi as if she’d taken on a new, more important role. And when Papa smiled at her like that, such a rare, kind smile, and her sisters looked at her as if she were a wonderful stranger come back to them, she knew that she had done the right thing after all. They needed her and loved her. She would show Papa that she was worthy. That she wasn’t a liability. She would nurse Mama back to health. Her parents would finally be proud of her. She would show them that she was worthy of going to school to become a nurse. She hummed an old Russian tune as she and Hildy and Renate did the dishes. Maria sat bent over the table, doing her homework in the lamplight. As Lexi peered over her sister’s shoulder, she remembered doing long addition and subtraction in grade eight, practising it over and over until she could do even the longest sums in a flash. She’d always been good at math, and she wanted so much to go to high school. Her heart was beating hard as she watched Maria, remembering the terrible day with Papa in the classroom at the end of grade eight.

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Lexi fell into bed, arms aching from all the scrubbing, her thoughts a jumble of Mama’s fitful breathing, Willy’s notebook, the huge washing that awaited her the next day, long additions, checkers, the chamber pot and somewhere, very far away it seemed now, the large house on King Street.

fourteen Papa sat in his chair beside the stove the next day and, instead of reading as he usually did, he sawed up a small round birch stick with a handsaw. Hildy hovered excitedly beside him. A can of black paint sat on the kitchen table on top of an old newspaper. All three girls wanted to paint the checkers and, since there were going to be twelve black ones, Lexi said that they could each paint four. It wouldn’t take long with the large stiff brush that had been used to paint the door of the woodshed, but it felt as if they were embarking on a magical enterprise. Lexi had found some sandpaper and the girls decided that they would make each checker as smooth as possible after Papa had whittled away the jagged edges made by the saw. And there was the board to make as well. Lexi was racking her brain about what they could make the checkerboard from when Mama called out. “I’m so hot now,” she said, trying to push the blankets away. Her pink face flared in the light of the coal-oil lamp. Earlier in the afternoon, her mother had called to her and she ran in to find her visibly shivering, her face white. “Shall I get you a sweater?” she asked, and her Mama, lost in her inward quaking, shuddered a faint yes. Lexi had opened the second drawer of the dresser and found Mama’s underclothes, things she’d seen only from a distance on the clothesline in summer, neatly folded in the almost empty drawer. The cotton bloomers and undershirts were thin and frayed and the black stockings darned in many places. Seeing this sparse collection of private things was like finding a pile of fragile white bones in a longforgotten cage.

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Now Lexi took the blankets from the bed and pulled at the heavy sleeves of the sweater until Mama’s arms were released. She lifted her up and slid the sweater out from beneath her. Her flannel nightgown was damp, and Lexi had a moment of panic. Mama must not get chilled. “We have to change your nightgown,” she said. “I’ll find you a clean one.” “In the top drawer,” said Mama matter-of-factly, in her old voice. When Lexi pulled back the sheet Mama’s body looked terribly small, curled up and crumpled on the bed in the shadowy light. The nightgown she wore had three buttons at the top and would have to be pulled over her head. She slid the nightgown up, grateful for the dim glow of the lamp in the room, and saw, for the first time, the bony mound at the top of her swollen legs with its sparse tangle of grey hair, the bunched-up belly, the flattened breasts. She saw all of it without really looking and swallowed a new wave of terror. She pulled the damp nightgown over Mama’s head as if she were undressing a child, and threw it on the floor. Mama shivered, naked on the bed, and then covered her face with her hands. Lexi lifted Mama’s head off the pillow and, helping her to sit up, gently placed her arms at her sides. She slid the clean, dry nightgown over her head and down to her feet as quickly as possible. As Lexi helped her put her arms into the sleeves Mama’s eyes held hers, as if she were asking some unanswerable question. By the time Lexi had smoothed the covers and straightened the bed, all the time thinking that she should also take off the bottom sheet but not knowing how, Mama was falling asleep again. Lexi leaned over, still seeing the beseeching look her mother had given her, and kissed her mother’s cheek. Nine checkers were lined up on the newspaper and her three sisters were sitting, heads bent in concentration, polishing the other three with small pieces of sandpaper. Papa had taken up his Bible and was again reading but beginning to nod off. The Swiss clock they’d brought from Russia said nine o’clock. “Time for bed,” said Lexi. “No! No! Not yet!” wailed Hildy. “Please?” said Renate, bending her head even lower, polishing harder.

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“You will finish them tomorrow,” said Papa, getting up from his chair. The girls immediately put the checkers on the table and went into their bedroom to put on their nightgowns. Papa went outside to the outhouse and a freezing gust blew in. When he returned, he filled up the stove with wood. As he left them to go into his and Mama’s room, he said, “Don’t forget your prayers.” Soon after, Lexi crawled into bed beside Hildy. She wasn’t tired. “Schlaf gut!” she said as Hildy snuggled up against her, giggling and wiggling in the cold bed to get warm. She put her arm around her little sister, closed her eyes and waited. Scratching the match on the side of the matchbox, she winced at how much noise it made and held her breath for a moment, listening, before she touched the fire to the wick of the candle on the kitchen table. The moment she heard Papa’s rhythmic snores, she relaxed. The girls too were now deeply asleep and wouldn’t wake. She pulled her heavy sweater tighter over her flannel nightgown and tucked her woollen-stockinged feet under the chair. She sat as close to the stove as she possibly could. Papa had filled it to the brim. Willy’s notebook lay in her lap. Unwilling to open it yet, she thought of the long-ago stories of Tolstoy that Papa had read to them in the boxcar. Adults and children had listened, rapt, forgetting the stink and itching, the constant hunger pangs. The blowing snow today reminded her of one of the pictures in that book: the smooth, rounded hipbone of a young man crouched in the snow. And she shivered as if she were once again waiting for Papa to get to the magic moment, the revelation that the beautiful young man was really Michael, the archangel. She pushed away the sudden intrusion of an image of Dr. Oliver. His presence in her mind made her face heat up. And then she opened the notebook. She was hoping for something, wasn’t she? But what? She moved the candle to the top of the stove and bent over the crinkled pages. Perhaps she was hoping Willy would write more about the beautiful land they had come from. She remembered so little. She remembered that, long ago, Mama had been beautiful and full of life. But that

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had ended before they left for Canada. It wasn’t Canada that had changed her and made her sour. What was it? It was hard to read Willy’s handwriting in the candlelight. I am with my family: my Papa, Johann Penner, my Mama, Katya, my older brother, Gerhardt, who is fifteen, my younger brothers, Henry and Jakob, ages thirteen and eleven, and my little sisters, Lexi, who is nine, and Maria, who is only four. Mrs.Reidiger and her son and daughter and their children and Reverend Unruh and his family are with us. Altogether we are twenty-five people in this boxcar, which feels like a crawling cage. The room we have to move around in is about eight feet by eight feet because of the luggage and bedding piled at each end. It stinks from the latrine in the corner behind a curtain. It makes me gag. Reverend Unruh pushes everyone out of his way and lets his power as a minister go to his head. He and his sons, except for Rudy, are all conceited. He thinks he owns the stove. He’s always hovering over his pot of black coffee. He burns it half the time, and that stinks up everything too. I can say nothing, of course. And Papa never would. He turns the other cheek. Lexi smiled at that description of Reverend Unruh. He was still like that in Canada, although he pretended humility. She’d never liked him either, although as a child she would never have questioned his behaviour. She marvelled that Willy had seen him so clearly even then. I am never going to be a minister or a teacher. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to leave home and seek my fortune like Robinson Crusoe. And I will be a writer, too. My teacher, Mr. Friesen, didn’t pass the medical exam to come to Canada and so has to stay in Russia. I am so sorry for him. Mr. Friesen said that it would be a good idea to write the story of my life before I forget everything about Russia.When he said it, I knew he was right. I suddenly felt very happy. There were doodles on the page: a boy leaping in the air arms raised, a cracked mug, a boot, a hand.

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Ach, I hate this boxcar. And now we’re stopping again. At this rate, we’ll never get to Latvia. In Latvia we will catch a boat to England, Papa says. And after that a boat to Canada. I’ve never been on a boat before. I am so excited. It feels like we’ve been in this train for a thousand years already. Everyone is jumping out to relieve themselves in the bushes beside the track, even Mrs. Reidiger, who can hardly waddle down the steps. We must look like a bunch of insects crawling out of a filthy nest. The Russian peasants in the fields stare at us with their mouths open, and then laugh and point. If only they knew that we Mennonites owned some of the best estates in all of Russia. My Onkel Walter Wiens was a millionaire with dozens of Russian peasants working for him. We belong in Russia as much as anyone, but Papa says they think of us as ethnic Germans, whatever that means, and they want us out. They think we’re oppressors because we have money and servants, but we’re pacifists. And now they’ve passed a law forbidding us to teach our religion. It’s been one thing after another, Papa says, and now it’s time to leave and start again. Yes, Lexi could remember overhearing discussions at home and at her Oma’s. In Blumenort, she suddenly remembered, the grown-ups would sit on the open front porch after supper and talk. They would talk about the days of the tragedy, but only briefly. Lexi’s stomach would churn. They talked also about the Mennonites who were leaving Russia. She can remember Oma saying she wanted to sell the farm and go also. Lexi’s Onkels had been very upset. They had raised their voices and slammed their hands against the arms of their chairs and Oma had begun to cry. Lexi can remember, so clearly, shivering as they shouted. She can remember watching twilight descend on the buildings and trees, the last rays of the sun lighting up the brass weathervane on the roof of the barn. The whole world was so silent after the shouting, and then Oma stood up and went into the house. Mama says we will never see Onkel Walter’s estate again, never see Oma or Tante Tina or Tante Mary or any of the other relatives. There were so many like them that were too old or couldn’t pass the medical exam the Canadians gave us. Papa almost didn’t pass because of his eyes. And there were some people who believe things will get better in

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Russia, like Mama’s brothers, and have decided to stay. Mama says they are blind to believe such things. I know those people make her angry but she would never say so. I know Mama believes we must stand up for ourselves and even push back sometimes, but she would never say so. It would make Papa angry. Lexi looked up and felt herself shivering once more. Was that true about Mama? She always thought of her as so quiet, so much like Papa: a shadow of Papa. The clock said eleven-thirty. Papa was still snoring. She was seeing the blossoming apple trees in Oma’s garden, Oma walking towards her, smiling. September 27, 1925 I couldn’t write yesterday because I was sick all day, throwing up and having the runs. My underpants and my wool trousers had to be taken off behind the curtain so Mama could wash them in a pot of water we got from a river when we stopped. I smelled up the whole boxcar. And since there are no extra clothes, I had to sit wrapped in a flannel sheet for the whole day with the bucket beside me. I felt too sick even to read the one book I was allowed to bring along. The Iliad for Boys and Girls. Mama looked more upset than usual and I felt terrible that I had made more work for her. But today I’m fine and the sun is shining and it’s getting too hot. We have just passed through another village where a bunch of little kids were gathering ears of wheat fallen off harvest wagons, just like Gerhardt, Jakob and I did last summer. Every day in August and early September we scoured our road like detectives until we had a big pile of wheat in our barn. It took us four afternoons to separate the grain from the chaff and straw, but when we finished we found that we had over thirty pounds of wheat. We couldn’t believe it. We loaded it into our two-wheeled wagon and walked with Papa to the general store in Hierschau. Papa told the storekeeper that we had collected all the wheat ourselves and he seemed proud of us, even though he would never say it. The storekeeper let us pick out candy in exchange for the wheat, but Papa took the bag. I thought that was very unfair, but typical of Papa. He rationed it out to us all winter and I think it’s all gone now. Lexi was always begging for some and I let her have one of my pieces of licorice, even though I regretted it afterwards.

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Lexi remembered that piece of licorice. She’d hated the black taste but pretended to love it and chewed it as slowly as she could, mostly to annoy Willy. I want so much to jump off this train. To run. Like the time Gerhardt and I tried to run all the way from Hierschau to Blumenort to visit with Oma. Twenty miles felt like nothing, at least at the beginning. And I was always a much better runner than Gerhardt. Mama got us up at five o’clock in the morning and we started running, although Mama and Mrs. Unruh and Lexi were walking quite slowly. We wanted to get to Alexanderwohl, the first of the eight villages between Hierschau and Blumenort. It was only five miles and I beat Gerhardt. After that we walked and ran and ate Krushki pears whenever we stopped for breath. Nobody minded if we picked up windfall pears. There were so many trees that the air was rich, like the inside of a greenhouse. Not like this ugly boxcar. Yes, that is how I would describe our part of Molotschna Province: a greenhouse. A flower garden. We Mennonites made it that way. It used to be barren prairie and we helped plant deciduous trees everywhere, so many of them fruit trees. Opa was always telling us that Catherine the Great invited us here to live, to turn the wild steppes into farmland, and promised that we could live peacefully. And now look at us. Running again. Mennonites are always running from somewhere. September 28, 1925 I can’t sleep so I might as well write. Lexi huddled closer to the stove, remembering now how she’d squeezed against the vibrating wall in the boxcar, trying to sleep, holding her doll close to her, rocking it. Mama had always seemed far away, busy with Maria or some other baby. But she did remember Papa holding her hand once to help her jump out of the boxcar to pee in the woods. And she remembered Willy writing in his notebook, perched high up on the pile of luggage at the end of the car. I’m sitting in the corner between two huge suitcases with a blanket under me. The little children are having their turn sleeping on the bunk at the other end of the car and the adults are all sitting quiet. Henry and Jakob are playing with little horses and wagons they have

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made out of sticks, pretending to be soldiers smashing or shooting each other when Mama isn’t looking. Mama has forbidden them to play violent games. They ignore me too when I frown at them. Lexi is staring at me from her little spot on the floor across from me and smiles when I wink at her. Mrs. Unruh, Mrs. Reidiger, her daughter Susa and Mama are talking in low tones, shaking their heads and rubbing their hands to keep warm. Papa is dozing against a big box and Reverend Unruh is standing as usual beside the stove, drinking one of his endless cups of burned black coffee. It must be the middle of the night but I don’t feel tired. I want to write about the day we left so I don’t forget it. I already feel that I will forget everything good about Russia. We got to the railway station in Stulnevo at one o’clock in the afternoon. One of Jakob Willms’ boys, Peter, drove us in a wagon piled high with all our things, along with more Mennonites than I’d ever imagined. Reverend Unruh says there were four hundred of us picked up in Stulnevo and five hundred more at Lichtenau. I know that there are over a hundred and twenty thousand of us in Russia but I never felt it before. It always seemed as if we were just our eight little villages in Molotschna surrounded by the Russian peasants in their decrepit villages. The station was in chaos. The train was supposed to arrive at three. Mama said that I acted like a ten-year-old. Rudy Unruh and I leapt over and around the dozens of carts and wagons and piles of baggage on the train platform, chasing each other. Papa had no idea where we were. Finally, though, he caught me by the arm and gave me one of his terrible scoldings and the games were over. I had to help him and Gerhardt and the other men pile up everybody’s belongings so that they stood opposite to where the twenty boxcars would stop. But the train didn’t arrive. We all stood around from three until four and then from four until five and nothing. The children got tired of playing games and everybody got cranky. People lit fires on the ground and made coffee and fried sausages. I couldn’t believe that Mama even cooked up some of the seed potatoes we were taking to start our farm in Canada. But what else was there except Zwieback? Maybe she was ashamed that we only had baskets of hard buns. After supper, Rudy Unruh dragged Gerhardt and me behind one of the outbuildings at the station and showed us how to light a ciga-

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rette. We all took a puff. It tasted terrible, but Rudy smokes every chance he gets. He made us vow never to tell his father. As if we would. Smoking! Lexi couldn’t believe it. It made her smile, and feel less alone in her sinful ways. Then everyone laid out their straw mattresses on the ground and the children and old people lay down. I found a good bed on top of our wagon and looked at the stars in the sky over Russia for the last time. There we were, all lying down on the ground on mattresses and we begin to sing “Weisst du wieviel Sternlein stehen, an dem Himmels blauen Zelt?” Can you count the stars that twinkle, on the blue sky tent of heaven? I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I made myself think of the end of school, when we ran from door to door in the village collecting flowers to make the garlands and wreaths to decorate the schoolrooms for the final day, when we would be quizzed in front of all the parents and teachers. I was chosen, as always, for the most recitations in Russian and German, and I did them perfectly. I could see that Papa was proud of me. And then the games and the picnic. I stuffed myself on Mrs. Unruh’s cookies and pastries. I would never tell Mama, but Mrs.Unruh is a better baker. That last day of school is such a good memory, but I still can’t cry. I’m angry that it’s all been taken away. September 29, 1925 I have to continue on quickly. I hear that we are coming close to the Latvian border. Everyone is sick of this train and Jakob and Henry are fighting all the time with the Unruh boys. Mama just glares at them and Papa says nothing. Lexi sits by the wall and sings to her doll and watches me writing. Lexi looked up from the notebook. Willy had always seemed to be watching too, never quite wholeheartedly joining in with the rest of the boys. It had made him different from her other brothers, more like her. Back in the train station, when we were waiting for the train, I was lying on top of the wagon looking at the stars. I heard a long shriek. I was dreaming of Oma and Tante Tina baking bread in the outdoor oven in Oma’s garden and it seemed it was Oma that was making the

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shriek. Suddenly, sweet little Oma had blood running down her cheek. I reached out to help her and… Papa grabbed my arm and shook me awake. I wanted to cry for the sight of Oma bleeding, in the dream of course, but there was no time. Everyone was running. My heart was pounding as if we were being attacked again by the Anarchists. I ran to look for Mama first, and found her rolling up the bed. Both Lexi and Maria were crying. Then Papa called me over to help the men load our pile of luggage into Boxcar No. 8. It didn’t take long. Papa sent me and Gerhardt back to pick up the straw ticks. And then I saw Oma. She’d come to say goodbye. She looked so small. With her hands dangling by her sides at first. Then she held them out to Maria and Lexi, who were running towards her. She was crying hard as she hugged them. Tante Tina and Tante Mary were standing there too, white as ghosts, and we all had to go to say our goodbyes. I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t cry even though Gerhardt and Jakob were sobbing. I shook Onkel Abram’s hand and he squeezed mine so hard I thought it would break. When I bent down to hug Oma, I felt like a scarecrow stuffed with straw. Oma said into my ear, “If not here on earth, then in heaven.” I will be back, I wanted to say to her. But the words got stuck in my head. I don’t remember walking away from Oma and my Tantes and Onkels. All I remember is all of us crowding into Boxcar No. 8 and then standing around the open door, staring at all the relatives on the platform. I felt so guilty that we were the lucky ones to be leaving. We were the healthy ones that passed the Canadian doctor’s examinations. The sky was a pale, pinky orange behind the station and a couple of Russian boys were running in and around the empty wagons, picking up things that had been dropped, no doubt stealing everything they could get their hands on. No one was watching them. I wanted to catch them, to humiliate them in front of everyone. But of course I could do nothing. And what good would it have done anyway? They have stolen everything from us already. Everyone on the platform was staring at us. Then they gradually all stopped talking and all I could hear was this funny low sound, which I realized was crying. Then a man’s voice, shaky at first, singing, “So nimm denn meine Hände…” So take my hands and lead me.

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Everybody joined in. I felt my mouth moving although I couldn’t hear the sounds I was making, if any. But the hymn got louder and louder until the train suddenly jerked and we all fell sideways. Some of the relatives on the platform rushed up to try to get one last touch. I kept looking at Oma. She looked tinier and tinier and then she disappeared. Lexi closed the notebook. A lump filled her throat. Where were her Oma and her Tantes, Tina and Mary? No one knew. There had never been any letters even though Mama wrote to Blumenort every month. Everyone in Millheim had heard the rumours that the Mennonites had been shipped to Siberia. She tried to imagine Siberia and couldn’t. All she could see was Oma, now a very old lady in a babushka, sitting on a bench in her garden.

fifteen The next morning Lexi stood at the stove, stirring the oatmeal for breakfast. She’d gotten up at five-thirty, having tossed and turned for the rest of the night, dreaming of being back on the train, of soldiers running towards their house. She always awoke just as they were about to enter. She’d hurriedly put on her clothes in the freezing bedroom and then thrown a couple of logs onto the few remaining embers in the kitchen stove. By six-thirty the kitchen was warm, the table had been set and the smell of coffee filled the house. She’d put the notebook back in the kitchen drawer, under the wooden cutlery tray. “Girls!” she called. “Time to get up.” She stirred the porridge furiously. Papa came out of the bedroom, adjusting his glasses and pulling down his vest. “Good morning, Papa,” Lexi said. She handed him his cup of black coffee, surprised by a sudden thought of Georgie, at this very minute, handing a cup of coffee to Dr. Oliver. “Is Mama awake? Should I take her in some coffee?”

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“Ja, and give her some porridge. She seems stronger this morning.” The memory of Dr. Oliver slipped away just as suddenly as it had entered. Mama was getting stronger. This was proof. She smiled at her Papa as she poured the coffee. “Oh, I’m so glad, Papa!” “We can thank God,” he said, closing his eyes and standing completely still in the middle of the room. He looked so powerless, so thin and worn out. Renate, Maria and Hildy came into the kitchen, rubbing their eyes and pulling their untidy braids apart so that Lexi could help them to brush their hair after breakfast. “Sit down,” Papa said, quietly. He continued to stand, like one lonely and bending stalk of wheat, in the middle of the room. The girls found their chairs and waited for him to sit, bowing their heads in anticipation of the prayers. Lexi hurried into her mother’s room after Papa and the girls had left for school, almost spilling the coffee in her excitement. Mama did look better. Her face had more colour. “Ja, Lexi, danke,” her mother said, even smiling a little as she took the steaming coffee. “Here, I’ve brought some porridge.” Lexi carefully placed the bowl on the small chair that was serving as a bedside table. Mama looked at it but made no move to take it. “Shall I help you with the porridge?” asked Lexi. “Not yet.” Her mother took a tiny sip of the coffee and handed the cup to her. “Nothing tastes the same,” she said, grimacing. “Papa said you wanted porridge, so I…” “Ja,” Mama sighed and motioned for her to hand her the bowl. Lexi balanced it on top of the blankets. Mama slid the spoon into the porridge and then slowly moved it towards her mouth, spilling a little milk down her chin. “Ach!” she said and dropped the spoon into the bowl. “Not now.” “Oh, please, Mama. Just a little. I can help you.” Lexi filled another spoonful and her mother opened her mouth like a child. After three spoonfuls, Mama pushed her hand away. “Enough!” she said gruffly. “Mama? Did you ever find Willy’s notebook? The one he was al-

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ways scribbling in?” Lexi stood with the cooling porridge bowl in her hands, her heart fluttering. “What notebook?” Mama’s eyes squinted tightly at her. “Willy was always writing. Remember?” “Ja. Bible study. School work.” “Well, I was just wondering if he left it at home.” “No. Why would he? He took it to Bible School.” Mama sounded angry, but her eyes looked scared. “Oh.” “Willy’s a good boy. He writes every two weeks.” Mama’s eyes were closing. Lexi pulled the blankets up tighter, picked up the coffee cup and the porridge bowl, glanced once more at her to make sure she was sleeping, and quietly left. Willy’s notebook in the cutlery drawer was like an itch all morning as she washed and baked and mended. Several times she opened the drawer to make sure it was still there and that no one would see it if they were looking for a knife, fork or spoon. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, as she sat at the kitchen table watching Hildy’s laborious embroidering, she opened the notebook again. Her eyes were tired from the night before. It was strange to read the notebook in daylight. It felt so private, a secret that only she and Willy shared. September 30, 1925 I’m hunched in my corner again watching old Mrs. Reidiger snoozing. Half of her huge rear end is hanging over the bunk and she’s holding the ankle of her youngest grandchild as if he will get away from her. Every now and then she lets out a snore or even a fart, and we all pretend not to hear. Papa, Reverend Unruh, Rudy Unruh and Gerhardt, who now thinks he is completely grown up just because he had his sixteenth birthday yesterday, are discussing the fact that many people on this train don’t have passports, that we could all be turned back at the last moment, that we might all be forced to undergo more medical exams before we are allowed to leave Russia. I’m most worried about Papa. He had to have the pus scraped from the backs of his eyelids only a month ago to get rid of the trachoma found by the Canadian doctors who came to examine us. He was horribly sick from the pain of it. And

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he could have been left behind if they’d found it on the second examination, which, thank God, they didn’t. Reverend Unruh says they’ll let us out, passports or no passports. They don’t want us and they’ve already let eight thousand of us go to Canada. Because we won’t fight we’re traitors to Russia. Because Papa refuses to teach atheism, he’s a traitor to the Revolution. What they want most of all is our land. Pure greed, Reverend Unruh says. I cannot turn the other cheek as Papa is always telling us we must. Of course Willy did turn the other cheek. But Lexi loved him for what he’d written, for his rebellious spirit; even to write these things was blasphemous. October 1, 1925 Latvia. We are only five miles away. We have just passed the last Russian station, Lebesch, and are heading for the border. I’ve been carving my name into the wall of the boxcar with the jackknife that Papa bought for me as a souvenir of Hierschau. We heard yesterday that the Canadian Mennonite Committee has ensured that we will all be issued passports. Papa says that Canada’s leader, Mackenzie King, and the National Railway have granted thousands of transportation credits to Mennonite refugees so that we will settle their “Wild West.” The Canadians have convinced the Soviet powers in Moscow that we can leave. When I asked Papa how they did that he just shrugged and said it was God’s will. Ach, for a smart man he doesn’t have a lot to say! I have to stop writing now since the train is stopping. I hope I never hear this constant screeching again. Whoever said trains were exciting? The Russians are going to inspect us. October 2, 1925 Well, here we are. Riga. Mama says the inspection was a farce. The Russians made us pull out everything and then, after glancing through a few things, put it all back in again in a huge hurry as the train was beginning to move. We all hung out of the door watching for the famous Red Gate, the boundary between Russia and Latvia. I started shaking when we passed under it and hardly heard the singing that had begun all down the line of boxcars. When I finally stopped shaking, I sang too, at the top of my

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lungs, “Nun danket alle Gott,” Now thank we all our God. The train suddenly jerked again and stopped beside another freight train with its doors opened. The railway men made bridges with planks and we had to run back and forth, transferring all of our things into the Latvian boxcars. The Latvians are so friendly! Their villages look much more prosperous than the Russian ones. People waved and smiled at us as we went through the countryside. It’s hard to believe. We should stay here even though the Latvian government has made the Canadian officials promise that we won’t. Then we could go back to Oma and get her and the others out. It took us only three hours to get to Riga, and now we are in a barracks right in the middle of the city. There are huge plank beds covered with straw all along the walls and we will have to sleep lined up like herrings. And the black bread with anise seed that they gave us is sour and horrible. Mama says that our bread is a delicacy compared to this and she’s sorry that she threw the leftover Zwieback out of the train as we went through the Latvian countryside. Me too. This afternoon, after we arrived, we were herded into the shower rooms, the men and boys in one room and the women and girls in another room. There were taps and tubs and shower faucets sticking out of the wall! Running water. Only the richest estates in Russia have bathrooms and already, after only a few hours in a free country, we are in a giant bathroom! What can we look forward to in Canada? We sprayed each other and slapped each other’s backsides with our cloths and slid around on the soapy floor. Papa and the other men didn’t seem to mind. I heard Papa say to Reverend Unruh, “They need a little roughhousing.” And I saw Papa naked for the first time in my life. And Reverend Unruh with his huge belly hanging over his… I can’t write the word. But it’s huge. Lexi laughed out loud and felt her cheeks flare up, imagining Reverend Unruh naked. Hildy looked up. “Why are you reading so much?” she asked. “Oh, just one of my old schoolbooks.” “Can I hear it? Is it about animals?” Hildy asked excitedly. She immediately put down her sewing. “No, it’s nothing interesting. You wouldn’t like it.”

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“I might,” said Hildy. “Please, Lexi?” Lexi closed the notebook. “I’ll tell you a story. How about the one about Oma’s garden?” When Papa and the girls stomped in after s chool, covered with snow, their faces glowing from the cold, Papa handed Lexi a letter he’d picked up from the town post office. Lexi tore it open. January 25, 1933 Dear Lexi, Nothing is the same without you! I wish you were back! Cammy is as crazy as a bedbug (ha! ha!) and Dr. Oliver is the same as always, if you know what I mean. The children are fine except that Sally had a bad cold for over a week and she always asks if your coming back. Simon is becoming a bad boy. He’s sneaky and tells lies. What would you do? I’m at my wits end and Mrs. Waddell doesn’t know what to do with him either. Cammy just laughs, if you can believe it! My Mom is good too. I’m working for the Olivers three days a week and double shifts at the restaurant. Nothing much else to do. When are you coming back? Dr. Oliver asked me to ask you how your mama is. How are your little sisters? I meant to ask first but I forgot. As you can tell, I’m not to good at writing letters! This is only my second ever. Missing you, your friend, Georgie XXXOOO and a big hug. Good luck too.

Lexi folded the letter and put it in her apron pocket. She would write to Georgie right after supper. The letter was making her stomach churn. She thought she’d forget about Waterloo in her devotion to helping her mother back to health, but the letter brought it all back. Cammy and the children. Georgie, her first real friend. Dr. Oliver. She looked down at the faded, stained apron she was wearing, one of Mama’s, and at her long skirt and heavy black shoes. Then she looked over at Papa bent over the stove warming his hands, and felt her throat constrict. “Who’s your letter from?” asked Maria in her new sure voice, as she piled her homework books on the table.

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Renate and Hildy were playing in the bedroom. Papa had moved away from the stove, put down his Bible, and was heading into Mama’s bedroom. “My friend, Georgie, in Waterloo. She’s helping out at Dr. Oliver’s, now that I’m away.” Lexi spoke without looking at her, keeping her voice flat, knowing that Maria always seemed to know, without being told, what was going on. “Oh,” said Maria. “I wish I would get a letter.” She looked up at Lexi and took a deep breath. “Lexi?” “Ja?” “You’re not going back, are you?” Maria was whispering and looking at the bedroom door. Lexi hesitated, glanced too at the closed bedroom door and tried to push down the sudden flare of anger in her chest. “I don’t know.” “But Papa said…” “Papa doesn’t know everything.” “But I thought…” “I didn’t have a choice about coming home, you know. About looking after Mama and you girls.” “You want to go back?” Lexi’s face was flushing. She didn’t trust herself to say anything. She shrugged her shoulders, wincing under Maria’s direct gaze, angry that tears were coming into her eyes. Maria flipped open her book and pretended to read. “I’m going out.” Lexi reached for her coat hanging by the back door, shoved her feet into her galoshes and wrapped a scarf around her head. The path was a narrow, icy run and she slipped and slid as she negotiated it. She pulled the squeaking outhouse door open and forced it shut behind her, even though it had warped in the cold and didn’t fit tightly anymore. “Damn,” she whispered to herself as she sat shivering on the little bench beside the toilet seat, wiping her tears away. She was selfish, sinful. But was it all her fault? Wouldn’t Jesus have compassion for her? She was like an oversized bird trapped in this small, dark house, crashing into walls and windows, trying to escape. And what did Maria know? Sitting there so calmly with her books and her new know-it-all attitude.

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After ten freezing minutes, she slowly got up. It was time to make supper. Maria didn’t look up from her books when she entered the warm kitchen, but Hildy and Renate smiled at her from the daybed where they now sat with pieces of sewing spread on their laps. “Can we paint the checkers tonight?” asked Hildy. “Don’t you have to finish sanding them?” “Oh, I forgot!” said Hildy, throwing down her embroidery. “I’m going to work on mine right now. Come on, Renate.” The two girls each grabbed two of the three unpainted checkers from the end of the cupboard where Lexi had piled them, went back to the daybed and began sanding. “Mine is going to be the smoothest ever,” said Hildy, glancing up at Lexi. “Ja, sweetheart,” said Lexi, thinking of how everyone in Waterloo called Simon and Sally “sweetheart” and “love” and “darling.” From now on, she would call her sisters whatever she wanted. Hildy seemed not to notice and went on sanding. Maria, however, looked up from her book, stared at Lexi for a long moment, and then finally smiled. Lexi picked up a knife and grinned back at Maria before she slashed through a potato.

sixteen The girls finished sanding the checkers and painted them. Papa had brought home the side of an old cardboard box from school. Maria measured and drew the straight lines and Renate and Hildy carefully coloured them in. The girls then took the checkerboard into Mama’s room to show her, and Mama watched while Hildy and Renate played a game on her blankets. Mama smiled and winked at Hildy when she finally won a game. Hildy giggled and hopped around the bed. Lexi played with them after supper each evening. Papa played one evening too, soundly beating Hildy and Renate and even Maria, who put up a good fight.

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Each evening that week Willy’s notebook lay in the drawer, pulling at her. How she wished she could run up to her third-floor bedroom at the Olivers’, lie on her bed with the door closed and read the notebook until it was finished, the big bare maple branches outside her window keeping her company. Each night when she got into bed, she planned to get up when everyone was asleep and read some more. But she fell into a deep sleep so quickly each night, and her days were packed with chores. On Sunday, when Papa was away preaching at one of the country churches, the girls sat around their mother’s bed, watching her sleep. They were not allowed to work or even play on the Sabbath, and had nothing else to do. Lexi read to them from The Iliad for Boys and Girls. As she read, she hated that Mama’s hair lay on the pillow like the tangled stems of the thin grey seaweed she’d seen on their ocean crossing, and that her cheeks were chalky in the harsh winter light and sunken into caves under her high cheekbones. Her sisters’ soft, slack faces, listening to the adventure story, were such a contrast and yet they were horrible too. She wanted to shout or scream. Anything. Mama used to jump up the moment the sun went down on Sunday evenings and say, “Ja! Enough!” She would get back to her work, scrubbing the dirty pots, setting the table for the next morning’s breakfast, and the house would come back to life. Mama and Papa were such hardworking people: Papa teaching all week at the Mennonite school and then preaching wherever he was needed on Sundays, and Mama used to never sit still. Lexi had taken all this for granted, hadn’t she? She had never thought that one of them may not be able to carry on forever like that. That night, after everyone was sleeping, Lexi tiptoed into the kitchen and lit a small candle. When we got back into the changing rooms from the showers, our clothes had been returned from being disinfected and, as Rudy Unruh said, “purged of lice and fleas and other similar Soviet citizens.” We all laughed like crazy, even Papa and Reverend Unruh. Mama was upset because the one nice dress she had, sent to her from Tante Gertie in Waterloo, Canada, came back scorched with

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yellow patches. After the baths we had one more hair-combing session to check for leftover lice, and then our legs and feet were inspected for foot ailments by two big nurses, dressed in white, who smiled a lot. One of them had terribly rotten teeth. Now we are allowed to go out and Gerhardt and I, and Rudy Unruh as well as Jakob and Henry, are going to explore Riga. Papa says we have to be back in three hours and he has given us each half a ruble. October 4, 1925 On our way again. We are now on a ship called the Baltara. We boarded a couple of hours ago and I don’t think this ship is seaworthy. Reverend Unruh says it’s a worn-out old steamer of twelve thousand tons. The only thing the Canadian government could afford. We could sink if the weather gets bad. I’m feeling a bit sick already and we are hardly out of the harbour. They say it will take us three and a half days to get to Southampton, England, and we are all crowded into two large rooms below deck with rows and rows of bunk beds, the men in one room and the women in the other. For supper they gave us pea soup, which was so salty that no one could eat it. I will try to write about our stay in Riga even though I’m afraid I’m going to throw up. The best thing about Riga was a floating bridge that was somehow totally supported by small boats. I don’t know how they did it. Gerhardt and I hung around it for a long time, examining it from all sides, and we still couldn’t figure it out. The Latvian fishermen were all laughing and pointing and beckoning us to jump down, but we didn’t dare. Willy had drawn a picture of the bridge, with the fishermen reaching out from their boats nearby. Lexi was sure she’d seen that picture before. Perhaps Willy had shown it to her. On the second day in Riga, Papa took us four boys shopping. Papa was amazed at the traffic, but we’d already seen it the day before. Horse-drawn wagons, which we’re used to, but also buses and thousands of bicycles and motor cars. Papa looked really nervous and made all the traffic stop by holding up his hand as we walked right across the middle of a busy street. It was embarrassing. The first place we stopped was a long, narrow street which turned out to be a Jewish bazaar. Lots of little booths along both sides of the

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street and, when they saw us, the Jews in their big black hats called out “Welcome!” and “Come in, friends!” and other things we did not understand, in loud German, but also Russian and Latvian and who knows what other strange languages. I saw Papa cringe and I was afraid that he was going to leave the street. But there were so many things to buy. Very cheap. Clothes and shoes and leather boots and belts. Nothing like we’d ever seen in Russia. Papa found a shop that sold caps of all shapes and materials. He decided to buy all four of us leather caps with fur-lined earflaps for the Canadian winters. The shopkeeper insisted that nine rubles was a very good deal. Papa said no and we walked out. When we were halfway down the street, the shopkeeper chased us down and offered the caps for six rubles. Again Papa shook his head and we walked on. Finally, the shopkeeper offered them for four rubles, one ruble per cap, and Papa agreed. I was proud of him and he smiled at us as we left the shop. And then he bought some high leather Cossack boots for himself. For more than eight rubles. He hid them under the bunk when we got back to the barracks and I don’t think Mama knows yet. Lexi didn’t know that about Papa, that he could bargain, that he had the courage to argue about the price of something. It was good to know that about him. It was good to know that he could stand up to more than just his daughters and his wife. She remembered the warm hats with the earflaps. She’d been jealous that the boys had been allowed out onto the streets to adventure, and then she had envied their hats. She had even complained to Mama, and Papa had heard her and gone red in the face and stared her down. She knew she’d been speaking out of turn, he hadn’t needed to say more. I feel awful. My stomach is churning. Papa has just come back from visiting Mama and the girls in their bunk room and Mama is terribly sick, along with the others. They are passing a bowl around for vomiting. Reverend Unruh says this ship has all the strength of a cork on the high seas. The room smells like hot, greasy food. A smudge. She sniffed the page. She’d never thrown up once on any of the voyages, one of the things she was proud of. She remembered running around the deck alone, exploring the ship while every-

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one else bent their heads over basins. She would sit on the deck with her knees curled up under her skirt and stare out into the endless chop and churn of the ocean. She’d made a promise to herself then, hadn’t she? To explore the world. To see faraway places. October 7, 1925 It’s amazing how the seasickness goes away the moment the rocking stops. We are now on the train to Southampton and I am much better. I was able to eat only two meals on the whole trip across the North Sea, boiled potatoes and herring both times. Mama was very frightened of the long stairs we had to climb to get up on deck for fresh air. She said the boat smelled of rotting corpses. But I helped her up, and she’s better now too. Although we had another terrible scare. Jakob got lost in London when we landed there in the middle of the night. Mama was frantic and ran around wildly in the huge crowd, shouting for him. But then all the train doors were closing and we had to get on. Reverend Unruh said not to worry. Jakob was a big boy, almost eleven, and that no doubt he had found his way on board. This did nothing to calm Mama down. She just sat and stared out into the night, refusing to talk until we got to Southampton, when Jakob suddenly appeared, in tow with Mrs. Doerksen. “God is still testing me,” Mama said, glaring at Jakob. She gave him a hard swat on the behind that made tears come to his eyes. I don’t think he’ll get lost again. Lexi smiled. Jakob hadn’t changed a bit. He was the dreamy one, still getting lost. Always forgetting to do his chores as he got absorbed in making something. She wondered how he was doing in Winnipeg learning how to be a tool and die maker. October 8, 1925 All nine hundred of us are now in an airport hangar in Southampton. When we arrived here early this morning, we were given a breakfast of bacon and eggs, swimming in grease, and kippered herring. On white tablecloths! Decorated with flowers and all set up in a huge room. English girls served us, almost all of them pretty and very well dressed, and Gerhardt and Rudy Unruh made asses of themselves, smirking and winking like crazy idiots. Rudy even dared to pull one of the girls’ apron strings. They must think we’re a bunch of uncultured

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Russian bumpkins. You’ll never catch me acting that way around girls. Gerhardt can call me a sissy all he likes. Willy hadn’t changed at all, had he? Always so polite. She could see him so clearly: tall and skinny and short-sighted. His glasses always slipping down his nose. His nose always in a book. He had the most beautiful hands. The thought of Willy’s hands and his crooked smile made her miss him terribly. No one else in the family understood her like Willy. No one. Even though the eggs were cold, it was the best meal we’d had in weeks. This afternoon we were again examined by Canadian doctors before we were given approval for entry into Canada. Papa had a terrible toothache but he had to hide it for fear of being turned back, so he tried to smile and he looked ridiculous. But the Canadians probably thought he was no stranger than the rest of us. I feel strong, even though I’m thinner. And, unfortunately, yesterday I got even thinner. The English people gave us oranges and peanuts, our first. I had no idea they could taste so good. Papa got a five-pound bag of peanuts and we all filled our pockets. I thought I’d gone to heaven. But by the time we crawled into our beds, which even had white sheets and pillow cases, I felt all the nausea of my seasickness come back, I asked God for forgiveness for being so greedy and managed to fall asleep after I threw up. And today I feel fine. We have to board one more train to Liverpool, where we will get the ship to Canada. Later. On the train to Liverpool. We are almost there. I have never eaten such tasty ham sandwiches. And for breakfast we were served “toast” with jam, and thick tea with lots of sugar. Our family has a compartment all to ourselves and we even have upholstered seats. I can write so smoothly because we hardly seem to be moving even though we are going along at an enormous speed, sixty miles an hour. This train is called a Flyer, and for good reason. It’s raining and the fields look greener than any I’ve ever seen, even in Molotschna in spring. October 9, 1925 We have become a flock of sheep. Herded out of the train right at the docks. The only things we saw of Liverpool were endless rows of red

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brick tenements, blackened by smoke. And then, in the harbour, hundreds of ships anchored against the docks. And even more ships out at sea. We were pushed onto a barge-like ferry, which took us to the ship we’re on now, the Montcairn. Reverend Unruh says it weighs seventeen thousand tons and is owned by the Canadian Pacific Company. It’s huge. As we walked up the gangway, it was swaying back and forth. Papa carried Maria and Mama held Lexi’s hand. I grabbed Jakob before he almost slipped off. Mama says she hopes we can get him to Canada in one piece. We’re now moving out of the harbour towards Ireland. There are about nine hundred people in our group, did I mention that before? It’s strange to think of all of us, a group the size of a village, floating out into such a vast and unknown water. There’s nothing, completely nothing, to see but sky and water ahead of us. Gerhardt, Jakob, Henry and I have a cabin to ourselves. Our parents have one with Lexi and Maria just beside us. Rudy Unruh wants to come in here and smoke later. October 12, 1925 Mama has been very upset about how they loaded our belongings into the ship in Liverpool. I didn’t see it, but she says that a big crane lowered a net full of boxes, luggage and all kinds of furniture into the hold, and they let it hit the bottom of the boat with a huge thump and stuff spilled all over the place. She says she saw one of our suitcases break open and our dishes, plates and cups rolled in all directions. A lot of them got broken. One of the officers laughed when he saw what happened and shrugged his shoulders. When the other officers saw that Mama was watching, they tried to pick up a few things, but Mama is afraid we have lost most of our dishes. She tries to be forgiving but then she starts complaining all over again. She’s different now. So sad all the time. It’s just dishes, I told her. We’ll get lots more in Canada, where I’m sure we’ll quickly get rich. Gerhardt and Rudy and I have been smoking in our room and I’m getting to like it, although our fathers will kill us if they find out. Rudy has found a sailor who will give him three cigarettes a day, and we each have one just before the evening snack in the dining room. I could stay on this ship forever. No one is seasick, although Papa is

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afraid of the water and never goes out on deck. Mama spends a lot of time out there watching the waves and looks a little less unhappy. Yes. Lexi remembers that now, how Mama was happier. The colour came back in her cheeks and she wasn’t so pinched in and thin. Sometimes she even smiled and made a joke. She joked that she could get used to this life of luxury. Papa heard her and turned his back and walked away. She shrugged and watched him go. Everything on this ship is very good. The first meal we had in the dining room, they served huge pieces of fish without the bones. I was sure that we were eating whale and everyone made fun of me. Gerhardt laughed so hard that milk came out of his nose. Idiot. But we also get chicken and beef and different vegetables, cheese and crackers and English tea. The waiters, all in white uniforms, line up against the serving counters and don’t move a muscle until grace has been said. Then they go into action and practically throw the food at us. One of our waiters, Johnny, is nasty, but Sam gives us extra desserts. Gerhardt, Jakob, Henry and I spend a lot of time in the lounges playing checkers and dominoes. Gerhardt always heads for the girls, who sit in the corners and read romantic novels from the library, which they, of course, have to hide when the adults appear. My favourite activity is to watch the engines. They make the Neufeld Flour Mill in Hierschau look pretty puny. Yesterday we saw our first iceberg. Someone said it was because we are close to Newfoundland. October 13, 1925 One of the sailors shouted “Land ahead!” when we were taking our second smoke of the day. We all ran out to see. It was just a grey strip on the horizon. Totally unimpressive. Then we were told that we were entering the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Nothing but rocks and some straggly evergreens. Canada looks cold and empty so far. Lexi thought the very same thing as they sailed up the St. Lawrence. She remembers watching Mama’s face as they stood on the deck, gripping the cold steel railing, the wilderness sliding by before them. Mama’s lips locked in a straight line, and then she closed her eyes. There was a rumbling in her throat and then Lexi was sure she

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heard Mama murmur the words God has betrayed us once again. Lexi had forgotten that. It had been so shocking. Surely it was something she had imagined. October 14, 1925 Quebec City. We are all lying in a huge building on a hard, cold floor, lying on our coats and jackets, shivering in this God-forsaken place. We are truly outcasts. I can barely write. My hand is so cold that it is blue and stiff. I’m between Lexi, who is whimpering, and Gerhardt, who keeps turning and tossing, sticking his icy feet into my back. Mama is beside Lexi and Papa is sleeping a row away, with Henry and Jakob. Everything is so terrible. Our life is ruined. Mama’s shoulders are heaving and I know she is crying, even though she’s not making a sound. There was a gap in the writing. A page of slashes, X s and wild scribbles. A crude drawing, so primitive and unlike Willy’s usual drawing, of a small stick figure holding a gun with ragged flames shooting out of it. The gun is pointing at three other stick figures wearing what look like fur hats. The figures had ghoulish faces with slit eyes and ugly, open mouths. A slumped blob of a figure lay at the bottom of the page. Lexi thought it might be a woman but couldn’t be sure. She studied the page for a moment, perplexed. On the back of the next page was scrawled in huge letters, BASTARDS, and on the next page the writing was almost indecipherable, tiny and cramped, with another huge X over it. Watermelon syrup horrible sticky everywhere and everything smashed. I was trying to tie my shoelaces. There was screaming and loud crashing. Chairs losing their backs. The table losing its legs. I hated the noise. Everything was so easily destroyed. At first I was angry at the broken things. And then at Makhno’s men. Swine. Bags of flour split and Makhno’s men peeing into it. Swine! Gerhardt and Jakob running to find help. Lexi and Henry were gone. Where were they? Hiding in the barn. They were hiding in the barn. I can’t get out. I can’t get out of the house! They are blocking the doorway. His filthy fur cuffs. His sword. I’m so afraid I’m peeing my pants. Hot piss down my legs. I’m tripping over my shoelaces, running to Mama.

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Mama pushed down and crying. Screaming. He was lifting her skirt with his rifle laughing saying terrible things in Russian. German meat, he said and spat. Spat at Mama with her head buried in the floor. Hiding her eyes when he ripped her dress open. Did I say something? Did I do anything? No, I stood there frozen. One of the other ones grabbed my arms so hard. Little motherfucker, he shouted. You greedy, rich people, he shouted. His eyes burned into me. I smelled his drink. He pushed me back, kicked me. I wanted to kick back but I couldn’t, I was pinned to the wall. I was useless. And Papa? Papa turned the other cheek, he did nothing. He was standing behind the door, hidden, and pretending not to see. Run away. Do nothing. This is our highest, noblest purpose—to not resist, to leave it in God’s hands. We don’t fight violence with violence. As Jesus said. Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you and use you. We must crawl out of the room like a dog. We must forgive. Let God bring us justice, but, but…even Jesus won’t forgive me for not helping Mama. I am a dog a disgusting dog. And Papa, too. Papa stood in the shadows, watching. He was there. Lexi closed the notebook with trembling hands. She stared at a crack in the table. Everything was broken. It had been broken for a long time. This table, this house, this family. Mama. Why had she not noticed before? Why had she never questioned Mama’s unhappiness, her silences? Why had she never questioned the unhappiness in the family, the lack of laughter? People didn’t come and sit around their table like in other families. Mama shut them out. She’d shut them all out. Lexi felt like she was going to heave her insides out. She curled into herself, doubled over with her hands pressing, pressing into her belly. And stared at the floor. Also broken. So much dirt between the cracks. So many stains. Her filthy body. She could smell herself. She was a stone. She was a writhing ball of snakes. No wonder Papa called her a liability. She was a useless person, too self-centred to notice how much her Mama hurt. Lexi couldn’t remember hiding in the barn with Henry. Or could she? Perhaps there was a faint shadow of something. The sweet, dusty smell of the barn. Sounds of shouting. Perhaps. She couldn’t remem-

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ber anything except the funeral, the wide-open pit with the dead inside, her Opa and Onkels and so many others, the limbs twisted and all wrong, and Mama’s cold, shaking hand. Lexi sat hunched over, arms crossed over her chest, rocking, until the kitchen was cold and she’d begun to shiver uncontrollably. She was frozen inside. A stone. An empty vessel. She slowly got up, put the notebook back into its drawer, threw a log into the stove and stumbled into the bedroom. Hildy stirred a little when she got into bed and then flung one arm over her. Lexi nestled her cheek into Hildy’s warm hair and felt her wet eyes closing.

seventeen “Lexi, will you help me finish my dolly’s skirt?” “What?” Hildy held out the skirt with its half-finished hem. “I’m stuck. My thread’s all used up.” Hildy had stitched to the very end of her thread so that the eye of the needle was only half an inch from the hem. Silly girl. When would she ever learn? She motioned for Hildy to sit beside her at the table. “We have to take out some of the stitches so that you have enough thread to finish off. Then you start again with a new thread.” “But I don’t want to take it out. It took so long…” Lexi had already unthreaded the needle and was ripping out the uneven stitches so fast that she was almost ripping the material. “Rethread the needle and I’ll show you, again, how to finish off.” Hildy began to unwind a long thread from the spool. “Long thread, lazy girl.” Hildy looked up, offended at the accusation. She immediately wished she hadn’t said it. Mama always said that. At the thought of her mother, her stomach tightened again. “You’re doing fine,” she said, softening her voice. Nausea was rising. Like the other night. Oh, God! Mama!

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For the last two days she’d thought of nothing else. Every time she had a moment to herself she saw her mother’s frail body, her legs, still thin even though they were swollen, the gnarled stomach and breasts. Had she missed seeing the scars Makhno’s men must have left on her mother? She imagined brass buttons cutting into her mother’s breasts, swords and rifles clanking on the floor, fetid breath stinking of alcohol. Stinking like the alcohol she poured into those crystal glasses at the Olivers’. Her mother. So beautiful. Breakable as crystal. Her mind wouldn’t stop jumping and twisting. Her thoughts were like snakes. She clutched her stomach as she watched Hildy. And another terrifying thought had come to her in the middle of last night. Had Makhno or one of his men made her pregnant? She remembered the midwife with her blonde hair tied back under a babushka, the baby howls from the bedroom when Mama gave birth to Maria in Hierschau. But that was three years later, when Lexi was six. During the drought and famine of 1922. So Mama couldn’t have gotten pregnant. Unless she’d lost the baby. Lexi had a sudden horrifying image of a misshapen monster squirming its way out of her mother’s body, something like a grotesque frog or lizard, and then of herself bashing it dead with a shovel. Hildy moistened the battered end of the thread and then stuck her tongue out as she concentrated on getting the thread through the tiny eye. She’d been two years younger than Hildy was now, only three when the Blumenort massacre happened. She’d heard that date over and over: September 8,1919. The day that Makhno and his Anarchists invaded Blumenort, rounded up eighteen men and shot them, including her Opa and two Onkels. Because they were prosperous. Because the Anarchists were angry with the prosperous. Why? They’d built their lives through hard work, not through hurting others. She remembered hearing horses’ hooves in the yard, Mama screaming at them to run, Henry almost pulling her arm off as they raced to hide in the barn. She didn’t remember seeing Papa. There was crashing in the house and men laughing. Henry, who was seven, putting his hands over her ears behind the haystack. And then, after what seemed like days but was only a couple of hours, Papa returned and brought her and Henry back into the house, hold-

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ing their hands and then dropping them while he wept. Her doll lay on the floor, covered in flour and watermelon syrup. But no one had ever said a word about how Makhno and his men had laid Mama on the ground. Papa knew. Papa saw. Surely he could have done something. “Can you help me, Lexi?” Hildy held up the doll’s skirt, needle and thread dangling. Lexi took the needle and showed Hildy how to weave the end of the thread under the hem, how to finish off with a couple of invisible, anchoring stitches. She snipped off the thread and pushed the skirt back at Hildy. “Now, thread your needle again and tie a knot. You can do the rest of the hem on your own.” Hildy looked up, obviously surprised by the hardness of Lexi’s voice. Lexi didn’t meet her glance but jumped up. “I have to check on Mama.” Her throat felt full of sand. When she opened the bedroom door, the harsh winter morning light made the quilted bedspread look as bleached and washed out as her mother’s face. Mama was breathing heavily and sighing, the corners of her mouth turned down in the expression she’d worn ever since they came to Canada. She’d worked every day from first light to bedtime, sewing winter coats, mending, washing, cooking, fixing the fence in the chicken coop, running everything with a joyless discipline. Her rare smiles seemed forced, almost false. Often she seemed to go away to some other silent world where no one else was allowed. She barely spoke for days. Lexi had thought she was homesick and would have gladly listened, but she refused to talk about Russia. Mama’s sadness made her think of how Eve had been expelled from the Garden, doomed to toil and pain. And the expulsion included all of them. She allowed no comfort. For herself or anyone else. Did she want to die? In Russia, Lexi had worshipped her beautiful mother, with her blonde hair pulled back, her soft pink cheeks, her dark eyes seeing into everything. Now, as she looked at her mother, wanting more than ever to love her, she raged for her mother’s pain but selfish thoughts came crowding in. A flash of Dr. Oliver. His warm hand, his fingers on her face. And then the hopelessness and sin of it.

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Mama stirred and moaned a little and Lexi gently pulled the blankets up. She bent over her and whispered, “Can I get you anything, Mama?” Her mother shook her head. Later, as she stood at the sink washing potatoes for supper, whisking away tears, she wished Willy were here. He always seemed to know things, to understand how people were feeling. He let them know with a glance or a touch on the shoulder. Willy was different from all of them. And now she realized that he did know things, that there was a reason he’d always been so protective of Mama, so ready to come to her defence even when she seemed cold or unfair. He’d been carrying this terrible vision all these years. Had he told anyone else? Did he even know that he’d left his notebook at home? She cut up the potatoes and put them in a pot with cold water, glanced over at the daybed where Hildy was happily playing checkers with her doll, then slipped the notebook out of the drawer. She flipped quickly past the X ’d-out pages, wondering why Willy hadn’t torn them out. October 16, 1925 We are on the Canadian Pacific Railway, heading west. Thirdclass coaches. Hard seats covered with oilcloth. They fold down at night to make beds. The food is terrible. Nothing but grey-coated salami and mushy white bread that tastes nothing like Mama’s. Reverend Unruh is still with us and he still makes horrible coffee on the little stove at the end of the car. A bunch of our group got off in Southern Ontario to go to Kitchener or Waterloo, where there are a lot of Amish who are willing to sponsor immigrants. Mama and Papa discussed for hours whether we should go there too, since we have our friends Gertie and Rudolf Peters there, but in the end they decided that we might have a better chance farther on. It sounded very crowded in Waterloo. But when we came to the long stretch north of the Great Lake Superior, everyone in the train got quieter and quieter. There is NOTHING here. Nothing but rocks, forests, swamps and sometimes a small hut. What an idiot Papa is! We have once again made the wrong decision. Lexi put the notebook down, stood up and stared out the kitchen window at the endless blowing white prairie and the sullen grey sky.

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If only they’d known. Tante Gertie’s solid red brick house would have been a haven of warmth and comfort after Russia. Papa could have taught in one of the Mennonite Bible Schools in Waterloo. They would have had trees and a real garden. Lexi sat back down with the notebook. She had to keep reading. She wanted to finish it quickly. Get it over with. Even touching the notebook made her queasy, but she couldn’t leave any of it unread. So much had been kept from her; what if there were more secrets? There is already snow in Manitoba and last night, after some of our people got off the train at a small village, we saw threshing crews working by lantern light. They were burning a straw stack and the machine was blowing more straw into the fire. The sparks were lighting up the sky like fireworks. And the stooks were standing there, covered with snow. We couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been harvested. Mama and Papa were looking at each other with that look of dumb amazement that we immigrants seem to have all the time now. I was thinking the same thing. How can we farm this land when there is so much snow all year round? I didn’t believe them on the boat when they said we were going to be close to the North Pole, but it must be true. And the worst part is that Papa isn’t even a real farmer and he’s promised to be one. They said they had no use for teachers and now I see why; there’s no one in this God-forsaken place to teach. Lexi closed the book. There were a few more pages, but she couldn’t read about the rest of the journey right now. She looked around the small kitchen with its log walls, sloping floor and wood stove. The house had originally been a log cabin, and Papa had had it moved to this spot just outside of Millheim before he and Henry Goerz added the lean-to kitchen. They covered the log walls with white clapboard so that the wind didn’t whistle quite so loudly through the chinks, and somehow they made do. So different from their large, prosperous house in Russia. How awful it must have been for Mama to come here with her terrible secret. She remembered Gerhardt’s angry whispers to Willy when Mama was pregnant with Hildy, just before he left. “Enough!” he’d said, glancing at Mama’s protruding belly. “Can’t she stop having children?”

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And she’d been angry too. She’d blamed her mother. Two more mouths to feed, more work for her as well as her mother. If Mama hadn’t had Renate and Hildy, she could have gone on in school. She glanced at Hildy, sitting in the corner with her doll. How could she think such sinful things? But maybe Renate and Hildy had been a comfort for her mother, a new start, though she hadn’t shown them any more affection than she’d shown Lexi or her brothers. In a fit of impatience she shoved the yellow notebook back under the cutlery tray, jammed more logs into the stove which was already roaring, then pumped the large kettle full of water and put it on the stove. First she’d mix the yeast for tomorrow morning’s bread, then pluck and cut up the scrawny chicken Papa had killed this morning, reducing their small flock to only nine laying hens. And while the chicken was cooking, she’d have to bring in more snow to melt for tomorrow’s washing. She hated bringing in snow. Hildy could help her fill the buckets, then. “After supper, will you play checkers with me?” asked Hildy as they got their winter coats on to go out to get the snow. She wanted to yell, “No, I’m sick and tired of stupid checkers,” but instead, having vowed that she would no longer be like her mother, said, “Ja, Liebchen. But I’ll win.” “No, you won’t. You’ll let me win. Maria always does.” “We’ll see about that. Aren’t you getting good enough to beat me on your own? Hildy giggled and whispered something to her doll.

eighteen The real world disappeared in the depths of February. Outside, the snow was like the sea, white foam crashing endlessly off their cabin, keeping Lexi off balance and disoriented for days at a time. The temperature was dropping daily. Her boots on the snow were like squeaky

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mice. Trips to the outhouse were Arctic expeditions. Papa, Maria and Renate, bundled up with every scarf and mitten they could find, went off each day into the brittle stillness where breath hung like gossamer, and returned in the afternoon dusk to hold their trembling blue fingers over the stove. Lexi and Hildy were prisoners. Once, at Lexi’s suggestion, they went for a walk after the others were home, but it was so cold that they returned to the house after only a few minutes. Lexi taught herself to bathe Mama, to make the right consistency of floury vegetable soup to warm her, to comb her hair without invoking too much irritation. “Ach, Lexi,” her mother sighed. “Why does He make me wait so long to go home?” “You want to get well, Mama, no?” Mama turned her head slowly and looked out the small window near her bed. “I have had enough, ja?” Lexi felt sick inside, but she nodded. Now that she’d read the notebook she understood. “Ja,” Mama said again, and closed her translucent eyelids. In the evenings, Papa gathered the sisters to sit by Mama’s bed and sing hymns, but mostly he read the Bible or devotional books, hunched in the chair beside Mama’s bed or prayed with his head in his hands. Once or twice a week, if he could make it, exhausted Dr. Douglas dropped in to check on Mama’s condition. He took her temperature, laid his hand on her head and listened to her heart. The whole house went perfectly still when he performed these things. The house was so silent they could hear the frozen crystals of snow ticking against the windows. They could hear the wind running across the frozen grasses and flatlands of snow. And they could hear Mama’s difficult, watery breathing. She sounded like she’d been running for days, like Willy and Gerhardt had run from Hierschau to Blumenort, and she could go no further. Her chest seemed ready to burst. Mama closed up even more when Dr. Douglas was there, even though he’d delivered both Renate and Hildy. She seemed ashamed of

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being sick and turned her head away, refusing to speak unless absolutely necessary. Dr. Douglas would sigh and make sure there was still medicine in the brown bottle. Papa offered to pay and the doctor waved his money away with a flick of his hand. The doctor knew there was nothing to spare, and Papa said nothing and bowed his head in thanks. Lexi was irritated by such submissive behaviour. Lexi hovered nearby, wishing that he were Dr. Oliver instead of this tired old man. She wanted desperately to ask him questions. Once or twice, when she tried to get him to say more about her Mama’s heart condition, he looked at her as if she were a child. “Her heart will only mend if she gets complete rest,” he said. “You must pray for your mother’s recovery. And cook lots of soft food. Are you doing that?” She nodded. Dr. Douglas gave her a curt nod back and went to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. She agonized every time he left. If only Dr. Oliver were here. He would know what to do. He would heal Mama. And he would teach her what to do, how to be a real nurse. She should write him, she should list all her symptoms and tell him what she’s doing for them, and ask if she could be doing something more, something different. She’d already written short letters to Jakob and Gerhardt and told them of Mama’s condition. But to Willy she’d written a longer one: Dear Willy, I can hardly believe I’ve been home for almost six weeks now. Mama is horribly sick and even though I do everything I can think of to help her get well, she doesn’t seem to be improving much. She has good days when she almost sits up and even tries to read, but those are becoming fewer and fewer. Her legs are still swollen and Dr. Douglas has visited twice this week and brought more medicine for her heart. But it doesn’t seem to be helping. I wish you were here. But I don’t suppose that you can get away from your studies. Papa said you are now beginning to do some teaching as well. Please write soon. I’m so lonely here. I miss Waterloo but I can’t say that to anyone. It sounds so disloyal. I loved Waterloo. The Olivers were kind to me and I liked having my own bedroom and bathroom. The work wasn’t nearly as hard as here. And I met so

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She’d sent that letter weeks ago. She was getting impatient for an answer. Lexi huddled by the stove with the notebook during the afternoon when Mama was sleeping. Hildy whined that she was getting sick of Lexi reading all the time. Lexi promised her a treat if she played quietly with her doll until the girls got home from school. Hildy yanked off her doll’s dress and spanked her. Lexi went back to the notebook. October 20, 1925 Well, here we are. We thought this was to be our home but now we find out we still have one more day to go on a freight train to Millheim. Right now we are in Rosthern, Saskatchewan. Who can pronounce these names? But that is nothing compared to what we have come to in this lonely place at the end of the earth. There is nothing here. Back home we had everything, we had so much. But Papa made us run. He says we should be grateful for this chance to live so far away from worldly temptations. He says we must have humility. He says it is God’s will, God’s will, God’s will that we lost everything. God is testing us to see if we have the strength to rebuild our lives. Perhaps I am too weak. All I want to do is cry. There are only thirty of us left on the train from the nine hundred who started out in Quebec City. Mr. Toews from the Mennonite Conference Church was at the station to meet us. His family came in the 1870 s and he was born here. Papa says they came with nothing, just like us, and made a wonderful life for themselves here, farming.

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The Toews are rich now. Just after supper a bell sounded out of nowhere and then one of the Toews girls went to a box on the wall and took a kind of horn off a hook, held it to her ear, and started to speak into a tube that stuck out of the box. She would stop for a while and then say something more and even laugh into it. We guessed it was a telephone. We’d heard of them on the boat. At dinner Papa made a big mistake. He told the Toews that we belong to the Mennonite Brethren Church. He started to tell the story of our conversion from the Bergthaler Gemeinde when Reverand Hofer, from America, came over to our small villages in Russia. Many in our villages were rebaptized and joined his movement. There was a sudden silence at the table and it seemed as if a cold wind blew over us. Papa stopped telling the story and hung his head. Mama was trying not to cry. We could have remained in Rosthern, but now they don’t know where to put us. Mr Toews said that if we insisted on being with the Brethren Church, we’d better move on to Millheim. Papa told us later that rebaptism insulted the people of the Mennonite Conference Church because it delegitimized their faith. October 22, 1925 Yesterday we took the train from Rosthern to Hepburn. At Hepburn the Unruhs got out. Reverend Unruh has apparently already been asked to be the minister of a church there. How does he do it when Papa seems so lost? There were a lot of people at the train station, some to meet the Unruhs, but others, not Mennonites, just staring. It seemed so strange. But then we heard that they were there to see us, the Russians. We must have looked like a ragtag bunch in our layers of filthy clothes. We haven’t been able to wash anything since we were deloused in Quebec City. We had to change trains before we got to Millheim and that last train ride was the worst of all our travels. Yes, Lexi remembered that awful train ride. She’d begged to sit on her Mama’s knee, but of course she’d been too old for that. She remembered being afraid of the land all around them, wide open and empty. There were no leaves on the few trees that were there. She

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remembered thinking that when the snow came and covered everything it would be like living on a cold blank sheet of paper. The train had three freight cars and a passenger and mail coach so we were able to sit, but the track was in terrible condition. The train swayed so badly that we were afraid it was going off the tracks. Mama clutched Maria the whole time and Lexi and I held on to the back of the seat. I can still see her white face. When we finally got to Millheim we were met by Mr. Henry Goerz. He had on big blue overalls, wide suspenders, a heavy sweater that was open and hanging almost to his knees, and a Russian fur hat. He also had a long black beard. Lexi and Maria clung to Mama when they saw him. Lexi smiled. Henry Goerz had looked like a monster and turned out to be an angel. He’d supplied them with firewood and groceries for a whole year while Papa was laid up with his bad back after failing at farming and then trying to work on the railway. And he’d helped them to find this house and to move it to where it now stood. She’d grown to love Henry Goerz. He died a year ago. Henry Goerz’s first words to us were, “Take the axe and chop wood.” Papa just stared at him. Then he herded us all into his truck and brought us here, a house he owns but doesn’t live in. It’s out in a field about five miles from Millheim and we’re sharing it with the Peter Wiebe family and another boarder, Dan Boschman. The Wiebes are seven and we are eight and Dan makes sixteen. Mama says we have to remember the old proverb “Necessity breaks iron.” Willy’s writing had fallen off more and more after they’d gotten to Canada. Gerhardt had been merciless in his teasing and neither of their parents had stopped him. Lexi wished she’d had the courage to stand up to Gerhardt. He was always a bully. But maybe her parents suspected that Willy wasn’t just writing out Bible verses. When Lexi began writing her own journal a few years ago, Mama was angry with her, perhaps suspecting that she, like Willy, was breaking the unspoken law: think and write only what the Mennonite church allows.

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December 24, 1925 Tonight Gerhardt, Jakob and I cut down a Christmas tree. Mr. Goerz has allowed the families living on his farm to have one for free, and since Papa works on the farm, he’d already seen one. There are so few evergreens that we doubted that he’d actually found one until we came up to it at the edge of a frozen slough. Gerhardt and I were supposed to take turns chopping it down, but Gerhardt whacked it so hard with the first couple of chops that it fell over in a minute. It’s not very big. Gerhardt always hits everything as hard as he can. On the way home the wind had dropped and the stars were all out and a huge moon. All we could hear were the horse’s feet crunching on the snow, the smooth shush of the runners and the jingling harnesses. I wanted to write a poem about the vastness of the prairie sky and the stars, but nothing came. Here in Canada I feel cold all the time. And it’s as if my brain has frozen too. When I think of all the poems I wrote in Russia. But what can I do? Nothing comes. Only the miseries. If I complain, Papa says Russia was this cold. I say nothing, but I want to say that in Russia we had a real home, we had our own home and it had such warmth. Is this sky any different from the one I stared into when we were leaving Russia? I can hear the others singing as they put the candles on the tree. The Wiebes are always singing hymns and carols out of the Dreiband, just like in Russia. I get sick of their jolly ways, all the talk of God’s goodness. They say that our family is too serious, that all we do is read. And, of course, I’m the one reciting a twenty-verse poem in the Christmas pageant. None of the Wiebes could manage even two verses. Except for Anna. Everyone had known Willy had a big crush on Anna Wiebe. Anna had a “voice” and wanted to be a singer, but now Anna was working in Saskatoon as a maid. Anna was never shy. Maybe she and Willy were writing to each other. Maybe they were even courting. A thought of Dr. Oliver stole into her mind and she looked up from the notebook, her heart suddenly pounding. She saw him walking down King Street towards her, so dapper and upright. She imagined him smiling at her in the kitchen, digging into her upside-down peach cake.

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January 1,1926 I have decided to start the New Year with a few resolutions. First of all, I will work so hard at English that I know it completely by the end of this school year. Secondly, I will try to write poems again, or, if not poems, at least some stories of real adventure. I must write to my old teacher in Russia and let him know what has happened since we left Hierschau. Perhaps he can give me some new ideas of things to write about. No one here cares. I mentioned to Miss Vogt that I wanted to write and she just smiled her weak smile and said that I would have to learn how to earn money first. All I hear from everyone is that we must be practical. In this outpost all we can worry about is how to live from day to day. Papa and Mama are constantly talking about how we are completely dependent on the charity of Henry Goerz, who owns this house. They are ashamed. There is some talk of Papa working on the railway, but he will be bad at that. And the idea of buying a farm is also stupid, even though that is what we promised the immigration board. Most of the other farmers are going under because of the drought. And I overheard Papa saying to Mama that he has only forty-five dollars. He’s not a farmer. He’s never done anything but teach. He should take over the school here. If only he had more English. The Canadian School Board is stupid to require everything to be in English when we all speak German. Why doesn’t Papa try harder? Why doesn’t he speak to an official about becoming a teacher? Why doesn’t he take lessons in English? He’s a good teacher. He’ll never be a farmer with his skinny, shortsighted Penner body. “Why doesn’t Papa try harder?” Those words made Lexi’s heart race again. They sat deep in her throat and wanted to come spewing out. Miss Vogt tries to be nice, but she’s a terrible teacher. I think she’s badly educated. She looked blank when I mentioned Goethe the other day. She will answer only in English, since her German is so bad. The only thing that makes me hopeful is that I know that one day I will escape all of this. I must learn English as fast as possible. I’ve suggested to Anna that we practise together, since she’s been here a year longer than we have and her English is quite good. She said she

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would meet me in the pantry after school when she’s finished her chores. When I think of Anna, I want to write poetry. Eyes of dark wood, hair of gold, Voice of the angels old— What a load of manure. I can’t do it. There was a gap of a page in the notebook and then one more entry. The handwriting had changed. September 25, 1928 Exactly three years ago today since we left Russia. There are only a couple of pages left in this old notebook and I might as well end the story. I decided that I couldn’t be a writer after all. Gerhardt and I had to work every day after school and every Saturday when Papa got sick and there was no time. And no privacy. This poor little book has been under my mattress the whole time. But now that I’m going to Bible School in Kansas—Tabor College, it’s called, in Hillsboro—I’m feeling the bug again. The Heinz Penners, cousins of Papa’s who live in Kansas, have already agreed to pay my tuition. I’m reminded every day by Papa and Mama about how grateful I should be. I won’t be writing this personal drivel, but a big book of some kind. And not a theological book either, although that would please Papa. I want to write about larger events, maybe the Revolution. We’ve all managed. Papa has been teaching at the Bible School in Millheim, having spent almost a whole year in bed after he hurt his back working on the railway during the first year. Yes, Lexi could remember the celebration when he got that job. He had worked first as a farmhand and then as a labourer on the railway, but it was such hard work and he wasn’t strong enough. Then they bought a 480-acre farm in 1926. It left them with only forty-five dollars. And then the farm failed within a couple of years and left them in debt. What finally cured him was the “snapper.” I was completely skeptical. A visiting Mennonite from Hepburn told Mama about this treatment and sent us the special oil for which he charged her five dollars. Since we couldn’t afford to buy the snapper, Mama had to make it

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herself by pushing as many needles as she could find into a cork stopper. Then she rolled it over and over on Papa’s back and thighs until she said he looked like a pin cushion. I heard him yell out a few times, so it must have hurt. She applied the oil and we all waited. After a few days the needle pricks became inflamed and began to ulcerate. Papa was miserable and groaning and Mama ran in and out of the bedroom, swabbing up the pus that was oozing from his back, afraid he was going to die. But the snapper worked. The pussing stopped, his back healed and the pain went away. Perhaps Papa got better so that he would never have to endure such an indignity again. We had a sister, Renate, born to us last winter and Mama is once again pregnant. This is getting ridiculous. We have no money and no room for another one. Gerhardt and I have been breaking our backs for Henry Goerz for the past two years and still the little that we bring in isn’t enough. Luckily, I am leaving home. Thank God, Lexi is now old enough to help Mama. She’s twelve, going on thirteen, and Papa says that she will quit school after grade eight to stay home and help Mama with the babies. And God knows, Mama can use all the help she can get. She’s looking so old. Grey already. Papa wants to marry Lexi to a well-off farmer in the district so that she can still help Mama when she needs it. Poor Lexi. She’s smart as a whip and wants badly to go to high school. And very pretty. But after all, she’s only a girl. Only a girl! The words stung in a way they never had before. She had understood them coming from Papa. Papa saw her only as a maid or a liability. But from Willy! Worst of all, these were the last words in his journal! And of course the “rich farmer” was Heinrich Willms. Twice her age. Over forty. Fat with a grimy long beard and always grinning stupidly, showing his missing front tooth. Papa reminded her often that Heinrich never missed a single church service. But Lexi was disgusted. Surely even Papa couldn’t imagine that she could be happy with Heinrich Willms. She’d be left in the middle of nowhere, milking cows, feeding chickens, baking and washing endlessly, having baby after baby, wearing out like Mama. Only a girl! How could he say that! He was no better than Papa and the rest of Mennonite men. A Mennonite man would never teach

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her how to drive and then give her her own key. A Mennonite man would never ask her opinion like Dr. Oliver did about his patients. The thought of Dr. Oliver was a balm. She saw him in his brown corduroy pants, his tweed jacket and cap, sitting beside her in the car. So good-looking in his round, well-fed way, his hand on hers as she shifted gears, clean and soft. “Lexi?” She jumped up as if from a dream and ran into the bedroom. “Ja, Mama?” Her Mama’s eyes were half open and she looked around drowsily, then focused on Lexi’s hands. “Lexi, what are you doing?” “Nothing, Mama, just…” Her heart stopped. She’d brought the notebook into the bedroom with her. She was still holding it in her hand, open. It was too late to hide it behind her back. Mama stared at the notebook. Lexi stood suspended in the medicinal air, barely breathing. “I…” “Aleksandra…” Mama motioned to the chair beside the bed. Lexi moved to the chair and sat very straight, the notebook closed on her lap, her hands folded on top. Like in school, waiting to be reprimanded. Goosebumps jumped up under her woollen blouse, blood pulsed in her fingertips. “You have read Willy’s book?” She nodded. “Ja.” Mama struggled to pull herself higher on the pillow, her cheeks now a strange bright red, as if someone had blotched them with rouge. “I found that…,” she pointed at the notebook, “under Willy’s mattress.” Her voice was angry. “You…found it?” “Ja, I found it.” “But…did Willy know…did he leave it…?” “I don’t know if he left it for me to find. I never asked him.” “Oh…” “And after I read it…” Mama grimaced. “I told Willy. I told him that I’d read every word he’d written.” Her eyes shot away from Lexi’s to the pale blue snowiness outside

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the window. It was almost four-thirty in the afternoon. The girls and Papa would be getting home from school soon. “I wanted to burn it. And I told Willy so.” Mama’s eyes flashed back to Lexi’s with their old defiance. “I had a right.” Lexi nodded. “I never spoke of it. Even to Papa. He doesn’t know about that.” She glanced at the notebook. “I never could speak of those things. And neither could Papa. But now…that I…” She took a deep, wheezing breath and rested her head back on the pillow. The room filled with a terrible silence. After a long moment, Mama said in a low voice, “I told Papa that Makhno and his men hit me and knocked me over, that the blood on the floor was from a cut on my leg.” Mama’s whole body was trembling. Lexi couldn’t take her eyes off her Mama’s mouth. It looked dry, as if it were working hard to form each word. “I stood there and lied as the blood ran down my legs.” Mama’s hands clenched into fists. “Of course, Papa knew but I didn’t know that until I read Willy’s words. I didn’t see Papa there. How could I not have seen him? Everyone knew, Lexi. Makhno bragged all over the district about what he did to women…” There was a strange cry, like a groaning howl. Was it her or Mama? Her Mama’s twisted face was white as if every ounce of life had been wrung out of it. She dropped her head, jerked it up again, her dark eyes burning in her chalky face. “We could do nothing. The Anarchists could do…that…in front of my own son and no one, not one single Mennonite, would say or do anything. Not even Papa. We couldn’t speak of it. Other women wouldn’t speak of it either.” Lexi could imagine Papa standing in front of Makhno, bowing his head, turning the other cheek. Something vile was rising in her throat. Her chest was seizing. She tried to take one of Mama’s hands but her fingers were grabbing at the top of the blanket and pulling, as if to yank it up from the bottom of the bed. “I wanted to burn that notebook. To destroy that writing. Ach, so much writing. I walked to the stove with it many times. But I couldn’t. I wanted someone besides Willy…how could a mother talk

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about these things to her son? How could I, Lexi? I needed so much to…ach, Gott.” Mama moaned again and put her hands over her eyes. Lexi wanted to put her arms around her mother but was afraid to. Mama was now shivering violently, and Lexi wanted to take her hand. But Mama’s hands disappeared suddenly under the blankets. She tucked in the quilt tightly to try to warm her, and when she felt Mama’s arm underneath she gripped it. “God deserted me in that hour, Lexi. I never knew for what reason. Why was I chosen for such suffering?” Her eyes were dry and red. She jerked her arm under the blanket away from Lexi’s hand. “What was I being punished for?” Mama looked up at her, she seemed to be waiting for an answer. Lexi tried to speak, she opened her mouth, but Mama shook her head. “There are no answers for these things, meine Lexi.” She closed her eyes and nodded to herself. “For years after we left Russia I wanted to die. But that, too, is a sin.” Mama glared at her. “We are not allowed to want to take away the life God gave us. But I couldn’t stop thinking of it. I couldn’t forgive them. I wanted to die.” “Oh, Mama…” “And I couldn’t talk about what happened, even with Papa. I don’t know why he kept wanting to touch me.” Mama glanced out the window and seemed to want to slip away again. “I couldn’t speak of it. It made me want to die and still I couldn’t speak of it. I was taught we could never speak of such things.” Something was pulling apart the muscles in Lexi’s chest, making it difficult to breathe, making it difficult to move her arms. “God tested me again and again. I went on submitting to Papa. The obedience of the wife, Lexi. I submitted even though I never again wanted to. I thank God I didn’t get pregnant that day. I would have killed myself.” A jolt shot through Lexi. Mama lying dead with a knife in her hand. “I committed the sin of not wanting to have my own children. I didn’t want Maria, Renate and Hildy.” Mama stared at her almost wildly. “After Makhno, I couldn’t feel…I couldn’t feel love anymore.”

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She sobbed, a harsh, unearthly cry. Her shoulders slumped back into the pillow and her body convulsed in wave after wave of such raw pain that Lexi could barely look at the writhing mouth, at the clawlike hands grasping hair and blankets. Each cry was a sledgehammer flung at her heart. She slipped to her knees, watched helplessly, her own hands pawing at the bedspread, tears falling down her cheeks. Finally, she reached again for her Mama’s hand. This time she let her hold it, let her smooth it between her fingers, as if she were polishing it, shaping it into marble, into stillness. “I tried, Lexi, to choose life, I tried to make myself want to live. The future seemed so dark then. Early in 1923 we heard that an American evangelist, a Reverend Hofer, from the Mennonite Brethren Church, was coming to preach. He came to a nearby village and my cousin and I walked over for the evening service. His message was very serious.” Mama paused and tried to slow her breath. Lexi could see her heart racing in her thin neck. Her chest heaved. “It’s all right, Mama,” Lexi said, squeezing her hand. Mama shook her head, tried lifting it from the pillow. There was such defiance in her, such a strong spirit. Why had she never seen that before? Why had she never really paid attention to her Mama before? She’d always just been—what? The person who took care of her, of all of them. She never seemed to be anyone in particular. “I could feel something move in my heart, Lexi, it gave me such hope that I could be released from all my torture, from my sins. And I walked forward and made a commitment. But I did not seem to get full assurance. I cannot tell you how painful that was, to want to be released from my pain and not get it. Many people, young and old, were born again in those days. So many of us were looking for saving. How innocent we all were.” She held Mama’s hand for what seemed like a very long while, lost in a white place where there was no past and no future, only Mama’s hand. Then she heard the back door opening and the girls’ voices. “Mama?” Mama gripped her hand more tightly but didn’t open her eyes. Her clogged voice was barely audible. “I want you, Lexi, mein Kind, to…” Lexi leaned close to her Mama’s face, pushed back a strand of wet hair and kissed her cheek. “Ja, Mama. What?”

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“I want you to understand. To have a different life. Try to erase… bitterness. Ja?” Lexi nodded. “I was glad when Gertie wrote to ask you to go to work out there, Lexi. I know life is easier out there. And Gertie is a good person.” Mama hesitated. She was talking too much. She was breathless. “She has a good life out there, Lexi, and I want you to…” Mama glanced at the floor where the notebook had fallen and Lexi picked it up. Mama motioned for the book, opened a page, seemed to read and then let the notebook fall on the bed. “Ach, too much.” After a moment she handed it back to Lexi. “Tell Willy. Tell Willy that, after all, I didn’t burn it.” Her eyes closed again and her face collapsed into sleep. Lexi stood up to go to the girls and carefully, gently, tucked her Mama’s loose hair back behind her ears. “You and Willy are my witnesses,” Mama whispered. Lexi pulled the blankets up around her, tears sprouting again, and kissed her Mama’s cheek. Her eyes widened for a moment —she seemed to be trying to see deeply into some far-off place—and then closed. Renate and Hildy were laughing and pushing each other when Lexi came into the kitchen. Renate was trying to grab Hildy’s doll and Hildy was giggling and clutching it, pretending to be mad as Renate tickled her. Maria was unloading her school bag, noisily slapping her books down on the table. Lexi could see Papa shovelling snow away from the back door through its little window. “Shush! Mama’s just fallen asleep,” she said in a harsh whisper. She was trembling and there was something hard in the back of her throat. “Oh.” Their faces fell. Hildy and Renate sat down on the daybed. Lexi stared at her sisters. Her mouth was beginning to crumble again. She turned away from them and flicked a last tear away, the notebook in her hand. The back door opened and Papa came thumping in, brushing snow off his cap and shoulders. She pretended, still in a daze, to busy herself with choosing some potatoes from the basket beside the kitchen sink, and slipped the notebook back into the cutlery drawer.

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“She has had a good day?” Papa asked, rubbing his hands over the stove. Lexi turned and looked at Papa and in that moment felt a cold clarity, all her old fear of him shrivelling to something no bigger than a cherry stone. She stared at him. He was a coward, hiding under his cold piety. He had hurt Mama as much as Makhno had by not helping her, by pretending that nothing had happened. “Ja. She was able to talk for a while this afternoon. She was better. Almost herself. But she’s very tired now. She needs to sleep. We all need to be quiet.” She looked at him with the same stern look that he always gave her. “Of course we need to be quiet,” he said harshly. He turned to get his Bible from the shelf. “A letter for you,” he said, taking a blue folded envelope from his pocket and thrusting it at her. She looked at the American stamp and Willy’s beautiful handwriting and stared back at him. She would refuse to read it to him if he asked. “Thank you,” she mumbled and shoved the letter in her pocket. Papa took down his Bible and moved towards the bedroom, glancing back at her once. The moment the bedroom door closed, she ripped open the envelope. Dear Lexi, You cannot imagine the shock I received reading your last letter! I had no idea Mama was so ill. And, even worse, I had no idea that you could even think of deserting her and the family. This is your place, Lexi. Has Waterloo made you forget that you are still a Mennonite woman, that your duty is to serve God and Papa?

Her heart was pounding again and she felt almost dizzy. She stopped reading, and looked up. Maria was watching her. Hildy and Renate were sitting subdued, sulking on the daybed, Hildy pulling at the doll’s string hair. “From Willy?” asked Maria. Lexi nodded and began to fold the letter. Unable to think, she deliberately put the letter into her apron pocket. She’d read the rest later. She heard the ticking of the clock, the rustling of a page of one of Maria’s schoolbooks, a sigh from Renate. She thought of Mama’s wild eyes.

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nineteen She sat on the chair with no back that served as a catch-all in the girls’ bedroom and stared out of their one small window. Snowbanks shimmered in the moonlight. Willy’s letter lay in her lap. The milky-musty smells and quiet breathing of her sleeping sisters enveloped her as she huddled in the knitted wool blanket she’d draped around her shoulders. She imagined Willy sleeping somewhere too, waking up in a cold sweat from a nightmare. He’d mentioned nightmares in his letter. And Dr. Oliver and Cammy sleeping in their big bedroom in Waterloo, the carpet no doubt strewn with Cammy’s silk underwear, Dr. Oliver’s boxer shorts and shirt neatly folded on the lid of the wicker laundry basket. She tried to remember the smell of his Old Spice, to make the memory of it surround her like the fragrance of spring lilacs. It was as if she alone were awake in the world, as if she now knew too much to ever fall asleep again. She longed for her little room in Waterloo. The same moon would be shining in its window. There she’d been able to think, even to weep if she wanted to. This evening, just before supper, Papa had come out of the bedroom, his face drawn into a deep frown. He said nothing as the four girls went back and forth between the stove and the table, getting the supper laid out. She’d put everything that Mama had said to her in the afternoon away in the drawer, with the notebook. A line from the Bible had come to her as she slid the drawer closed: And Mary put these things away in her heart and pondered them. And there was a new feeling. She felt more grown up, Mama’s confidante, and yet, at the same time, she thought with surprise and a stab of pain, lonelier than ever. When they sat down to supper Papa’s face was stretched and pale, although his eyes, before he closed them for prayer, seemed to burn through them all. The sorrows of death compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried out to my God: He heard my voice and out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even unto his ears. Then the earth shook and trembled.… Papa’s voice broke.

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“We must be ready for the end,” he said, looking up. There was a moment of silence as the girls stared at him. “But we talked this afternoon,” Lexi said. “She…” “She is fast going from us,” said Papa, lifting his fork and putting it down again. “Is Mama going to die now?” asked Hildy, her mouth quivering. “Ja. Soon she is going home to God,” said Papa. Lexi couldn’t swallow. “I want to see her!” Hildy had almost wiggled out of her chair. Papa stood up and caught her by the arm and sat her down again. “Not yet, Hildy. We will all go in after supper.” “But what if she goes home to God before we’re finished?” Hildy wailed. Lexi looked at the white faces of Renate and Maria. Their eyes were wide and still staring at Papa. She knew her face was not like theirs. Hers was flaming. “How do you know?” Lexi asked, trying to stop her voice from rising into a shout. “Maybe she’s just very tired. She talked a lot this afternoon. She told me…” “Only God knows for sure.” Papa interrupted. “But Mama is ready now. Ready to go home to God.” His voice caught in a sob and Hildy, Renate and Maria looked at him in wonder. Lexi’s heart was thumping wildly. She was like an animal trapped in a burning barn. Ready to go home to God! If he only knew how Mama felt that God had deserted her. “Ja, soon,” he whispered, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. “Her pulse is almost gone and she can barely breathe.” He shuddered, got up and stood by his chair as if there were somewhere he had to go, then sat down again. “No!” Maria almost shouted it. Everyone turned to look at her. Quiet Maria who said little but saw everything. “No! I don’t want Mama to die.” “Hush! You’ll wake her. We must surrender to God’s will, Maria.” Papa’s voice was still shaking. “I don’t care about God’s will!” “Maria!” said Renate, “God is the boss.”

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“Enough!” hissed Papa, suddenly himself again. “You will not say such things.” He glanced at Lexi as if it were all her fault, as if she had caused this blaspheming. “Eat your suppers.” Their forks scraped the plates but none of them managed more than a few mouthfuls. Maria had a scowl on her face, as if she could kill the world, and the two younger girls made no effort to hold back their tears. Lexi sat stunned and disbelieving. Mama could not die now. She had been planning to write to Dr. Oliver for help. Why had she not written sooner? What was wrong with her? “I can’t eat any more,” sobbed Hildy, pushing her almost full plate to one side. “Me either,” said Renate. Papa put down his fork too and said, “All right. We will talk to Mama now. You will finish eating later.” All of them got up and hovered outside their Mama’s bedroom door until Papa opened it. They entered in single file and arranged themselves around the bed. Lexi had a sudden memory of a bereaved family filing down the aisle of the church, all of them looking numb, even though everyone else was singing about the joy of the dead one going home to God. Mama was lying with her eyes closed. Her face was grey and her cheeks seemed even more sunken. Every few minutes she seemed to stop breathing and then she took a quick gasping breath, as if she had to quickly replenish her empty lungs. Papa leaned over her and gently pushed a few stray hairs back from her cheek. “Katya,” he said softly. The girls looked at each other; he never called her by her name. “Ja.” Her hands grasped the top of the blanket as if she were using it to steady herself. “I’m coming.” “The girls, Katya. They’re here. You wanted them to come in.” “Ja.” She opened her eyes and tried to smile. Her eyes seemed to be seeing something very far away. “I am going home soon,” she said. She stretched out her hands. “Hildy, Renate, come.” The two small girls crowded up to Mama’s side and each took a hand. Hildy tried to lay her cheek against her Mama’s. “Mama?” she whimpered.

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“Try not to cry, mein Liebchen. I’m going to a place of no pain. I’m going home to God.” “But Mama,” wailed Renate. “You mustn’t cry,” said their mother. “Du musst nicht.” Lexi took Maria’s hand and held it very tightly. “Maria, Aleksandra, come.” The two older girls moved closer to the bed. Maria suddenly sobbed one horrible, harsh sob and gulped as if the sound had shocked her. Mama gazed at her and then looked around the bed, suddenly seeming to see all of them clearly. “Tell the boys,” she said, “that I— that God has blessed me with you. My children.” Mama’s eyes were once again wavering. “You have been good children. Aleksandra?” Lexi pushed in closer but then suddenly held back. She didn’t know how to touch her Mama now. She stood, not knowing what to say. Then she heard a high gasping sound and realized that it was coming from her. She pushed in between Renate and Maria, took Mama’s hand from them. “Mama, you can’t go now. We love you. You’re going to get better. You have to fight.” “No, Lexi, it’s my time. God wants me.” “No. You can’t.” Papa started to sing in a low voice and the girls knew that they must join in. It was the same hymn that they’d sung in the railway station in Lichtenau, leaving Russia. So nimm denn meine Hände. Take Thou my hand, O Father, and lead Thou me. They all knew it by heart, the song of leave-taking, sung by Mennonites leaving for a new land. The migration song. Lexi heard her sisters’ voices as if they were coming from some far-off place; her own was barely audible. Mama had closed her eyes and seemed to be listening intently. Lexi dropped Mama’s hand and slowly crept backwards from the bed, inching towards the door. She had to get out of this bedroom, away from this quietly suffocating hymn, away from this thing that wanted to scream out of her, to fill the room with ragged red gashes or blinding white light or ugly belches of sorrow. When they had finished three verses, Papa signalled that they were to leave the room and the girls filed out, not daring to touch their Mama. Instead they touched her quilt, and Lexi felt nausea ris-

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ing. She refused to touch it as if her touch could kill. She glanced at Papa, who sat beside the bed, his head bowed. Back in the kitchen the girls stood staring at each other. Maria’s dark expression had returned and Hildy and Renate looked up at Lexi with tear-stained faces, as if she could do something. “We’ll clear up the dishes,” she said, still fighting with the feeling that she might throw up. “Maria, you wash and Hildy and Renate will dry.” Her hands automatically gathered up the uneaten food. Maria bumped her as she placed some dishes on the cupboard and then slumped against her. Lexi held her as she burst into tears. Renate and Hildy crowded up to them too, flinging their arms around Lexi’s skirt, crying. “She’s sleeping now,” Papa said, coming into the kitchen. His eyes were red. “Has she gone home to God yet?” asked Hildy, her voice almost matter of fact. “No, not yet.” Papa walked over to the hook on the wall and took down his coat. “I’m going over to the Doerksens’ to use the phone. To call the boys.” “Are they coming home?” asked Renate. “I don’t know,” said Papa. “We can’t afford to send them money. But they need to know.” After Papa had left and the girls were busy doing the dishes, Lexi slipped into her mother’s room. Her breathing was more laboured than it had been earlier. She tiptoed to the side of the bed, sat down and leaned forward. “Mama?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?” Her mother continued to sleep, motionless except for occasional small snorting gasps. Lexi leaned in closer. “Mama, I’ve always wished, always wanted to tell you…” Her beloved memory came back, the memory of Mama hanging out clothes in their yard in Hierschau, it must have been just before Makhno, and she began to tell the memory to her Mama. The sun had been shining, a brilliant golden egg, the wind ruffling wave after wave of the long steppe grass in the field behind their house. Mama had smiled at her and then stopped to watch as

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she whirled in circles, whirled and whirled with the sheer delight of being alive in the warm wind until she was dizzy and fell over. She couldn’t have been more than three. She’d lain looking up at her beautiful Mama standing over her and laughing, both of them completely happy. She caressed her Mama’s hand and then held it. “But in Canada you always felt so far away. I couldn’t…I was afraid to come to you. I didn’t know.” Her Mama showed no sign that she’d heard her. Lexi felt as if her chest were caving in, as if her own heart were shrivelling. “Do you remember that day, Mama?” she whispered. “That day when I was twirling in the sun?” Mama’s eyeballs were rolling under her eyelids and her lips were moving slightly as if she were talking to someone in a dream. “You were so beautiful…” She caressed Mama’s cheek. It felt papery and cold. “I hate what happened in Russia. I hate what happened to you. And I hate that Papa—” She was speaking out loud now and was suddenly aware that the house was silent, that her little sisters might be listening. How futile. How stupid. Mama couldn’t hear. She was never going to be able to tell her anything. She’d intended to tell Mama, when she got better, that she wanted to be a nurse, that she wanted to go back to Waterloo and save enough money to study. In the dim lamplight she stared at the dots of the tightly closed pores in Mama’s cheeks, at the barely fluttering hairs in her nose, at her jawbone, which seemed already to be jutting through her translucent skin. She touched Mama’s cheek again, then leaned over and whispered, “Don’t go, Mama.” Mama lingered on for three more days, in and out of consciousness. At times she seemed to know who they were, even to smile a little. She had a more peaceful air about her than Lexi had ever seen before. Sometimes she mumbled Bible verses and at other moments, Russian words. Each evening they sang hymns in her room as she slept more and more, her mouth gaping open. The night that she died Lexi heard a thump and ran out of her room to her parents’ door. Papa was trying to lift Mama into bed.

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She’d been agitated in her sleep and became tangled in her blankets until she fell off the bed onto the pallet of blankets that her Papa slept on. Lexi held her legs and feet and together they laid Mama back on her bed. The next morning, she was dead. Reverend Unruh, who was still the minister for the congregation in Hepburn, came to perform the funeral. The small church in Millheim was packed. Papa had planned the service for later in the day so every Mennonite in the area could come. Some must have travelled for hours. It was incredible how quickly the news had spread. Willy had arrived from Kansas and was picked up by Reverend Unruh an hour before the service. He had borrowed money for a train ticket to Saskatoon and then hitched a ride with some Mennonite friends to Hepburn. Jakob and Henry, both looking older, had taken the train home from Winnipeg a day earlier and were staying in town with Mrs. Doerksen and her son, John, since there wasn’t room for all of them in the house. John Doerksen, who was the same age as the boys, had also come home from Saskatoon for the funeral. It had been too expensive for Gerhardt to come from British Columbia. Lexi and her brothers and sisters sat beside Papa on the front bench, the bare wooden casket in front of them. There were no flowers to be had in February and the wind whistled through the cracks of the little church, made warm mostly by the body heat of the people gathered inside. The smell of wet wool and mothballs filled the small room. Puddles were slowly forming on the floor the women had scrubbed, on their hands and knees, the day before. Lexi imagined Mama inside the coffin, dressed in her Sunday dress. It lay flat on her emaciated body like a dark purple sack. She and Maria, helped by Mrs. Doerksen, had washed and dressed her in her best clothes on the morning she died, before she was taken away to the small Mennonite funeral parlour in a neighbouring village. They’d struggled with her underclothes, Maria unable to look. But in the harsh morning light, Lexi couldn’t stop herself from looking. She searched Mama’s body for scars. At first she saw only the caved-in belly, the flattened breasts and the thin limbs with their small folds of hanging flesh. Then, with a start, she saw it. Just above the left hip. It had always been hidden by her underwear. It was a

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small rope of a scar, strong and tight in contrast to the dead grey skin around it. She ran her fingers along it, imagining the blade of the sword. They had difficulty fitting Mama’s limbs into the long sleeves of the dress, and in exasperation Maria had whispered, “She’s stiff.” Lexi glanced at Mrs. Doerksen, who looked away. She had a sudden urge to laugh hysterically but forced herself back from it. When Mama was finally dressed, Lexi braided her hair tightly and curled it up into a bun. Reverend Unruh’s words floated around her. “Time,” he said, smiling down on them, “seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia! None of them have any meaning for Katya. Katya now lives in unending day. She needs no ticking clocks or even the sun or the moon. God is her only source of light now, the Living Light. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And there shall be no more night there; and they need no candle, nor light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign forever and ever. So God tells us in Revelation 21:23. Katya is at this moment, at this very moment…” He looked directly at Lexi. “Katya, our sister, is at this very moment revelling in this paradise! Praise the Lord!” The moment Reverend Unruh took his eyes off hers, Lexi glanced at Willy, who was on her right side. His face staring at Reverend Unruh was a somber mask even though his twenty-two-year-old cheeks were soft and pink above the small growth of reddish curly beard. Only his top lip trembled. He wore his old black suit, now too small for him. If he’d been home a day earlier, Lexi would have lengthened the sleeves and pant legs. He looked like a younger version of Papa with his round glasses and high forehead. He’d run up to her, smiling a lopsided smile full of grief and pleasure, and seized her hand, after he jumped out of Reverend Unruh’s car. Then he burst into tears and put one arm around her shoulders as he wiped his eyes with his other mittened hand. He also bent down to kiss Hildy and Renate, who each held one of his hands as they all walked into church. Before he went to Kansas, Willy too would have been much too shy to do anything so overtly demonstrative. Being in the United States had changed him already.

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“But Katya in Glory has a new name!” Reverend Unruh smiled again. “The Bible says, To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Revelation 2:17. I wonder what name Katya goes by in heaven!” Lexi glared at the big man beaming down at them. She’d never liked him. Every time she smelled something burning she thought of him. How could he think of Mama with a new name? They’d been children together in Russia. Mama would always be Katya, beautiful, beautiful. Laughing in the sunshine. She turned to Maria, who sat on her left, took her hand and then, almost imperceptibly, shook her head in denial of what the minister was saying. Lexi welcomed the cold, harsh wind, freezing the very marrow of her bones as they followed the coffin out to the graveyard beside the church. The wind felt right. It felt like death. Two men of the church had burned a wood fire all the previous day and night over the site of the grave and then dug the hole in the morning when the ground had thawed enough to open up under their shovels. The pile of brown earth and the grave were shocking gashes in the unrelenting whiteness of the snow, but they made Lexi think of spring, of sticky mud thawing, of the grasses which would wave on top of her Mama’s grave. For He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary. From heaven did the Lord behold the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner, to loose those that are appointed to death. They shall perish, but Thou shall endure. Reverend Unruh paused and looked at Papa before he reached down to pick up a small piece of the frozen earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He threw the dark earth on to the casket and it bounced like a stone before it tumbled down into the cavity. Lexi turned away and buried her face in Willy’s shoulder.

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twenty “Me too! Me too!” squealed Hildy, hopping up and down in the kitchen as Willy swung Renate, his hands under her shoulders. Renate closed her eyes as her brother whirled her around and around. Her feet were almost hitting the table. Hildy hopped another little hop and grinned at Lexi who stood by the sink, washing dishes. Lexi smiled at her little sister. Everything in the house changed when Papa was out. “OK, little girl,” laughed Willy, hooking his arms around her from behind. “My goodness. You’re light as a feather.” Hildy giggled and then screeched as Willy swung her faster and faster until he stumbled and bumped into the table. “OK, enough.” He lurched sideways and fell into a kitchen chair, still holding Hildy, panting and flushed. Hildy snuggled up into his lap as if she intended to stay there. “When will Papa and Maria be home?” asked Willy, adjusting his glasses. He looked like his old self, comfortable and relaxed in his mended sweater and baggy black wool pants. Lexi was lengthening the sleeves of his good suit jacket. She bit off the end of her thread and glanced at the clock. It was three-thirty. “In about half an hour or so.” “Now girls, he said, sliding Hildy off his knee, “go and play in the bedroom for a while.” “Do we have to?” Hildy asked, looking at Lexi as if she wasn’t sure whom to obey. “Ja,” said Lexi. Hildy gathered up their dolls and Renate took the checkerboard down from the shelf. They glanced back at Lexi and Willy, pouting. Once they were in the bedroom, Willy got up and closed the door behind them. Lexi smoothed the cuff of Willy’s jacket, wondering if the faded line of the old crease would come out when she ironed it. They hadn’t had a chance to speak alone since he’d come home. After Mama had been buried, they spent the rest of the afternoon in the church with friends and family, eating sandwiches and Tortes and drinking coffee,

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listening with fixed smiles to people telling them of God’s grace in delivering their mother from suffering. And the following day, Sunday, they’d all gone to church. Papa had preached a sermon on Romans 9 : The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us. For we are saved by hope. Lexi watched Papa as he stood at the front of the church, his face dark, his expression even more severe than usual. Was there doubt in Papa’s mind as there was in hers? Did he ever, she wondered, question the “hope” of heaven? Then Papa had spent the whole afternoon reading the Bible in the kitchen and they’d all pretended to read too, their heads falling frequently to their chests in the overheated gloom. Willy spent the afternoon drawing secretly in a small sketch pad, hiding it behind the book he had on his lap. Lexi wished she could fix Willy’s suit, since he’d be leaving in a few days, but of course working on the Sabbath was not possible. Occasional giggles and shushes came from the girls’ bedroom. Finally, Jakob, Henry and Willy disappeared outside for an hour even though it was bitterly cold. When they came back, all three smelled of cigarette smoke. On Monday morning, Henry and Jakob arrived at the house with their suitcases, ready to depart. Henry tried to make a joke as usual, something about a farmer and a chicken, while Willy folded the blankets he’d used to sleep on the daybed. No one laughed at Henry’s joke. Lexi thought of the joke that Onkel Rudolf had told, the one with the cursing. Damn, Lexi whispered in her head. Damn. Even in the privacy of her own head she whispered. Papa ate his bowl of oatmeal slowly, got up even more slowly, shook hands with Jakob and Henry, put on his greatcoat and left for school with Maria. Renate was to be allowed to have an extra week off school. Lexi had insisted that Hildy needed company. An hour later Lexi and Willy also shook hands with Jakob and Henry. Their car ride appeared, honking in the yard. Now Willy jumped up from the table and began pacing around the room. He stopped and stared out the window for a moment, took down a devotional book from the shelf on the wall, flipped through the pages and put it back. He opened the drawer in the cupboard which

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held the tea towels and tablecloth and rummaged around. When he pulled open the cutlery drawer, Lexi’s heart stopped. “Ach, what’s the use,” he said, barely glancing in the drawer before he sat down again at the table, automatically reaching for the pocket where Lexi suspected he usually kept cigarettes. “Would you like some coffee, Willy?” she said. “There’s some left.” She shakily poured out two small cups of overcooked coffee from the pot on the stove and set them on the table. “Thanks,” he said, not touching his cup. He looked up at her. “Did Mama ever say anything about…?” “About what?” “Ach, nothing.” He looked down and brushed away a crumb from the tablecloth. “What’s going to happen to Mama’s things?” “Mrs. Doerksen’s coming over to help me. Her clothes will go to overseas relief. Each of the girls is getting one of her embroidered pillow cases as a keepsake and I’m taking the crocheted tablecloth and the little embroidered picture. You know, the framed one of the tulips? I love that one.” Her eyes were suddenly stinging. Her Mama had done beautiful embroidery. “I didn’t know what to give you and the other boys,” she said, after a minute. “I guess Papa will decide.” “Ja.” Willy looked down at his hands. “But I saved the announcement of her death for you. From the paper. I asked the Doerksens if I could have their paper too, and the Unruhs and the John Penners. So I have one for you and Gerhardt. I already gave one to Jakob and Henry. The picture didn’t come out very well, but it’s something.” She got up and went to her bedroom to get the small newspaper clipping. Willy studied it. “Ja, danke. This is good. Even though it’s poorly written.” He tucked it into his shirt pocket. “But I’d like a real photograph. One of the ones from Russia.” She hesitated. “There aren’t very many.” “Do you remember that one of us in front of the schoolhouse? The one where we’re all lined up? Henry and Jakob have sailor suits on. And Mama looks so young and pretty. You were only about three, I think. A butterball.” He smiled. “I wasn’t,” she protested. “You were. Where’s the photo album? I’ll show you.” Willy got up

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and opened the door to their parents’ bedroom. “Don’t they keep it in here? In the closet?” “Ja.” After rummaging in the closet for a couple of minutes Willy came back to the kitchen and placed the photo album, a thick rectangular book with wooden covers, on the table. The word Photographs was engraved on the front cover in Russian script, with a carving of a swan swimming on wavy water under it and flowers in each corner. They opened it to the first page, to the large formal black-andwhite photographs of their Mama as a girl, dressed in a high black collar and buttoned boots, standing with many brothers and sisters beside her serious parents in front of a backdrop with fake columns on either side. “Mama looks so…confident,” said Willy, a note of surprise in his voice. “She reminds me of how Maria looks sometimes.” Lexi looked at the picture. Her Mama did look sure of herself, slender and graceful and half smiling in the dark old photo. And yes, to her chagrin, she could see Maria in Mama’s face. Her Oma looked so young, even though she was frowning at the camera. Lexi felt an unexpected jolt at seeing her again. She remembered that in real life she’d been nothing like this pose. She’d been soft, always smiling. Memories of swinging on the big swing on the apple tree in her garden in Blumenort came back. Lexi remembered the cloying sweetness that filled the yard in syrup-making time. Onkel Peter or Onkel Hans sliced through watermelons and Opa turned the handle of the big grinder that made them into pulp. Tante Tina and Tante Mary stared back from the photo too, little girls then, so full of life. Willy hurriedly turned the page. His right leg jiggled incessantly under the table, touching her skirt. She hated his nervousness. “If only we could tell Oma that Mama has died,” she said. “She’ll never know,” said Willy. “If she’s still alive.” Willy had written in the notebook that he hadn’t cried when he’d said goodbye to Oma and the Tantes. No one spoke of them anymore. Lexi knew that her family had been in the last group allowed to leave Russia. The rest had died. Or been sent to Siberia. No one knew for sure. There had been letters for a while, but then they stopped. She turned the page.

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Their parents’ wedding picture. Papa was standing tall and imposing, looking scholarly, his hairline already receding above his small round black-rimmed glasses. Their mother was tiny beside him, wearing a plain white blouse and skirt, her blonde hair tightly bound up on her head, her eyes staring directly at the camera. She looked strong, she looked certain of herself. And she looked like she might easily break out into a laugh. All that had been taken away from her. Lexi closed her eyes to suppress what felt like a choking sob. A sob of grief. And anger. Then pictures of Mama posing with Gerhardt and Willy when they were about two and three, Gerhardt standing beside her, wideeyed in a straw hat with a wide black ribbon around it and Willy on her hip, his pudgy legs not quite disguising the fact that she was pregnant. “See, you were pudgy too,” laughed Lexi, even though she felt her throat tightening. “Before the famine I was.” Then, there it was, the picture that Willy remembered. The four brothers lined up in front of the long white stucco schoolhouse with the blue shutters. Gerhardt and Willy were about nine and eight, in woollen shorts and jackets with tightly buttoned-up shirts and black boots. Henry, at five, was grinning as always and Jakob, at four, looked serious and dreamy. Both wore white sailor suits and jaunty little hats with ribbons. Lexi, at age three, her round face surrounded by flaxen pigtails, stood to one side of the boys by Mama, seated in her dark billowing dress. It was hard to read the expression on Mama’s face. Was she about to smile or cry? Papa, his face stony, his high forehead still unwrinkled, stood behind Gerhardt at the other end of the row, his hand on his shoulder. “I told you,” said Willy, pointing at her in the picture, trying to keep up a jocular tone. His leg under the table was shaking even harder than before. “That picture must have been taken just before the raids.” Willy put his finger close to Mama’s face in the picture. “Mama never smiled after we came to Canada. Poor Mama.” Lexi nodded. Her stomach was churning. Willy’s finger was right on Mama’s face and Lexi wanted to push his hand away from the photograph so that Mama could breathe. It was as if she were in the room with them, her thin, ravaged body

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with its broken heart trembling somewhere above them. So was Makhno. She thought of the scar on Mama’s dead body, how cold and smooth it had felt as she ran her fingers along it. “She never smiled.” Willy finally slid his finger off the picture. “And she got old so fast. I’m the only one who…” “No, you’re not, Willy. I know too.” “What are you talking about?” Willy stared hard at her. “I…read your notebook. I know what happened to Mama.” Her heart was lurching in her chest. The moment she said the words she regretted them. “What?” His face had gone white. The coffee cups rattled as he stood up abruptly. “I found it. Mama put it inside an old Bible.” Heat surged behind her eyes. Willy rushed over to the shelf and pulled down the Bible. “It’s not there,” she said. “Where is it?” he demanded. She slowly walked to the cupboard and retrieved the notebook from under the bone-handled knives and forks that had come from Russia. Willy grabbed it from her hand and immediately began flipping through the pages. When he came to the X’d-out pages, his face and neck were flaming crimson. “Willy, I’m sorry. I found it by accident. I was dusting and it was sticking out. And then I had to run in to Mama and it was still in my hand…” “And you read it?” She nodded. “And Mama knew?” She’d never seen him so angry. She nodded again. Willy slapped the notebook shut, headed for the row of hooks by the back door and grabbed his coat and scarf. As he yanked on his boots, he said, his voice as hard as Papa’s, “I can’t forgive this, Lexi.” The door slammed and he was gone. Lexi stared at the closed door, then slumped into her chair at the table. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she whispered, her head in her hands. She heard muffled sounds from the bedroom and then the bedroom door slowly opening.

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“What’s wrong, Lexi?” Hildy ran to her and tried awkwardly to hug her. “Oh,” Lexi said, wiping away her tears, “I’m just sad about Mama.” “Me too,” said Hildy, beginning to cry. Renate stood beside them, dangling a doll’s skirt by a needle and thread. Lexi took them both into her lap. “Where’s Willy?” Hildy asked. “I don’t know,” said Lexi. “He went out.” “Maybe we could play checkers with you,” sobbed Hildy. Lexi kissed her cheek. “Not right now, Liebchen. I’ve got to get supper ready. Papa and Maria will be home soon.” Supper was silent except for their Papa’s long, meandering prayer. Willy had come back just after Papa and Maria arrived home from school, his face rigid. He pulled the notebook from the inner pocket of his coat and put it into his suitcase, refusing to meet Lexi’s eyes. When supper was ready, Lexi thumped the bowl of potatoes on the table, suddenly angry too. Didn’t she have a right to know things? Willy was acting just like Papa, as if everything, even Mama’s secret, belonged to him. Finally, after a sullen evening in which Maria did homework and Lexi angrily finished off the hems of Willy’s pants, Lexi sent the girls to bed. Papa went to his room and Willy and Lexi were left sitting across the kitchen table from each other in the dim light of the coaloil lamp. “Willy,” Lexi said, keeping her voice low, “I apologize for reading your notebook.” “Apologize!” he hissed. “It was a violation, Lexi. A sin.” “I couldn’t help it. I was so little when we left Russia and there was so much that I didn’t remember. And then the part about Mama…” “Mama told me that she was going to burn it, that no one else must ever see it.” His voice was trembling and bitter. “And then I find out that she’s stuck it in a Bible where anyone could find it.” “I’m not anyone, Willy.” Willy glanced at up at her, his eyes glistening. “I know you’re not anyone, Lexi. But…” “It’s not just your story. It’s…the family’s…” “Lexi! Do you want the whole world to know Mama is a …”

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“Please, Willy.” “It’s just that now that I’ve read it again, I…it’s just that…” He was trying hard not to cry. His hands were clasping and unclasping, then reaching into his empty pocket. “You can’t know…I’ve had such terrible nightmares. Of reading the notebook out in church, to the whole congregation, telling everyone what happened. And then I would dream of Mama burning it, burning the memory away, and I would scream at her not to. And, at the same time, I wanted her to burn it. So that it would all end. So that I’d never see him in my dreams again. Never see him laughing over Mama. I was so scared. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even look. But afterwards, I had to write it. I couldn’t forget. Not for one minute.” He put his hands over his eyes and slowly rocked. Lexi thought of how the flimsy yellow paper notebook with the red Russian writing on the cover, filled with Willy’s young handwriting, would have burned in a flash. But Mama hadn’t tossed it into the stove. The notebook had survived. And she now realized that the notebook had been to Willy what Mama’s last words were to her something deep and shining even though horrible. The truth. She moved her chair beside Willy’s and put her arm around his shoulder, leaned her head into his, rocking him. “When Mama screamed it was unearthly. I’ve never heard a sound like that. And then I couldn’t see her face anymore. I was so afraid they’d killed her.” He turned to Lexi, pushing away tears. “Oh, Willy.” She tightened her arm around his shoulder and handed him her handkerchief. “I wanted to commit murder,” he said in a low, vehement voice. “Murder. To hell with pacifism. But I was such a coward.” His voice was filled with contempt. “You weren’t! You were only eight years old. They could have killed you. They would have killed you.” “And Papa did nothing. He just stood there, frozen, half hidden behind the door. I’ve never forgiven him for that. Him and his idealistic nonresistance.” Willy’s eyes narrowed as he stared at his Papa’s bedroom door, his leg once again jiggling. “I’ve never forgiven him for that. But I’m just like him. A weak coward who can only write.” “You were brave to write it, Willy. And Mama wanted us to know.

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That was why she couldn’t burn the notebook. She tried, but she couldn’t do it. It was almost the last thing she said to me before she died. She said she wanted us, you and me, to know, to be her…witnesses. We’re the ones who know, Willy. She trusted us.” Willy slid his hand across his eyes. “Ja,” he said. “Witnesses.” The next afternoon Lexi and Willy stood at the kitchen window, drinking coffee, watching Hildy and Renate making a snowman in the sunshine. The weather had suddenly turned warm and the snow was soft and wet. “Of course, I won’t tell Papa,” she said, smiling at him. “You should see Cammy. She smokes like crazy, like eine Verrüchte. And Georgie, my friend, does too. And I’ve tried it too.” She loved his shocked expression. If only he weren’t going back to Kansas in the morning. She was dying to talk now, to tell him everything. “My boss, Dr. Oliver, doesn’t like Cammy smoking all the time, especially around the children, but he can’t control her. He’s the most…” She wanted to say beautiful, lovely. “And Cammy’s given me so many things…” “Is she really crazy? Verrüchte?” asked Willy. “Oh, no, not at all.” Suddenly everything about Cammy and Dr. Oliver seemed infinitely interesting and wonderful. She reached up and touched her tightly bound hair. “Do all the Mennonite girls in Kansas keep their hair up?” “Of course. And the Old Order wear the prayer caps, of course. But, I have one very good friend, Emma, who…” He was blushing. “…lets her hair down now and then.” He stared out at Hildy making a snow angel. “But no, most of them are very pious.” “Oh, I thought that in the States they might be more…” “Mennonites are the same everywhere, Lexi. One people, one mind.” “Ja.” “How did you meet her?” “Who? Emma? She’s the sister of a friend of mine.” “She goes to your Bible School?”

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“No, no, of course not!” “But you drew a picture of her, in the library.” He smiled. “Oh, ja, well she comes with me sometimes and reads while I study. It’s a way we can be together.” Lexi felt terribly disappointed by this. She’d thought that maybe there might be room for her in a Mennonite Bible School somewhere. Willy was staring at her, studying her. “You’ve grown up,” he said. “We’ve both changed.” “I know. I never knew that being in the world would be so…Papa would die if he knew.” “Knew what?” “Oh, nothing. It’s just that there are so many things.” She turned and smiled at him again, revelling in their new intimacy. “I want to be a nurse.” “Really?” He studied her again for a moment. “Ja, I could see that. You’d make a good nurse.” “I used to read that book when I was little, the one about Florence Nightingale. Over and over. I wanted to go to the Crimea like she did. Or to our part of Russia again. Or to other places. Meet other people. Do things. Georgie wants me to go to live in Toronto with her.” “Toronto. Ja.” Willy walked over to the stove and poured himself another cup of coffee. “Emma’s been to New York. It’s a filthy, noisy, sinful place. But still. Full of writers. Toronto too, I would think.” He sat down at the table. “Do you still want to be a writer?” Lexi sat down beside him. “Ja.” He said it almost like a guilty admission. “But I’m writing just for myself. For now. Do you ever have that feeling? That life doesn’t feel real until it’s written down?” Lexi shrugged. She hadn’t written in her journal for months. “Well, I always have that. It’s like a curse. It’s selfish but I can’t help it. It never leaves me. I feel better only when I write.” Willy stood up and went to the window again. “Even when it means I write something that shouldn’t have been read by anyone.” He came and sat down again. He paused and looked at her again. “So, Lexi, you’ll be staying home now?” “I don’t want to. I want to go back. Dr. Oliver wants me to come back.”

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She looked down at her cup for a moment and then at Willy. “So what if this doctor wants you back. You have responsibilities here. The girls need you. Papa’s hopeless.” “So are the Olivers. They need me too.” “But surely you can’t think that it’s the same thing. They’re not family. They’re not even Mennonites. Maria told me they’re rich, that you have your own bathroom. Do they go to church?” “No,” she said in a small voice. “Perhaps, Lexi,” he said in the same grating, guilt-inducing voice that Papa used when he was admonishing them, “you’re becoming too much influenced by the world.” What right did he have to scold her? To treat her as if she were a child? What about this Emma letting her hair down in Kansas? She wanted to punch his arm, to knock that superior look off his face. “Papa won’t let you go, Lexi. He needs you, he’ll forbid you…” “Ach, you! Don’t you dare say a word to Papa.” Lexi was shaking. She’d made a huge mistake telling Willy anything. “Papa told me you were staying to look after the girls.” “He did?” “Ja, of course. He assumed.” “He assumed, as always.” She jumped up from the table and yanked at her hair, sending the pins flying. She stood there for a moment and looked defiantly at Willy. “He doesn’t have the right. He’s a…a liability!” They both burst into laughter, and then laughed harder and harder. Lexi wiped her eyes, not sure whether she was laughing or crying. Without thinking, she opened the photograph album to the picture Willy wanted, and carefully pulled it from its little black corner holders. “I won’t tell,” she said, her hand trembling slightly as she held it out to him. “Danke,” he said, reaching for it. A blast of cold air exploded into the kitchen. Willy hurriedly slid the photo into the back of the album and slammed the wooden cover shut. “Well,” Papa said, shaking off his coat and staring hard at Willy. “You’ve had no time to shovel?”

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Willy blushed bright red. “Sorry, Papa, Willy and I were just looking…” “Ja, I see where you were looking.” He stared at the photo album lying on the table and then at Lexi’s hair. “Put that away, Aleksandra. And make yourself presentable.” Lexi hastily retrieved the pins from the floor and braided up her hair and stabbed the pins back in. She picked up the photo album and looked around the kitchen, afraid to take it back into Papa’s room. She’d have to put it on the shelf beside the Bible. Papa turned to Willy. “When you come home, you work. Like the rest of us.” Willy stared back at Papa but said nothing. Papa hung up his coat and put his satchel of books on the kitchen table. He automatically reached for his Bible from the shelf and then stood still in the middle of the kitchen looking pained and uncertain, staring at the bedroom door. Lexi, Willy and the girls, still half in their snowy coats, stared at the bedroom door too, as if the handle might turn and their Mama might appear. Then Papa slowly moved towards the door and disappeared inside. Willy rushed to retrieve the photo from the album and stuffed it into his suitcase. He glanced once at Lexi and then at Maria’s surprised face, as he shoved on his boots and yanked his coat from the hook. He slammed the door behind him, and in a moment they heard the rasping of the shovel on the snow. Maria laid out her books for homework, while Hildy and Renate hopped about getting out of their boots and wet coats. Lexi watched her three younger sisters from the corner of her eye as she peeled the potatoes for supper. How could she ever explain to them this thing, this wanting to go, this feeling that was now, more than ever, like a tulip bulb in her chest, thick, fat with life, pushing up, demanding to be born? The evening before Willy was to leave they escaped the house to visit John Doerksen in town. They’d known John and his mother their whole lives, had been neighbours in Russia. John and Willy had been best friends at school in Canada, too. Now John worked in a bank and even though his mother worried for his soul in the big city of

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Saskatoon, most people in the congregation believed he was doing very well for himself. “You’re so lucky,” said Lexi, as they walked over the moonlit snow. “You can go back to Kansas and leave all this behind. It’s not fair.” Willy turned to her, his breath a white cloud, and took off his frosted glasses. “Can’t you be philosophical? Can’t you wait a couple of years until Maria is a bit older?” “No, I can’t. Maria has four more years of school. If Papa lets her go to high school. And Renate has ten and Hildy twelve more years to go. I’ll be almost thirty.” She kicked at the hard snow as she walked. “No. I can’t do it. I won’t.” “Well, then, you’ll just have to tell him. Tell him you’ll send more money home.” “Can’t you send more money home too?” “I already send more than half of my teacher’s salary. And I have to pay room and board. And now I have to pay Walter back for the train ticket. You’re not the only one who has it hard, Lexi.” “I know. I know. And, of course, I worry about the girls. Maria’s too young to look after everything. She should finish school. Not be uneducated and stupid like me. Fit for nothing but looking after children. I hate it here. I hate my life here.” “Then go back to Waterloo and don’t come back.” He was exasperated with her. “I’d be shunned.” “Ja. Is that what you want? I have to lie, too. Do you think that I’m going to be a Bible School teacher?” She looked over at him, shocked. He marched beside her, head down again. He’d changed even more than she thought. He was secretly building a whole new life for himself. “But I just can’t stay home and become an old maid. And I won’t marry some old farmer either.” They reached the Doerksens’ house and both she and Willy stared at the shiny blackness of John’s Model-A Ford reflecting the moonlight. Lexi slid her mitten along its snowy roof. “Did I tell you I learned to drive?” she said, as they walked up to the door. “No! You really are full of surprises.” He sounded angry again but

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put on a smile as John Doerksen, small and neat with a blond moustache, answered the door. The Doerksens’ living room was filled with knick-knacks, doilies and plumped-up embroidered pillows. Lexi pushed down her old envy of the people who could afford to live in town and had enough money for beautiful things. There had never been any beauty in their house. Mrs. Doerksen, after hugging them, bustled about, smoothing a doily here, straightening a cushion there, and then disappeared into the kitchen. “We admired your car,” said Lexi. “Ach, it’s only a used one. But it makes the trip home to see my mother much more efficient.” John blushed and straightened his tie as he spoke. Lexi thought that he already looked every inch a banker. He looked assimilated into the Englische mainstream, though Lexi could see that he tried to hide that from his mother. How easy it all seemed for him. Already owning a car, and having the best of both worlds by living his life in freedom, in Saskatoon, yet able to come home for visits. She wanted that. She wanted everything. “You’re leaving so soon,Willy?” John asked. “Ja, back to work. I’ve missed over a week of classes.” “Do they pay you well?” John asked. Willy hesitated and Lexi remembered that John and Willy had always been highly competitive, thrown together because they they’d been the only two boys the same age in their small school. “Well, I’m still an apprentice teacher.” “He’s the youngest teacher they’ve ever had,” said Lexi. “Ja?” “And he’s writing…” “Now, Lexi…” Willy shot her a silencing look. “Still scribbling then?” “A bit.” “A book on theology?” “Not exactly.” “A book on the Mennonites?” “Something like that.” “Now that’s what we need. A good history of the Mennonites in

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Russia. Without us, the Russian peasants would still be living hand to mouth on subsistence plots. And now, unless someone writes it, we’re going to be nothing more than a footnote in Russian history.” John’s face was bright. Lexi had rarely seen him so animated. “And you’re the man to do it, Willy.” “Actually,” said Willy, “it’s…” “Did I hear you talking about Russia?” Mrs. Doerksen came into the room, all smiles, bearing a tray of coffee cups. “Ach, I will never forget Blumenort in the spring. So beautiful. So many flowers. So much nicer than here. You remember it, Lexi?” Lexi nodded. “Praise God for our freedom. I’ll always remember your Oma’s garden, yet. Such plums!” She handed them each a cup. Lexi smiled. “We were just looking at photos of Oma this afternoon.” “God bless her. Both in heaven now. She and your poor Mama.” Tears had begun to well in her eyes. “Ach, the cake!” She hurried out of the room and they heard the oven door slam. After a moment of silence, just as Lexi was about to ask John about his job in the bank, Mrs. Doerksen returned carrying a freshly baked coffee cake and the pot of coffee. “Willy. Lexi. So good to see you,” she said serving them each a piece of cake. “Your Mama and I talked often.” She stood up from serving the cake, crossed her arms over her ample breasts and smiled sadly at each of them in turn. “She was so proud of you. Of both of you. Willy a teacher. And Lexi such a good wife someday, ja.” “What am I going to do, Willy?” They’d refused John’s offer of a ride home, saying they needed the fresh air. Willy shoved his hands in his pockets. Their boots squeaked even louder than before. The temperature had dropped and the moon hung high in the sky, small and very far away. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why can’t you stay home longer?” asked Lexi without turning to look at him. “Me? I’d lose my job teaching English. It wouldn’t work. And I’d just be another burden.”

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“You’re telling me to be patient. Why can’t you be patient, too? Why can’t you do your work at home? You could teach in Millheim. You could look after Papa and the girls.” He turned. “Don’t be crazy, Lexi.” He said it in such a matter-offact tone that she knew he’d already dismissed it. Lexi felt her throat tightening, holding back the churning in her stomach. “Why not?” she persisted even though she knew it was futile. “Why can’t you make the choice I have to make?” “I can’t,” he said, his voice cold and calm. “You don’t care about the Tabor College Bible School and teaching English there. You’re just as selfish as I am!” Lexi raced on ahead of him to the door of the house and yanked the screen door open, not caring if it flapped in his face. Inside, she tore off her coat and boots and scarf, threw them on the hook and hurried into the bedroom, leaving him to stoke up the fire. She slid into bed beside Hildy, who opened her eyes for a moment and then went back to sleep. Shivering, she pulled the blankets up over her head. She could hear Willy making his bed on the kitchen floor. A small voice told her to go out, to apologize. But her body refused to move. He was going back to Kansas and she was trapped here, like a fly wriggling on a wad of sticky paper. The next morning Willy was up before she was. The fire was roaring and he’d made coffee when she came into the kitchen, her head aching and fuzzy. “Good morning,” he said, a sheepish look on his face. She couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead she went straight for the cupboard and got out the paper bag of Quaker Oats. “I’ll need a lunch for the ride,” he said. She pushed the remains of yesterday’s loaf of bread towards him and plunked the gauze-wrapped piece of cheese beside it. “Ja, I guess I can make it myself,” he said, glancing at her and then beginning to slice the loaf. The fire crackled and spit. Lexi could feel the warmth of it on her belly. “I’m taking my notebook, Lexi.” Lexi stirred the oats into the water and nodded. Her eyes were stinging.

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“Willy, will you give me one more swing? Please?” Hildy, still wearing her long flannel nightgown, had snuck up behind him and grabbed his legs. “Not now, Hildy,” said Lexi. “Get dressed. It’s time to eat.” She knew she sounded just like Mama. “But Willy’s going…” “Tell Renate and Maria to come for breakfast, too.” Hildy walked slowly to the bedroom, her head hanging, while Lexi stirred the porridge and Willy made his sandwiches. Just as she was about to turn to Willy, Papa came into the kitchen. He nodded at both of them and glanced at Willy’s suitcase parked by the door. “Ja, well,” he said, sighing. When everyone was sitting around the table, Papa bowed his head. “We pray for Willy’s safe return, for his Bible studies, for blessings on his teaching.” Their Papa’s voice droned on for an eternity. Lexi stopped listening, one eye on the bubbling pot of oatmeal. Willy promised to write the girls. “And you too, Lexi,” he said. She nodded and managed a half smile as she stood up to clear the dishes. As she was braiding Renate’s hair they heard the car honk outside. Willy jumped up from the chair where he’d been holding Hildy on his lap. “Time to go,” he said. Papa shook his hand and then Willy kissed each of his three little sisters quickly on the cheek. He held out his hand to Lexi. It felt strong and warm and gripped hers hard. “Goodbye, Lexi.” He handed her a folded white page and she slipped it in her pocket. “Have a good trip, Willy.” She wanted to hug him, to whisper that she was sorry even though she still felt angry and left behind, but couldn’t in front of Papa. “I will. And we’ll write,” he said, staring hard at her. And then he was gone. Papa and Maria left for school and Lexi sent Renate and Hildy to their room to play. Finally alone, she took the paper from her pocket and saw a detailed pencil sketch of herself sitting at the table, her chin resting in the palm of her hand, her sad mouth looking just like Mama’s.

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She leaned over the kitchen sink, her body shaking, her tears dropping quietly into the empty porridge pot.

twenty-one By the middle of June Lexi and her sisters had soft brown tanned faces and their hair had begun to turn white-blonde, as it did every summer. Sometimes the four girls walked across the field to the cemetery where their Mama was buried and gazed at the slightly raised mound of earth now sprouting tender green shoots of grass. There was no stone. Papa would have one made when he could afford it. While her sisters gathered prairie crocuses, buttercups and dandelions, Lexi stared at the grave and tried to remember her mother as beautiful and happy, but the last images of Mama crowded her head. Mama’s shrivelled body and face. How huge her eyes and mouth had become as her flesh had fallen away. And the images of Mama from Willy’s notebook. Those images started in her head with such violence but always went blank when she saw her Mama pushed to the floor, a man standing over her, his rifle beginning to lift the layers of her skirt. There was only so much that her mind would let her see. Sometimes she wished she didn’t know what she knew. When Papa wasn’t around, the girls rolled up their long sleeves, took off their shoes and stockings and waded in the small creek at the edge of the field. When Lexi had first suggested they take off their shoes and stockings the three girls had looked at her with such surprise and something else that was perhaps fear. It must have been the look that Cammy saw that first day when she told Lexi to do the same. The thought made her laugh and her laughter had encouraged the girls. They loved the feel of cool water and warm sun on their bare skin. And from then on, the minute they got to the creek, their feet and legs were bare. After paddling about they all flopped on the grass to dry, pulling their skirts up on their pale thighs. Perhaps inspired by such boldness, Maria and Renate had begged Papa to let them wear shorts to compete in the field day at school, as

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some of the other Mennonite children in school were allowed to do. “You’re different,” Papa had said. “The minister’s children must set a strict example.” Lexi remembered her own field days when she’d desperately wanted to run races and jump hurdles and had to stand on the sidelines and watch, too angry and humiliated even to cheer for her brothers’ victories. As she sat on the grass, letting the sun warm her face, Lexi thought, as she did a hundred times a day, of Waterloo. All of it, the streets of the city where she walked in ordinary clothes, the yellow car, the garage where he kissed her. Waterloo had become the unattainable land, the dream she now longed for more and more each day. Twice she’d dared to broach the topic with Papa. She mentioned a letter from Georgie, who’d written that they were expecting her return. Papa said nothing except to remind her that the henhouse needed cleaning. Even when a brief letter came from Dr. Oliver himself, expressing his condolences and asking if she was coming back, Papa had said nothing. She showed him the letter, hoping that the formal “Dr. Gerald Oliver” across the top of the letter would somehow intimidate him, make him see that she was wanted by an important man. Papa remained unmoved. She wrote to the Olivers, saying that she had to stay home a little longer but that she hoped to come back soon. Lying in bed at night beside Hildy, she couldn’t sleep. She jumped up to slap at the flies buzzing on the windowsill, determined to kill them, not caring if she woke her sisters. But then, in the middle of squashing flies, during which she imagined running away to Toronto with Georgie or, even better, Dr. Oliver driving up in his car to reclaim her, she would also remember Hildy clinging to her skirt while she worked in the kitchen or fed the chickens. She would think of Maria earnestly asking for help with a math problem or Renate proudly showing her the latest little dress she’d sewn for her doll. She forced herself back into bed, pulled up the hot blankets and cried as quietly as she could. She wrote to Willy: Everything’s so different since Mama’s gone. Even though she was always so sad. After she talked to me about what happened I

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hoped that I could tell her things too. I wanted so much to tell her that I wanted to be a nurse. If only we could have seen her smile and laugh again like when we were little. I wanted it to be like talking to you, Willy, even if I do get mad at you. But I can’t tell Papa anything and when I try he only thinks of more work for me to do. I’m doing my best and it’s never good enough for him. He never thanks me or shows me any affection. And yet he preaches about God’s love! He knows nothing about love. I can’t wait to get away. And yet Maria, Renate and Hildy keep me so busy and I can’t imagine what will become of them without me. The only good thing is that I am being a mother to them now.

To Georgie she wrote: You asked me to tell you what was happening at home since Mama died. It’s awful! My father is a tyrant who doesn’t care about me. I know that’s a terrible thing for a daughter to say, but it’s true. I only want to come back to Waterloo, or even, if you’re still thinking about it, to go to Toronto with you. But how can I leave my sisters? Do the Olivers ask about me? Though it’s only been about five months it feels like five years. Do they really want me to come back? What will you do if I do manage to escape? I don’t want to take your job away. By the way, remember that horrible farmer my father wants me to marry, Heinrich Willms? Well, he got his missing front tooth fixed and now he’s got a gigantic gold tooth. When he smiles he looks like he’s got a shiny corn kernel stuck between his moustache and his beard. And John Doerksen, Willy’s friend from school, has been visiting more and more. He comes to Millheim from Saskatoon almost every weekend now and drops in to see me. He just sits and drinks coffee and talks about the bank where he works and how we are in an economic depression and how awful the godless Russians were. I know what he’s thinking about me and I know Papa would approve. Oh, Georgie! Why can’t I wish to marry John and live in a little house in Saskatoon? And have six children and think about

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Willy wrote back: Yes, Lexi, I too have felt this emotional aridity. I see it more and more in my work, how the Mennonite culture and values keep us from the world, the daily life of the world. We are taught never to be a part of it. We are continually running, escaping the life around us, isolating ourselves in a “holier than thou” stance. And the rules we are expected to follow, the impossible rules and impossible ideals. As for love, I believe that Papa does love you in his way, in the Christian way, in the way that teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves, to turn the other cheek. Mama did truly love us but couldn’t show it anymore after what happened in Russia. I remember too how she was when she was young. Like Oma and Tante Tina and Tante Mary. But we’ve been taught to be a cold people, Lexi. Emma and I have had many talks about this…

There were no answers in the letters back to her. She wanted answers, she wanted guidance. She wanted…what was it that Mama had said? Try to erase bitterness. That’s what she had said. She wanted to live her life without bitterness, yes. Georgie wrote back: Dear Lexi, We are all OK. The children ask about you. But they can’t say Saskatchewan. I said your hellos to Cammy and Dr. Oliver. They said to say hello back and to say how sorry they are. They understand about your sisters and don’t want you to do anything until your ready. Do not worry about your job!!!! I don’t tell them but I like waiting on tables more than I like waiting on them and their kids. I’m

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just holding out for you. You have to come back!! The kids are not so bad. It’s Cammy who drives me nuts!! I could ring her neck. And her sister, Louise the snob, isn’t any better and hangs around a lot more now that your gone. They both drink like fish. Dr. Oliver is almost never here. Mom said that her friend who is a nurse told her that he leaves the hospital at six o’clock almost every night except for emergencies but he only sometimes gets home for supper. I’m sure your father loves you, Lexi. He just doesn’t know how to show it and is sad about your mother. Don’t worry. You’ll find a way. And don’t marry anyone who’s not good enough for you!! I’d like to punch that Heinrich Willms’s tooth right out of his mouth! Your best friend, Georgie xxxooo PS . I’m not going to Toronto anymore since I started going with Wayne.

Wayne! Who was Wayne? And why was Dr. Oliver never home? The nurse must be wrong. He was probably just going out for a quick supper before coming back to work late. He’d told her how much time it took to write up all his case files. Lexi threw the letter down on the kitchen table, then picked it up and read it again, hoping that she’d missed something vital, something that would offer even a tiny bit of hope. She could imagine them more vividly than ever, Cammy slinking around, puffing, Dr. Oliver pouring coffee in the kitchen before he left for the hospital, telling her about one of his patients, the children tagging along after her and Georgie as they did the laundry or the Hoovering. In spite of everything that had happened here at home, it still seemed like real life was there, not here. Why was that? It had to do with freedom. Somehow, perhaps, having had the freedom made her feel more at home in herself. Could that be? Or was she just spoiled by all that freedom? Had the freedom made her selfish? If she wanted to be a nurse, she couldn’t be selfish. A nurse gave herself up for her patients, didn’t she? Her head hurt. And so did her heart. How could she be so suddenly confused? Perhaps she should just give in and stay. Perhaps then all the questions and confusion would go away.

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She closed her eyes to imagine staying, but all she could see were Willy’s words, the last words in his notebook: After all she’s only a girl. Mama’s face, her collapsed mouth, her hollow eyes, and her rasping, whispery voice, more air than sound, begged her to…what? Lexi wasn’t sure. The days were getting warmer and warmer. The late June sun blazed over the prairie and by six in the morning she longed to take off her hot shoes as Cammy had ordered her to, almost a year ago now. She’d been so embarrassed about showing her feet. Now, having bare legs and arms seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Even the scissors that lay on the table beside her as she sat darning Papa’s wool socks tempted her. How satisfying the snipping would sound as she cut into her thick blonde hair. Perhaps she’d be bold enough to take it back to her shoulders. How would it hang, then? Would it curl and bounce once it was released from all that weight? School was nearly over and Papa had taken to going over to Mrs. Doerksen’s on his way home for a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. John told her that they talked of Mama and of the old days in Russia and Lexi was glad that he was away for another hour of the day. She was dreading the next week. School would be over for the summer and he would be home all the time. The day before the annual school picnic, which was always held on the last day of school, she got a letter from Willy saying that he would be staying in Kansas over the summer. He’d written to Papa too, saying that he was doing research for his classes, but to Lexi he wrote that he was working on a book. He also confided that he was thinking of asking Emma to marry him. Lexi read the letter twice and smoothed out its folds, imagining Willy and Emma with children, living in the married quarters of the Bible School. Willy was gone. She walked back to the kitchen. She had to make extra loaves of bread for egg salad sandwiches and then several pans of cookies and a cake for the school picnic. Everyone in the community turned out for the picnic, just as they’d done in Russia. Only here they didn’t have armfuls of roses and daffodils to make garlands to hang over the classroom doors and blackboards. A few bouquets of black-eyed susans and white daisies had to do. But there would be the same games and potato sack races, people spreading out their blankets to sit on, lunch

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on tables set up on the prairie field beside the schoolhouse. Hildy, Renate and even Maria had talked of little else in the past few days. When Papa entered the kitchen just before supper Lexi was bent over a bucket, peeling more potatoes for the salad. She stood up and wiped the sweat off her face. The bread had just come out of the oven of the wood stove and pots of boiling potatoes still simmered away on top. All that was left in the cellar from last year’s harvest was potatoes. And pickled beets, of course. Mama’s pickled beets. “Ach, ja, another year,” he said as he emptied his worn leather case of its few tattered books and placed them on the shelf. His voice seemed to have a lost a little of its sadness. “Ja, Papa,” she said, thinking that another year of teaching for him had been another year that she had not had a chance to go to school. “We’re ready for the picnic?” he asked. “Ja, almost. I’m making the potato salad tomorrow morning early so it won’t spoil, but I’ve done the baking.” Papa looked at the three loaves of bread lined up on the table. “You’re a good girl, Aleksandra.” He smiled at her. “You work hard.” She tried to smile back at him. His praise threw her off. “Thank you, Papa. I…” If only she could say it now, tell him that she wanted to go. “Ja, Lexi. Your Mama was proud of you. She told me. She knew that you would stay to look after the girls.” “But, Papa, I want to go back…to go back to school.” He looked at her as if she’d slapped him. She saw his face sharpen, all the thanks gone now. “God has blessed you with a strong constitution and you’re needed here.” “Oh, I can’t wait for tomorrow!” Hildy slammed the screen door open and ran in from the yard. She stopped when she saw the expressions on the faces of Lexi and Papa, and then ran past them. The picnic day was even hotter than the day before. Standing in the dawn light throwing grain to the chickens, Lexi was already sweating in her long-sleeved dress and stockings, and she remembered walking down a street in Waterloo wearing a short-sleeved silk blouse, a pair of trousers and the sandals that Cammy had given her. She kicked at one of the clucking chickens with her black boot.

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But why spoil the day by thinking of Waterloo? This had always been such an exciting time of the year for her. It was a time that always reminded her of Russia and the huge, joyous community there. The feasts and singing. The shared celebration. There were wonderful things about this community but Lexi couldn’t bear to feel them, not now, when the community and its beliefs were swallowing her, denying her her life. Hildy, Renate and Maria were so excited and even Papa seemed to be looking forward to the picnic. For the first time in the four months since the funeral, Mama seemed very far away and Lexi tried to imagine her happy in heaven, free at last, smiling down on them, giving them permission to enjoy the day. The girls were already dressed and making breakfast when she came in from the yard. “I’m going to trounce everyone in the sack race,” announced Maria. Lexi smiled at her. Using big words even for races. “I’ve been practising.” “Is that so, Maria,” said Papa, also smiling. “Ja. Mrs. Doerksen gave me an old potato sack and I can jump across the whole schoolyard without falling.” “Can I borrow your sack?” asked Renate, carefully pouring milk into four glasses. “Just for a few minutes?” Maria stared at Renate. “Now?” “Please, Maria? I need to practise, too. You’ve had it all week and you never share it.” Maria glanced at Papa, who was searching in his Bible for the morning reading. “Well, I guess you can have it for fifteen minutes after breakfast,” she said. “Me too?” asked Hildy. “Ach, ja,” said Maria, exasperated. “But I want it back at least half an hour before the race. It’s the only race I’m going in.” “Oh, I’m going in all the races,” said Hildy. “Right, Lexi?” “Ja, for sure. All the races. Now come. Sit down for breakfast.” “Me too,” said Renate as she placed the last of the four glasses of milk on the table. Papa began the morning scripture: How much better it is to get wisdom than gold! And to get understanding rather than silver! The highway of the upright is to depart from evil: he that keepeth his way

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preserveth his soul. Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. The sisters walked beside Papa the mile and a half to the school grounds in the town. Maria carried her folded potato sack as well as one of the food baskets, and as the school came in sight Hildy and Renate skipped ahead. Papa carried his case under his arm as usual. Before the races and the picnic dinner, there would be graduation ceremonies. Some of the senior boys were already setting up the trestle tables on the field beside the school and others ran back and forth measuring out the start and finish lines for the races with a sense of excited purposefulness. Families were arriving, some on foot, some by horse and buggy, some by car. Lexi noticed that John Doerksen’s car was parked in front of his house in the town and was surprised. Surely he hadn’t taken a day off from the bank just to attend the picnic? When everyone was gathered inside the schoolhouse Papa began the ceremonies with a long prayer, thanking God for allowing the children to study in this free country. He prayed that their studies would be put to doing good in the community. Then, one by one, he called up the forty students starting with the youngest. Renate smiled shyly as he handed her her grade one certificate and Hildy looked on with her mouth hanging open. When he reached the grade eights, Lexi noticed that Maria was trembling slightly. “Maria Penner,” he said, handing her the certificate. “Promoted to grade nine.” Unexpected tears popped out of Lexi’s eyes as Maria dipped her head and took the certificate. When the few remaining certificates had been passed out, Papa looked out over the gathered families. “And now,” he said, “I have a special announcement.” A surprised stir in the audience. “One student who shows exceptional ability will be awarded a scholarship of twentyfive dollars, donated by the Bank of Montreal. We are grateful to John Doerksen for arranging to found this scholarship for our community. I call on John to present this award.” Everyone turned to watch as John, in a dark suit and tie, his pale skin on fire, walked to the front of the classroom. His red face made his blond hair look almost white.When he got to the front, he clutched the lectern with one hand.

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“I am very happy,” he began. He cleared his throat. “We Mennonites have a long history of study, of Bible study, and some of us believe that we must continue to send our best students to Christian colleges and Bible Schools. Some from this community,” he glanced at Lexi, “are already engaged in furthering their studies in Kansas and Winnipeg.” He glanced down at the lectern and then up again. “This scholarship is to be awarded to the grade eight student in Millheim Public School with the highest academic achievement for further studies, for advancement to high school.” He slowly untucked the flap of the envelope and took out a long blue paper. It felt to Lexi as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. “I am very pleased to announce that the first winner of the Bank of Montreal scholarship of twenty-five dollars is…Maria Penner.” Maria gasped. “Maria has achieved an average of ninety-five percent in her classes this year,” John went on, smiling now. His eyes flickered in Lexi’s direction. “She will enter grade nine at Millheim Secondary School in the fall and we hope that this money will be helpful to her in pursuit of her future studies. We know that Maria will learn well and return to us, for the betterment of our community, to teach our children or nurse our sick. Would Maria please come up to the front.” Maria stumbled over the knees of Lexi, Renate and Hildy. When she took the envelope from John’s hand, she bowed and hung her head, mumbling something they couldn’t hear. Papa said the final prayer of thanks and Lexi felt a familiar tightening in her throat as she stared at the white envelope on Maria’s lap. To help Maria become a teacher or a nurse! How could this be? The envelope had more money in it than any of them had ever held in their hands all at once. Papa must have known about this and hadn’t said a word to her. Not a single word of warning. Once again he’d betrayed her. Simply expected her to keep working while Maria got to go on into grade nine. She was drenched in sweat, her clothes pasted to her body. Her black wool stockings were making her thighs itch. She wanted to jump up and smash the fly buzzing on the window sill but instead she put her arm around Maria and squeezed hard. Maria glanced up at her, her mouth trembling.

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Parents, grandparents and older brothers and sisters were finding the best spots to watch the younger children run the dashes, the potato sack and the pass-the-egg-on-a-spoon races. Lexi watched as John Doerksen set up a wooden chair for his mother. She turned away as Papa brought a chair from the classroom to sit beside Mrs. Doerksen. What did she care where they sat? “Hello, Lexi.” John looked very pleased with himself. He’d taken off his dark jacket and tie and looked like all the other men in their white shirts, dark pants and straw hats. “That was quite a surprise,” she said. “Ja. Your Papa didn’t tell me it was Maria until this morning. I thought the winner would be Jakob Goerz. But Maria’s marks were so much higher. He had no choice. He didn’t seem very happy about it.” “No, he wouldn’t be. We’re just girls.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “He didn’t let me go on to grade nine.” “Ja, well, I know some of the older ones think it’s wrong, but more and more girls are finishing high school before they get married.” “Well, I’m never getting married!” His eyes widened and looked even paler blue. “I’m going to be a nurse.” “How will you be a nurse when you don’t even have…?” “I don’t know how. I just will.” She felt herself blushing. She felt stupid. But she wasn’t going to let John see that. He could think what he liked. “But I was hoping…” He turned bright red and Lexi looked away. She knew what he was hoping. She had a flash of standing here beside him as his wife, watching their children run races. Never. “They’re starting,” she said, turning toward the start line. Hildy was lined up with the grade ones and the grade-ones-to-be, all of them with one foot on the line in front of them, the other foot back, ready to kick ahead. The girls seemed to have no disadvantage in running, even though they wore long cotton dresses and heavy black shoes. After a short melee at the finish line, Hildy galloped over to where John and Lexi stood. “I came in second!” She waved the blue ribbon. “Will you pin it on me, Lexi?”

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She jumped up and down as Lexi tried to pin on the ribbon with the tiny gold safety pin. “I can’t wait for the potato sack race!” Hildy whirled in circles around them as Lexi had once whirled around her mother. Now all she wanted to do was to sit down on the grass and weep. She turned back to watch the races, tears creeping into her eyes. Renate came in fourth or fifth in every race and Maria, as she predicted, won the potato sack race. Maria was running around with the other girls her age, not standing quietly on her own as she usually did. Had the scholarship already made so much of a difference? John stood rooted beside her the whole time, his pale blue eyes looking flat in the hot sun. Heinrich Willms was watching her too from the other side of the field. He laughed heartily at everything, at every win, at every child who tripped and fell. He shook everyone’s hand as they passed by as if he hadn’t seen them every Sunday of his life and most days in between. Lexi even caught a flash of his tooth in the sunshine. If only Georgie were here to see all this, to make it seem funny and unimportant. Picnic blankets were spread out and the older people sat in little clumps, some on chairs brought out from the schoolhouse. A few wooden desks had been hauled out. Children giggled behind the backs of the adults who squeezed themselves into the too-small desks. The trestle tables were loaded with bowls of potato and egg salad, farmer sausages, Zwieback, pickles, pies, cookies and lemonade. The men helped themselves and then the women and children piled their plates high. Lexi stood beside Mrs. Doerksen and the other women behind the tables, making sure that everyone got enough before she took her own lunch. Mrs. Doerksen was, as usual, full of smiles and small pats for everyone. She stood close to Lexi and nudged her like a girlfriend. When Papa approached the table, Mrs. Doerksen thrust a plate at him. “Johann! Eat good! You’re too thin yet!” He immediately put a Zwieback on his plate next to a single slice of farmer sausage and a little hill of potato salad. “Ach! That’s not enough,” she said, laughing. “We’ll fatten you up yet.” She pointed at the coffee cake at the end of the table. “Baked this morning. Have a big piece.”

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“Thank you, Rebecca. I will.” Papa almost grinned. “Are you coming to eat?” He motioned to the chairs where they’d sat all morning. “Ja.” She took up a plate and held it in front of her for a moment, before she began filling it full of food. “Ja, I’m coming.” Papa walked back to his chair and in a moment Mrs. Doerksen had gone too. Papa smiling? How dare he smile, knowing how upset she must be. John moved up to the table. He blushed as he filled his plate and couldn’t meet Lexi’s eyes. As soon as he began walking to the place where his mother and her Papa were sitting he looked back at her, as if willing her to join them too. Heinrich Willms smiled grandly at her as he slapped five slices of sausage on his plate and dug into the bowl of egg salad. “We have room on our blanket,” he said, gesturing with his head to where the Willms family had spread themselves on the grass. She gave him a meagre smile. She was doomed to stand behind this table for the whole meal. “I have to look after my sisters,” she said, relieved that Hildy and Renate were running across the field to the table. “Ja.” He glanced at them and then laughed heartily as he squeezed a third bun on to his already overflowing plate. He was an idiot! If only she could shout it. If only she could smirk and giggle with Georgie. She suddenly imagined Dr. Oliver here at the picnic, and blushed. “Come, girls,” she said to Hildy and Renate. “Where’s Maria?” “She’s with Katie and Gertrude,” said Renate. “They keep running away from us.” “Well, never mind.” The three sisters laid their blanket down under a small Manitoba maple. “It’s not fair!” wailed Renate. “I didn’t win anything. Even Hildy won something.” She looked over at the blue ribbon pinned to Hildy’s dress. Hildy stuck out her chest. “It’s not just about winning, Renate,” said Lexi. “It’s about joining in with the others and running the races. You enjoyed that, didn’t you? We can’t all win.” She was sounding impatient and irritated just as her mother would have. “Maybe you’ll win next year,” said Hildy.“Next year I’ll be in grade one and I’ll win again for sure.”

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Renate shrugged her shoulders and turned her back to them. Lexi bit into a pickle and watched Maria run up to the table with two other girls. The thought of Maria’s white envelope made her unable to swallow. The injustice of it. She dropped her half-eaten pickle on the plate and looked at John Doerksen hunched stiffly on his chair beside his mother and then at Heinrich Willms, sprawled like a cheerful walrus on his family’s blanket. She hated them both. She hated all Mennonite men.

twenty-two For two days after the picnic Lexi and Maria circled each other like wary animals, each unsure of what the other was going to do next. The evening after the picnic, Papa too had been particularly pensive, sitting at the table staring into space. She wanted to say something to him, to register her protest that it wasn’t fair, but nothing had come. No one said anything at all about the twenty-five dollars. The blue cheque hung over the room like a ghost while Hildy and Renate chattered about the races and games at the picnic. Maria had been very quiet at supper, her exuberance of that afternoon, so unusual for her, completely dissipated. Every time Lexi looked at her, Maria was looking back. Then she would adjust her glasses, drop her gaze and bow her head. Three days after the picnic, Lexi had just plunked the darning basket down on the kitchen table and begun mending a hole in one of Hildy’s stockings when Maria sat down too. Lexi glanced at her once and stabbed the needle into the stocking. “Lexi, I…” Lexi said nothing. “Lexi…” Maria placed the white envelope on the table. Lexi saw it out of the corner of her eye. “I’ve been thinking and thinking,” Maria said. “I want you to have this.” Lexi jabbed a finger with the darning needle, winced and then pressed the wounded finger to her teeth before she looked up. Maria

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was holding the cheque out to her. She wanted desperately to stop the thumping in her chest. This could not be happening. She stared at Maria, willing herself to calm down, shushing the small voice that had secretly wondered what she would do with the money, if it had been hers. “Don’t be ridiculous, Maria,” she said in Mama’s voice, flicking the cheque away. “You earned it.” “But I want to. I know it’s not fair. You should have gotten to go to grade nine too. I know how upset you were when you couldn’t go. And now it’s too late for you, and Mama’s dead, and you’ll never get to be a nurse unless…” Maria pushed her glasses higher on her nose. “How did you know I want to be a nurse, I never…” “I heard you talking to Willy, and…” “You were spying on us? What else were you listening to?” “You can use the money for the train back to Waterloo and then pay me back when you can. Papa will still let me go to high school. With my marks and the scholarship, he has no choice.” “This is…” Impossible, she wanted to say. And yet, now that Maria had offered, her head was flooded with selfish thoughts. “No, Maria.” “You could help me open a bank account and then I could give it to you. Or most of it anyway. Papa wouldn’t even have to know. And then you could go back to the Olivers’.” “But what about you and the girls? I have to stay and look after things. Papa…” “I can do that now. I’m mature enough.” “You’re not. How are you going to go to school and do all the washing and the cooking and this?” She held up the black stocking with the needle stuck in it. “Hildy and Renate can help me. And Papa. I’m perfectly…competent.” Lexi was silent. She could see herself on the train back to Waterloo, undoing her hair. Her heart was beating fast. “No, Maria, I can’t. Thanks for wanting to help, but … I just can’t.” A hard lump was pushing up into her throat. “It’s my money. I can decide what I want to do with it.” Maria adjusted her glasses. Her eyes were dark and steady. Lexi suddenly saw who Maria would become. A scholar of some kind, a teacher.

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“Everyone knows I’m going to high school now, Lexi. There’ll be no argument.” “I’ll think about it.” Lexi felt a wave of humiliation. If only things could have been the other way around. If only she could have been the one with the money, offering to help her little sister, like a proud mother. But this was dust in her throat, to use her sister’s scholarship money because she was helpless to do anything else. Maria slid the cheque back into the envelope and got up. “Let’s go to the bank tomorrow when we go to buy flour,” she said, putting the envelope in her skirt pocket. “I’m going to play with the girls now.” Lexi didn’t look up as she rapidly wove her stitches across the small hole in the woollen stocking. A million thoughts came rushing in. Cammy smiling her crooked, smoky smile, welcoming her from a doorway. Simon and Sally peering at her from behind the curtains as the yellow car rolled into the driveway. Eating cookies at the blue checker clothed table with Georgie. The dresser full of Cammy’s clothes. Handing Dr. Oliver a cup of coffee in the morning, listening to his stories about the hospital. And then, somehow, crazy as it was to even hope for, going back to school. Try to erase bitterness. Mama’s weak, dry voice echoed in Lexi’s head. She jabbed her needle faster and faster. She would lie about the money. She would tell Papa that the Olivers had sent her money to return to them. Of course, she would pay Maria back. She could work night shifts at the Cat’s Eye. Or take in mending. Sell her baking. But how could she desert her sisters? What would Willy say? The door opened and she turned. The girls were coming in. It was almost dark outside. “Lexi?” Hildy’s voice rang out. “Ja.” “Maria said you were greedy.” “What?” “I did not!” Maria protested. “I was just trying to explain the word ‘voracious.’ That some people are voracious for…” “I don’t care what you were explaining. Time for bed,” Lexi said sternly. “But Maria said…” Hildy now looked close to tears.

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“I said time for bed. All of you.” Maria turned and glared at Lexi. “You’re not the boss,” she said. Lexi stared back. Without a word, her face burning, she threw the sewing basket into its corner. Maria grabbed Hildy and Renate by the hand, did an abrupt turn and marched them into the bedroom. She barely acknowledged Papa as he emerged from his bedroom and headed outside to the outhouse. Before he came back into the house, she threw things into their places in the kitchen, ignoring the low voices of her sisters in the bedroom, and then turned down the oil lamp until it spluttered and died with only a little wisp of oily smoke winding up the fluted glass chimney. She escaped into the dark bedroom when she heard her Papa’s footsteps approaching the back door. As she crawled into bed beside Hildy, she was sure that Maria was only pretending to be asleep. Her body looked rigid beside Renate’s in the bed across the room, her eyes deliberately clamped shut. In the jumble of images that rose up behind Lexi’s eyes, a crazy, anxious mix of Dr. Oliver and Cammy, Papa glaring, Maria holding her cheque, proud and wilful, she saw Mama. Her pained voice, the voice she’d had as she lay dying, was saying something, something Lexi desperately wanted to hear. But her words were like pinfeathers, floating just out of reach. She woke with a start the next morning and looked over at the other bed. Maria was softly sleeping, her face vulnerable and sweet without her glasses. An illusion. Maria was spiteful and deceitful. Offering her the twenty-five dollars, her ticket to escape, and then calling her greedy. The money would hang around her neck like a stone if she took it. She dragged herself out of bed and got dressed in the dawn light. She would concentrate on making breakfast and on getting the bread dough mixed and rising. By the time Papa and the girls came to breakfast, she’d firmly put the cheque into the back of her mind. But, as she sat with her head bowed during the prayer, the fingernails of doubt scratched. Could she just sit at this kitchen table forever, waiting to dish up porridge and listening to Papa pray? But how could she take the money? And Maria couldn’t possibly do all the work for the family. Last night had shown just how immature she still was.

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The prayer ended and Lexi jumped up and began filling the porridge bowls. “Give me your cheque, Maria, and I will take it to the bank today,” Papa said. Lexi could hear Maria lay her spoon in her bowl, carefully. “Lexi was going to take me to the bank today and show me what to do, Papa.” Everyone was silent around the table, unsure of how Papa would react to this disobedience. “Do you know how to open a bank account and deposit a cheque in it, Lexi?” “Ja,” she said, slowly, keeping her back turned to her family. “I was paid by cheque in Waterloo.” “Ja, of course. Then you can take Maria into Millheim today to deposit her money when you do the shopping. Put it all in. She will not be spending any of it until school starts in the fall.” “Ja, Papa.” She was shocked that Papa had allowed this to happen, that Maria was allowed her own account. He would never have allowed her the same freedom. Was it because she was the eldest daughter and the rules were different? Did he trust Maria, but not her? He seemed distracted. Was that because of Mama’s death? Maria smiled shyly in her direction but Lexi refused to meet her eyes. After breakfast Maria watched as Lexi punched down the bread dough more vigorously than usual. “Can I do the bread tomorrow?” asked Maria. “Ja, why not?” Lexi jammed her fist into the soft dough. “And you might as well mix it too. And light the fire first thing in the morning. And serve the porridge. And braid the girls’ hair. I’ll sleep late.” “I did all that when Mama got sick. Before you came home.” “Ja? Is that why the floors were so filthy?” Maria flushed. “But I’m excellent at mending and sewing. You know that. And knitting. And less competent at baking, but I’ll learn. Mama said baking was all in the hands.” She held her hands out in front of her. The index finger on her right hand had ink stains on it. She quickly folded her hands into fists and let them hang by her side.

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“Why did you call me greedy?” “I didn’t. I just said that … some people were voracious for life. The best, most successful people…” Lexi stared at her. “Where did you get that idea from?” “From a book…” Maria adjusted her glasses. “When are we going into Millheim?” she asked, an edge to her voice. “Right after the bread is baked.” “Good.” Maria patted her pocket. “Now I’m going to read the book that Papa let me borrow for the summer.” “What is it?” “Gulliver’s Travels.” “Oh, I thought you wanted to work. You could finish the mending. And the chickens need feeding. And the garden needs weeding…” After a long moment, during which she chewed on her lip, Maria smoothed down her apron, went to the corner where the mending basket was, picked up the stocking Lexi had left unfinished from the day before, sat down and bent her head over it. After two minutes of watching Maria fumbling with trying to rethread the darning needle, Lexi grabbed the stocking out of her hand and pulled her up out of the chair. “Go and read your book!” Maria gazed at her, tears glistening. “You’re the selfish one,” she said in a low tremulous voice. “Just like Mama. You never let anyone give you anything.” Two hours later, after Papa had left, saying only that he would be home for supper, Lexi and her sisters slowly walked the mile and a half into Millheim. It was another hot day. Dust rose from the road in puffs as they plodded along. The fields were burned. There had been no rain for several weeks. Lexi followed the horizon with her eyes and imagined the train tracks going south from Hepburn to Winnipeg and then turning east, making a straight line to Toronto and Waterloo where, instead of all this dust, there would be huge maples shading green carpets of lawn. Sally and Simon would be running around in bare feet. The tracks would go on and on to Montreal and Halifax and the Atlantic. Ships were sitting in great harbours waiting to cross the ocean to London, Paris and Moscow. “Lexi, I’m hot. I want a drink,” whined Hildy.

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“We’ll stop at Mrs. Doerksen’s for a glass of water when we get into the town. After we go to the bank and the Co-op.” She wished she had enough money to buy them an ice cream cone. She glanced at Maria, whose hand never left the pocket in which the cheque lay. “Can’t we go to Mrs. Doerksen’s first?” “No.” She had to get the money into the bank and be done with it. The teller in the small Toronto-Dominion Bank, one of the few red brick buildings in the town, was a non-Mennonite lady they didn’t know. Lexi saw with a start that she was wearing a short-sleeved blouse almost exactly like one of Cammy’s. “We’d like to open an account for my sister,” Lexi said, standing in front of the little grilled wicket. Hildy and Renate were openly staring at the teller. Maria stood staring at the floor. Lexi reached back and pulled at Maria’s sleeve. “Come beside me,” she whispered. Maria adjusted her glasses and looked up. “And will this be a savings account? Or chequing?” The teller was keeping her voice even. “A savings account,” said Lexi firmly. “No,” said Maria, “a chequing account.” She looked at the teller. “That means that I can take money from it, doesn’t it?” The teller nodded. “You’ll have to fill out the forms.” She found some papers under the counter and shoved them under the grill. Lexi gave the papers to Maria, who bent over them. “Why don’t you and Renate wait outside on the front porch?” Lexi said to Hildy. “It might be cooler out there.” Hildy looked up at the ceiling fan and didn’t budge. “Go!” She shooed them out as if they were chicks. Maria handed the paper in under the wicket. “Fine. This looks very neat,” the woman said, smiling approvingly at Maria. “Now, what do you want to deposit?” Maria pulled the battered envelope out of her pocket and carefully took out the cheque. She slid it towards the teller. “Have you signed this…” she looked at the name on the form, “Maria?” “No, I didn’t know…” “That’s fine. Just sign the back and we can put it into your account.”

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Lexi watched as Maria slowly signed her name in her perfect grade eight script. “Do you want any cash now?” The teller was filling in the top line of Maria’s new bank book. Maria glanced at Lexi, then pushed her glasses up on her nose. Her voice squeaking slightly, she said, “Five dollars.” Lexi gasped. “No!” The teller looked up at them for the first time as if they were real people. “Ja,” said Maria, her voice stronger now. “Five dollars, please. I want to take out five dollars.” “Yes, Miss.” The teller pounded the back of the cheque with her stamp and opened the drawer in front of her. Maria’s hand trembled as she took the bill and the bank book and slipped them into her pocket. “Thank you,” she said shakily. Then she turned and headed toward the door. Hildy and Renate were each swinging around a white pillar when they came outside. “Can we go to Mrs. Doerksen’s now?” asked Renate. “Ja, but first we have to get the flour,” said Lexi, once again taking charge. They headed over to the Co-op and Lexi nodded hello to Mr. Dyck, the proprietor. She asked for a five-pound bag of flour and some baking soda and then went to find a spool of black thread. As they waited for Mr. Dyck to write up the bill, which she would give to Papa, Hildy and Renate stared at the large glass candy jar on the counter as they always did. Maria stared at the jar too and then, just as they were about to leave, pulled out her five-dollar bill. “I’d like to get two cents’ worth of candy. How many is that?” she asked. “That’ll be eight candies. Your choice. You can have any eight you want.” Mr. Dyck laughed. “You’re rich today, eh? Rich from all your learning, then?” “Ja.” Maria handed him the five-dollar bill and blushed brightly. “My, this is a lot of money for a young lady,” he said as he counted out two two-dollar bills and ninety-eight cents in change. He took the metal lid off the glass jar and Maria lifted Hildy up to choose the first candies.

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Lexi’s candy tasted almost too sweet. “Don’t tell Papa,” Lexi said quietly as they left the store. All three girls nodded in unison. “Or Mrs. Doerksen.” Mrs. Doerksen’s house was a block away, on the edge of the town, and they headed eagerly for it now. Lexi wiped the black licorice from the corners of Hildy’s and Renate’s mouths with her finger before they knocked on the door. “Come in, meine Kinder, come in, come in.” Mrs. Doerksen’s house smelled of coffee and cinnamon rolls. Her cheeks seemed especially bright red, probably from baking in all this heat, thought Lexi. “Ach, ja, water. It’s so hot. Come.” They followed her in and stood in the centre of her small bright kitchen while she pumped at the sink and handed each of them a glass of water. She crossed her arms over her large breasts and watched the girls drink, almost as if she were waiting for them to go. “How is your garden coming?” she asked, her voice unusually impatient. “Not very well. It’s so dry this year,” said Lexi. Mrs. Doerksen’s garden was flourishing as always. Her house was filled with plants, all of them lush, falling out of her flowerpots. “Ach, ja,” she sighed. “Everything on the prairies is so dry again this year. Just like the famine in Russia. You remember that, Lexi? That would have been 1921 or 1922. Your brothers started to grow hair on their faces like little old men.” Lexi shook her head. She couldn’t think of Russia or famines. “But then again,” Mrs. Doerksen continued, “those few years before we left Russia, those you would remember well, ja? Those years were so plentiful and rich. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Mrs. Doerksen’s head wobbled excitedly. She looked at the girls, who stood watching her. “I thank God for my deep well.” Mrs. Doerksen glanced at the pots of red geraniums on her windowsill. “Your Mama always said I had a green thumb. Ja, but…” Mrs. Doerksen fidgeted, stuck her hands in her apron pockets and took them out again. She smoothed down her apron in a mechanical sort of way. Lexi had never seen her so jumpy before.

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“We have to go home now,” said Lexi. “Thank you for the water.” “Ja, time to go,” she said quickly, snatching their glasses away from them. “You have so much to do now that your Mama’s gone.” She looked at the girls for a moment, then hurried to her cupboard and brought out a small jar of sweet pickles. “Take these,” she said, pressing the jar into Lexi’s hand. “And when the tomatoes are ready, come and get some. I always have too many.” Lexi took the jar reluctantly, even though she knew Mrs. Doerksen had jars and jars of pickles. She doubted that she’d be able to bring anything in return, though Mama surely would have returned the favour. As they walked away from the door, Lexi thought she heard a man’s voice coming faintly through Mrs. Doerksen’s open window. But she forgot about it as they trudged home in the broiling noonday sun. The skin under her tightly braided hair seemed to be on fire. The blue cheque had disappeared into the brick bank like an ice cube melting in the sun and now Maria carried four dollars and ninetyeight cents in her pocket. Lexi kicked at the patch of dying grass in their scrawny yard, pecked even drier by the chickens. She was just like one of these dried-out tufts of grass, faded and parched, stuck here until it couldn’t help but die.

twenty-three For several days after the visit to the bank, the twenty-four dollars and ninety-eight cents burned in her head like a brush fire. Perhaps enough money to cover the train ticket to Waterloo. She watched Maria feeding the chickens, doing the dishes, helping to make the bread, then scribbling in the notebook that Papa had given her, one of the old yellow notebooks. Maria would glance up at Lexi, then slide her arm across the page if Lexi got too close. She was so much like Willy. Every time Lexi saw the notebook the fire in her head burned harder.

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For the last two weeks she slammed pots and doors, spoke sternly to Hildy and Renate, refused to smile at Papa, and pushed her way around Maria as if she were an unwelcome guest. She felt herself sinking into a familiar place, a place she hadn’t known that she knew so well. She was becoming her Mama. And there was no way around it. She couldn’t pull herself out of it. Thoughts of Waterloo were dead flowers. Maria was determined to help but she dropped things and broke them. She even made a mess of the darning, leaving Lexi to clean up with the same silent, long-suffering expression her Mama had worn, a mask that had finally become her face. When they all lay in bed, Maria closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall. One morning, Maria came into the kitchen with the white envelope in her hand. She held it out to Lexi, her head down, as if it were a peace offering. Lexi opened the envelope and took out the twenty-four dollars. Maria must have gone back to the bank on her own, she realized with a start. “When did you…?” “What’s going on here?” Their Papa had appeared from nowhere. “I was just…” Lexi stared back at him. She was holding the bills in her hand. The look he was giving her made her feel as if she’d been caught robbing a bank. “Where did you get this money?” Papa reached for the bills and took them. “It’s mine, Papa,” said Maria, her voice trembling. “My scholarship money.” “And why is this money not in the bank? Were you not told to deposit it?” He waved the bills at Maria. “Ja, Papa. We did. But Lexi needs…” “Lexi needs what?” “It’s not fair…she didn’t get to go to grade nine…and she wants to go back to Waterloo…” Papa raised his hand with the money in it and for a moment Lexi thought he was going to strike her or grab her arm or.… Instead he slammed the money onto the table. Two coins rolled on the floor. No one moved to pick them up.

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“Is that what this is about? Not going to grade nine? You were never a student like Maria, Aleksandra. You’ve always been a selfish girl. All this restlessness! All this foolish talk of being a nurse.” He spat the word out of his mouth. “But it isn’t fair, Papa, I have a right to…” “This has nothing to do with fair. Who do you think you are? You have responsibilities, not rights. Your mother needed you. And now your sisters need you. Your duties are here.” He pounded the table with his fist. “You’re a wilful, ungrateful, worldly girl.” “But I wanted a chance! I don’t want to be forgotten like you forgot about what happened to Mama when…” The rage in his eyes disappeared and was replaced by something that looked like fear. He winced and stepped back away from her, as if she might strike him. “Enough!” He looked at the envelope on the table. “And a thief as well.” Papa’s voice was shaking. “But Papa, I’m not. I…” She thought her heart was going to explode. “Shame. Taking your sister’s money to run away from us. From us. From your duties. This is a sin against God. Against all of us. You would have broken your Mama’s heart.” He looked over at Hildy and Renate in the corner, clutching their dolls to their chests. “God will decide what rewards you will reap from this. I wash my hands of you.” “But, Papa…” “I will hear no more,” he said as he reached for his Bible and moved towards the bedroom. “You will go. Go back to Waterloo, to that godless family you love so much.” He turned back to Lexi, his knuckles white with gripping the worn leather Bible. “You are shunned. You no longer belong to us. We will pray for God to forgive you.” The silence was broken only by Hildy’s whimpering. Renate shushed her. Lexi’s head suddenly cleared. “How will I pay for the train fare?” “I will pay the train fare and you will pay me back. Every cent.” He looked at Maria. “And you will put your money back in the bank.

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You will not touch it until it is time to buy books for school. Is that clear?” “Ja, Papa,” said Maria, hanging her head. Papa turned and entered his bedroom, slamming the door. Lexi bent down to pick up the two nickels that had rolled out of the envelope. Maria’s shoulders shook with her silent sobbing. Lexi stood up, put her arms around her and let her cry into her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Maria. For being so jealous, so selfish. So ungrateful for your offer.” She pushed away a tear on Maria’s cheek. “But it’s best for you, Liebchen. Now you can go to grade nine without any worries.” Maria looked up. “And I guess you’re going to have to look after the house. Like you wanted to.” “But I didn’t really want to,” said Maria, in a small voice. “I know. But Renate and Hildy will help. Even Papa will help.” She looked over at her little sisters and they jumped up, dropped their dolls and ran to her. “I don’t want you to go,” said Hildy, clutching her skirt. Renate hung back, nodding, brushing frantically at her cheek. “I know. But I have to.” Lexi glanced at Papa’s bedroom door. “He’s never going to forgive me for wanting to go.” “When will you come back?” asked Hildy. “I don’t know, Liebchen.” Papa didn’t come out of his room for the noon meal or for the afternoon. At supper he sat stonily after reading the evening devotions: But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Lexi listened as far as cast down imaginations and mentally closed her ears. She would not bring every thought into captivity. She decided to think about packing. She was leaving early in the morning. She’d walked into town in the afternoon to ask Mr. Dyck from the store if she could get a ride into Hepburn when he made his run for supplies. After supper, the girls wanted her to read stories, play one last

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game of checkers and help them with their dolls’ clothes, anything to distract her from her packing. Finally, she jumped up from the table after letting Hildy win at checkers, ignoring her pleas for one more game. Her sisters watched by lamplight as she threw all of her clothes into the old brown suitcase that she’d first taken to Waterloo. She barely bothered to fold them. Soon they would be useless. She hardly slept that last night. After the girls finally fell asleep, she scribbled a quick note to the Olivers, telling them when she’d be arriving. She’d send it by telegraph the next morning in Hepburn and hope that it got there before she did. She hoped also that they’d take her back. She climbed into bed and the moment she closed her eyes she saw Papa, holding the money in his hand, raising his arm, his words like sledgehammer blows. “Never the student Maria is,” “worldly,” “ungrateful,” “sinner.” She saw Maria and Willy writing in identical yellow notebooks, both approved of by Papa in spite of the fact that she had done all the housework, all the cooking, all the dishes, the chickens, the garden. Looked after Mama. She tried to think of Mama in heaven, saying that it was going to be all right. But Mama didn’t say a thing. Just like Mama, when she left Russia, she was leaving her family, her beloveds, behind. She was leaving, never to return. But unlike Mama, she was choosing her own life over theirs, her own wellbeing over theirs. Selfish, selfish girl. She got up in the earliest light, dressed and made the fire in the kitchen stove. As she poked more logs into the wood stove she saw herself standing in the Olivers’ kitchen, making coffee on the electric range, her feet bare, the radio playing music. Should she write out a list of things for Maria to do? No. Maria would learn what to do and Hildy and Renate would have to pitch in. Papa would supervise closely. And Mrs. Doerksen might help out too. At the very least, she’d send over jams and pickles and baking. Just as she was pouring a cup of coffee for herself she heard Papa’s bedroom door open. She turned slowly to face him. “Good morning, Papa.” He was holding a white envelope in his hand. Without saying anything, he placed it on the table by her plate. “Papa, I…”

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He looked up at her, his face rigid. “I will not speak to you again. You are no longer part of this family or this community. You will send extra money home each month until every cent of this is paid back.” “Please, Papa, I could stay…” But her suitcase was sitting by the door. “No.” He walked over to the stove, poured himself a cup of coffee and took it into his bedroom. The girls said very little at breakfast, not sure what to do without Papa to lead the prayer. “We’ll skip it today,” said Lexi. “Can we, Lexi? Won’t God…?” said Hildy, looking worried. “God will understand.” Papa did not come out of his room to say goodbye. Lexi kissed each of her sisters and held them. At the last moment, she wanted to throw her suitcase back into the bedroom, beg for forgiveness and go on with the day’s chores. “You won’t be allowed to speak of me,” she said, “but we can think about each other. Every day.” She tried to smile at their stricken faces, but burst into tears. Then, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, she pushed herself away from the table and went to check her Mama’s old worn purse to make sure she had the envelope of money that Papa had given her. The chickens scrabbled around her as she walked through the bare yard to the road. When she got to the road, she turned back and waved at the tableau of her three sisters in their long cotton dresses and aprons, arms at their sides, in front of the door of the small wooden house. She saw her sister now as she sped along in the train. Their faces were faint shadows behind the window glass. The ride to Hepburn with Mr. Dyck was already a blur and she got on the train without a hitch. The ticket had cost thirty-one dollars and Papa had given her thirty-five. She would have money for a taxi in Waterloo. She’d packed sandwiches and a large bottle of water. This swaying train, which seemed about to fly off the tracks at every moment, was the same train on which they’d arrived from Russia nine years earlier. Sometime after Winnipeg, she unbraided her hair in the washroom and looked into the mirror. She hadn’t seen herself since last

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January when she left the Olivers’. Now, as she stared at herself in the tarnished glass ripples, she saw that she had dark circles under her eyes and that her face was thinner than when she’d left Waterloo. Her hair hung in straggles, kinky from the two tight braids she’d had wrapped around her head. A dishevelled, sad-looking Mennonite girl in a dark cotton dress, nothing like the excited girl on the train to Waterloo almost a year ago. Everything had seemed possible then. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror as if she were smiling at Dr. Oliver, willing herself to retrieve her old excitement. But the forced smile faded instantly. She wound her hair back into a long braid and made her way back to her seat. Since Winnipeg the train had become full and she now shared her seat with a large middle-aged woman in a dark serge suit and small black felt hat pinned tightly onto grey, frizzy hair. The woman smelled of perspiration and lilac, and there were pale rings of stain under the arms of her jacket. She’d given Lexi one small, stiff smile when she sat down and then ignored her as she settled into a tattered fashion magazine and a salami sandwich. Lexi recognized the magazine. She’d read it in Cammy’s living room. Her eye caught the image of a slender girl with a smooth blonde pageboy haircut wearing a fitted crepe dress with puffy sleeves. The radiant girl in the ad was holding a bar of Camay soap. She fell asleep then and when she woke the woman with the magazine was gone and a tall, thin young man, about Lexi’s age or maybe older, had taken her place. The early morning light glinted off his small round glasses. “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” he said. “Oh,” she said, not sure whether she should speak to him or not. She liked the way his brown hair touched the top of his glasses. “No, you didn’t wake me. Thank you.” Outside, enormous trees were flowing by, maples and elms, giants extending their arms over the gold and green fields of late summer. The air was soft and humid and the sun had just risen above the trees. The dusty prairies and the endless pines were gone, as if a hand had turned the page in an atlas. The young man had turned back to his book and Lexi stole glances at him as she rummaged in her bag for one of her sandwiches. She’d barely eaten since leaving home and she was suddenly starving. “Where are you going?” he asked.

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“Waterloo. I’m going there to my… job.” She hoped that he wouldn’t ask what her job was. “Really! I’m going to Waterloo, too.” He seemed genuinely happy that they were going to the same place. He grinned at her, then looked away. She bit into her sandwich. Should she offer to share it? She made a gesture with her hand towards the other half of the cheese sandwich and he shook his head. “I go to the Lutheran college there, the seminary,” he said. Lexi wondered if a Lutheran seminary was anything like Bible School. He seemed so relaxed and friendly, and it struck her that Willy was probably like that in Kansas. She couldn’t help glancing at him. He was wearing brown wool trousers with cuffs, a little too short for his long legs, and a white shirt, buttoned up. A worn tweed jacket lay on the seat between them. In spite of his buttoned-up clothes he looked comfortable and cool in the August heat. A book lay on his jacket, The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler. He turned to her. “My name’s Ted Bauer.” He held his hand out sideways. “I’m Lexi,” she said. His hand felt large and cool. “Aleksandra, that is.” “Hello, Aleksandra.” She retrieved her hand and looked down at his book. “What’s your book about?” “Well,” he laughed. “This isn’t a book I should really be reading. It’s about a minister and his son, how the father, a complete tyrant and hypocrite, ruins him by punishing him for the least thing and how the son believes that he has to go into the church too, like his father, because it’s his destiny. But he hates it and ends up in prison. I don’t know why yet, I haven’t got that far… ” He smiled at her. “Not exactly what they’re recommending in the seminary for us new recruits.” Lexi stared at the dull orange and brown cover of the book. She wanted to pick it up and start reading. Could someone really write a book like that? She looked up at Ted. “Was your father a minister?” “Yeah, I’m afraid so. But not nearly as bad as old Theobald Pontifex. Isn’t that a great name?” “Mine too,” she said.

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“Pardon?” “Mennonite. My father’s a Mennonite minister and teacher.” She glanced at the heavy black shoes sticking out from under her long dark skirt and then back up at him. “I guess you noticed.” “Well, I wasn’t completely sure. Don’t Mennonite girls usually wear those little…hats and have their hair tied up under it?” Lexi laughed. “The Old Order do. We’re a bit more …well, I wouldn’t say modern, but…we don’t wear the veil, as they call it. But we do keep our hair tied up. Usually.” Ted laughed too. Then he shook his finger at her, pretending to look stern. “Du bist nicht ein gutes Mädchen!” Lexi knew he was joking, telling her she wasn’t a good girl, but the German words suddenly brought back the image of her three sisters standing by the door, watching her walk away from them, her Papa’s stern face somewhere in the background, banishing her. She smiled bravely, but her eyes were welling up. “Hey, I didn’t mean…I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, Aleksandra. Really. That was rude of me…” “No, it’s just that…I can’t really talk about it.” She looked out the window at the zigzagging rail fences beyond which a group of men stood in a field around a large threshing machine. Even from a distance she could tell by their discouraged postures that the machine had broken down. When she turned back to Ted, he’d picked up his book but wasn’t reading it. He sat with it in his lap, staring straight ahead. “I’d like to read that sometime,” she said. Ted looked surprised. “Well, sure,” he said. “I’ll lend it to you after I’ve finished it. Which won’t be long. I could bring it to your work.” She smiled at him. “Thank you. I work for a doctor, Dr. Gerald Oliver. On King Street. Do you know him?” “No, I’ve never lived in Waterloo. But I think that the seminary is on King Street. Isn’t that a coincidence? We’ll be just down the road from each other.” He smiled back happily. When she didn’t answer, he went on. “We moved around a lot. Small country parishes. Wingham, Brodhagen, Walkerton. And a couple of others. Have you ever been to any of those places?” She shook her head. “Well, you haven’t missed much.”

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“Where are you coming from now?” she asked. “I was just visiting my sister in Sudbury. She’s married to an engineer. Just had a baby. I wanted to see him before I got too busy with the seminary.” Lexi nodded. Soon she’d be seeing Sally and Simon. In fact, the outskirts of Toronto had begun to appear. “Excuse me,” she said getting up. He instantly leapt into the aisle to let her pass. In the washroom she saw that her cheeks had gotten some colour and that her eyes looked more alive. She undid her long braid and her hair fell in soft waves down her back. She quickly brushed her teeth with the little toothbrush she had put in her purse, even though she had no tooth powder. In a couple of hours she’d be in Waterloo. Ted once again stood up when she came back and took the seat by the window. She was too excited to think of anything but her arrival in Waterloo. Ted seemed to sense she was thinking about other things and went back to his book. When the train finally stopped in Union Station, Ted, who had only a small leather case of his own, insisted on carrying Lexi’s old brown cardboard suitcase up the stairs. They stood side by side on the platform, waiting for the Waterloo train. She wished she could wait by herself. She needed time to think. But she was also glad that Ted was there. That meant that she couldn’t think. By the time they got to Waterloo, Ted had told her about his childhood, about how his father had moved from country parish to country parish, never staying anywhere for more than three or four years. “Why did you move so often? Did the church make you move?” “No, we didn’t really have to move. It’s just that Dad gets…discouraged. He starts to think that the congregation doesn’t like him anymore. He has this nervous condition.” “Oh.” Lexi wasn’t sure what to say. She immediately thought of Cammy. “It’s not like he’s crazy or anything. He just needs a lot of rest. My Mom pampers him. It calms him down.” He looked at her as if gauging her reaction. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a good minister. He visits every single sick and shut-in. And they love his sermons. Some of them are even quite poetic. And they love him. He’s the one that thinks they don’t.” “Why do you want to be a minister?” Lexi asked.

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“I…I think I have a calling. And I want to help people. Not just visiting them, you know, but helping them with their problems, being of some real use. I want to change the way we do things. Start some groups that actually do something.” Lexi half smiled at him, wondered what he would think if he knew that she’d been shunned by her Papa, that she could never again be a member of the church. Never set foot in his house again. Never eat with her brothers and sisters. Probably never know their children. And they, in turn, would never get to know her children…if she ever had children now. If she ever married. Would her family all turn against her in the end? Would they all think of her as dead? Like poor Rudy Friesen. She remembered something Papa said about that shunning. He said that shunning was the only way to preserve the integrity of the community without violence. But how terribly, terribly heartless and cold. When she said nothing he hurried on. “I don’t know much about the Mennonite church, but the Lutheran church has been too concerned with sin. Luther flagellating himself, wallowing in punishment. All that old stuff. Like Pontifex.” He slapped the book. “I want to concentrate on love.” Lexi imagined kissing him. She didn’t think that he was thinking of that kind of love. “The Mennonites are the same,” she said. “That’s why I’m leaving.” “You’re leaving?” She enjoyed the shocked look on his face. “Ja, as soon as I get back to Waterloo. First of all, I’ll be getting rid of these clothes. Once and for all.” She grabbed a handful of her skirt. “My employer, Mrs. Oliver, gave me a bunch of her clothes when I was here before. They made me feel…” She thought of Ted seeing her in a fashionable dress. Maybe he only liked religious girls. “Well, I don’t think you should leave the church just because you disagree with some of its ideas. My idea is to change things, not destroy them. The church has done a lot of good in the world. Think of the missionaries, of all the refugees the church has helped, the…” “We were refugees.” “There. See? My point exactly. Were you not helped by the church?”

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“Ja, but we were also helped by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the government. They wanted to populate the prairies with good workers.” “But surely your church helped you to escape? Where did you come from?” “Russia. I was nine. I…my mother died in February.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Aleksandra.” She thought for a moment he was going to touch her, but he looked away and then down at his book. “Maybe you could come to the Lutheran church and give us a try,” he said. Everything in her recoiled. She hoped he couldn’t see it in her face. “Thank you. I don’t think so. Not yet. I need to think. Get back to my job. I…” She glanced away, towards the window. The train was pulling into the Waterloo station.

twenty-four Dr. Oliver was standing on the platform, with Lexi’s telegram sticking out of his shirt pocket. A flower unfolded in her chest, a brilliant thin-skinned poppy like the ones in the Olivers’ back garden. It had been the right thing to do, to leave her family and come back here where she was wanted, where she was appreciated. He held out his hand to help her down. “Welcome back, Aleksandra,” he said. His fingers were hot, sticky. His smile seemed strained. He was not his usual jovial self. She guessed that he might be surprised to see her in her old clothes. She must look like a plain old-fashioned skinny doll, the colours worn off its face. When Ted handed over her suitcase Dr. Oliver quickly shook his hand and immediately turned towards the parking lot. Lexi said a hurried goodbye to Ted, as if now that she and Dr. Oliver were together they had much more important things to do than to stand around a train station talking. Ted called out as they walked away, “I’ll bring you the book!” and Lexi waved. She was surprised that the streets of Waterloo looked so dusty. The lawns had brown patches and the huge maples, oaks and elms,

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which had seemed so glorious from the train, were a faded end-ofsummer dull green. Still, Waterloo looked much richer and lusher than Saskatchewan and the large red brick houses, with their wide white porches, promised cool and inviting interiors. Like this yellow car, with its familiar smell of leather and Old Spice. She glanced at Dr. Oliver. Ruddy cheeks, slicked-back dark hair, white shirt and tie, dark pleated trousers. He looked heavier than she remembered, not quite as handsome as he’d been six months before. “Good trip?” he asked, not turning to look at her. “Ja, thank you. It was long.” “Well, I’m sure you’re tired. You look tired.” “Do I?” She could feel her cheeks beat up into red. “Well, I only meant that you’ve had a long trip and a hard winter.” He glanced at her. “You look thinner too.” He’d touched her cheek with his fingers the day she left, kissed her other cheek. It had been so cold and snowy outside and yet she’d felt radiantly warm, enveloped in heat. Now, although the day was hot and humid, she felt cold. Something had happened in her absence. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. “We were surprised that you were able to come back so soon.” “My sister, Maria…” Her throat was constricting. What was Maria doing at this very moment? Cooking potatoes on the wood stove, dealing with Papa’s black looks? She took a deep breath. “My sister Maria is looking after things. She wants to. And they need me to send money home.” “Speaking of money,” he said, “we’ve decided to give you a raise. We’ve had to pay Georgie more to keep her from going back to the restaurant, so we’re going to pass that on to you. From now on, you’ll make seven dollars a month instead of five.” He sounded pleased with himself. “Thank you,” she said, suddenly feeling shy. She could use the extra two dollars to pay back Papa. “Rich or poor, people get sick and die,” he continued, coughing out a laugh. Lexi felt uncomfortable. And confused. “I’ll always be in demand, Aleksandra, not like some pathetic folk in this town scrounging around and begging and wearing rags.” Did he think she wore rags? Did he think she was pathetic?

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“Well, here we are,” he said, pulling into the driveway. The house looked smaller and duller than she remembered. “The children have been waiting.” The car entered the open garage and Lexi looked numbly at the corner where Dr. Oliver had kissed her, a thousand years ago now. He was being businesslike as he took her suitcase out of the back seat and closed the garage door, oblivious, it seemed, to any memories. Sally and Simon jumped down from their chairs by the window where they’d been watching and shyly approached her when she walked into the kitchen. “You look different,” said Simon. She bent to kiss them. “You’ve both grown so tall!” Georgie stood grinning by the cupboard, her arms folded casually across her chest. She opened them to hug Lexi. “Hiya, kiddo,” she said, kissing her on the cheek. “We missed you.” “We made a cake! We made a cake!” Sally pointed to the large round cake covered in heavy white icing and wobbly words in turquoise, “Welcome back, Lexi.” “I suppose you’re all going to gorge yourselves now,” Cammy said, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, frowning, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, as if in Lexi’s honour, and held it high above her head as she approached. “Welcome home, darling,” she drawled, pecking Lexi on the cheek. “Georgie, for one, is absolutely delighted to have you back. We all are, aren’t we?” Cammy glanced at Dr. Oliver, who was standing by the back door. She lowered herself onto a kitchen chair and draped one of her bare legs over another chair. Her long, thin legs were tanned and she was wearing shorts. “Well, my dear,” she said, “you’re even more slender. It’s very becoming. But we’ve got to get rid of those clothes again. Can’t have you running around like you just got off the boat. You wouldn’t like that, would you, Gerald?” “Aleksandra can wear whatever she pleases.” Dr. Oliver scowled and walked across the kitchen to the opposite doorway. “Not staying for cake?” called out Cammy. “I have to get back to the hospital,” he called out from the hallway. “Save me a piece.” In a moment he was back in the kitchen, wearing

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his suit jacket and jingling the car keys. He looked at Lexi. “We’re all very glad to have you back,” he said solemnly before he opened the back door and went out to the garage. Cammy laughed and lit another cigarette. “Let’s cut the cake,” said Simon, sticking his finger into the icing. “I’m hungry.” “Sure. If it’s all right with your mother,” said Georgie, getting a knife out of the drawer. “It’s only four-thirty.” “Why wouldn’t it be? It’s not every day the prodigal daughter returns.” She giggled and squinted her eyes at Lexi. “Well, you know what I mean.” Georgie cut five slices of cake and put them on plates. The children seated themselves at the table beside Cammy. “Oh, I’m not having any,” said Cammy as Georgie put her plate in front of her. “I think I’ll have a scotch instead. Lexi, you remember how to pour scotch? Three fingers. No, actually, make that four. Run and get me one, will you?” Lexi and Georgie exchanged glances as Lexi set down her plate and left to get Cammy’s drink. A hard stone felt wedged somewhere behind her eyes. As she found the scotch bottle and the crystal glass, she imagined Hildy, Renate, Maria and her Papa sitting down to dinner around the threadbare checkered oilcloth, Papa saying a long prayer. The place where she always sat would be an empty hole just like Mama’s place had become. Would he even mention her name in the prayer? Of course he wouldn’t. What a silly thought. How could she have left them all? And with Mama so recently gone. How would it feel right now around that table with two of them gone? She filled up the glass to just over three fingers and then tilted the bottle down to her lips. The scotch stung her throat as she hurriedly stuffed the cork back into the bottle. Maybe it would dissolve the stone behind her eyes. Georgie didn’t stay long. She had to get back, she said, to help her mother in the restaurant. After casually patting each of the children on the head, she promised to come the next day to help Lexi ease back in. With Cammy in the room, they had barely talked. After the cake, Lexi took her suitcase up to her room. The pink chenille bedspread lay on the little iron bed, placid and unruffled,

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and Cammy’s clothes lay there too, folded neatly as she’d left them. Trousers and dresses hung in the closet like strangers who had once been friends. The room smelled musty. It was hot. Her head felt fuzzy from the scotch and she slid the window open. She unpacked her few belongings, her other cotton dress, her two white blouses and purple skirt, her black stockings and plain underwear and then didn’t know where to put them. Under Cammy’s things in the dresser? Back in her suitcase? She’d had the idea when she came up to her room that she’d change into some of Cammy’s clothes, but now she didn’t want to. Her sisters seemed to be in the room with her, watching her every move. She left her suitcase open on the floor and her clothes in a small pile on the bed, washed her face and hands in the tiny bathroom and brushed her hair. She decided, finally, to change into one of her own skirts and a white long-sleeved blouse. When she was dressed, she looked at herself in the mirror. She was no longer the faded doll who had gotten off the train and she wasn’t the girl in a magazine ad either. Maybe she was something in between. Nothing seemed clear anymore. During supper, Simon and Sally stared at her and smiled awkwardly when she caught their eyes. Cammy wandered in and out of the kitchen, drinking scotch and looking wilder and more distracted than Lexi remembered. She hadn’t said a word about Lexi’s mother. Lexi thought she heard her mumbling to herself a couple of times. After supper Cammy and the children disappeared and she was relieved to work at simple, familiar tasks. She was looking out the window, thinking of her sisters washing their supper dishes too, when she heard the back door of the kitchen open behind her. “Well, I see that you’re already hard at work.” Dr. Oliver’s voice had softened from its brusque matter-of-factness earlier in the day. She turned from the sink and smiled at him, feeling a warmth rising in her cheeks. “Oh, it’s nothing. Only the dishes.” He put his briefcase on the kitchen table and sat down to watch her. “Any coffee left?” “No, but I could make some.” She reached for a towel to dry her hands.

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“Don’t bother. I’ll get myself a drink.” He made a move to get up. “It wouldn’t be any trouble. There’s some cake, too.” She knew she was blushing deeply now. He was looking at her as if he might be remembering kissing her in the garage. “I…” “Don’t say anything, Aleksandra.” He got up from his chair and moved towards her. When he was very close, he touched her cheek. “You’re still far too beautiful,” he said, his voice low and almost gruff. “I was hoping that…perhaps…things might be different.” He leaned over to kiss her cheek. The nearness of his breath made her want to weep. She felt it rising up in her, the torrent of grief that she had pushed down and down. Her Mama dying, her Papa’s shunning of her, her abandoning her sisters and yet desiring to abandon them too. All she wanted was for Dr. Oliver to hold her, to put his arms around her and let her weep. But his mouth had moved to her mouth. She was shocked and wanted him to stop, and yet her body moved closer to his. Running footsteps sounded in the hall. He jerked away from her, quickly turning to pick up his briefcase from the table. “Hi, Daddy,” sang Sally. “You missed supper. Is Lexi going to make you some?” “Yes, I was just asking her to,” he said, loosening his tie and smiling at his daughter. “It’s good to have her back, isn’t it?” He glanced at her and winked. Her face was on fire. Would Sally notice? It was excruciating to have to stand there, burning, and to smile meekly at Sally. “I’ll be back in a little while, Aleksandra,” said Dr. Oliver, moving towards the hallway. “Just a sandwich will be fine. And some coffee, if you wouldn’t mind. Come on, Sallykins, let’s find Mommy.” He took Sally’s hand and left the kitchen. Lexi fell into a chair as soon as they’d left and let the tears that had been gathering behind her eyes flow silently. Now she knew, even though it made everything even more impossible than ever. She’d been pretending that she didn’t care, that she could make herself forget Dr. Oliver. But this feeling, this desire, had taken her over again. It didn’t care about if it was a good or bad thing, or whether he was married to Cammy. It was terrible, as if the devil had entered her. The

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spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. She felt it in every pore of her being. She was a bad girl, a sinner. She always would be. “Missing your family?” Cammy strolled into the kitchen and sat beside Lexi at the table. Lexi nodded and brushed at her cheeks. “I would die if anything happened to Mommy.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a silver lighter. “And I don’t even like her that much. But she’s like an anchor, you know? I’d float away if I didn’t know she was there. Like flotsam and jetsam. I love that phrase. You’re like that too. Like Mommy, I mean.” Lexi tried to smile. She didn’t want to be like an anchor. “Would you mind terribly putting the children to bed? I’ve got a headache and can’t possibly read to them tonight. And Gerald wants me.” She sighed. “Sure. I’ll just make Dr. Oliver a sandwich and leave it for him. And some coffee.” “Oh, never mind that. He doesn’t want it now. He told me to tell you.” “Oh.” She wanted to collapse. “Good night, Lexi. Sleep well,” said Cammy, cheerily. Lexi dragged herself upstairs and found the children already in their pyjamas and waiting for their story. As she read them Winnie the Pooh, they snuggled up against her, completely absorbed and for a few moments she felt comforted by the warmth of their small bodies. She tried to ignore the voices of Cammy and Dr. Oliver wafting up from the living room. They were drinking and hurling insults at each other. As she slid into her own bed half an hour later, getting under the chenille bedspread and closing her eyes, the day finally over, she felt again the rocking of the train. But instead of being on a railway track she felt as if she were in a dark sea, neither flotsam or jetsam nor an anchor, but something like a fish, quietly rocking, holding itself still with its fluttering fins, breathing in water, waiting, not knowing whether to dive down or to float up.

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twenty-five Lexi had just finished making the coffee. Dr. Oliver hadn’t come down yet and the children would sleep for another hour. “I can’t believe you’re back, Lex.” Georgie bounced through the back door, smiling. Her hair had grown longer and was now an unruly bush that she’d tied up into a messy ponytail with a scarf. She wore a short skirt, a wrinkled blouse and block-heeled shoes with socks. She took two cups down from the cupboard, set them on the table and relaxed into a chair before she lit her cigarette. “You’ve had a hell of a time, eh, kiddo?” Lexi poured the coffee. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. All I wanted to do was to come back here. But it feels so…strange. I wanted to come back so much and now I’m not so sure.” “Worried about your sisters?” “Ja. But they’ll be all right. Maria gets along better with my Papa than I do. I miss them. But I couldn’t stay. My Papa thinks I’m a thief.” “A thief! Why?” “He thinks I was going to take Maria’s scholarship money to run away from home. She offered it to me and I couldn’t help but think about it. But, it would have been wrong. I didn’t want to. Well…not really.” “What didn’t you want?” asked Dr. Oliver. He’d come into the kitchen carrying the morning paper. Lexi and Georgie both jumped up from the table and Georgie hurriedly stubbed out her cigarette. “I didn’t want to use my sister’s scholarship money for the train fare. To come back. And I didn’t. My Papa lent me the money.” Georgie was giving her a look that said shut up. “You have to pay back your father?” “He doesn’t really have the money. Although he would give it to me if he could. But I’ll send him the two extra dollars a month…” “Hmmm. Coffee ready?” Lexi hurried to pour him a cup and went to the icebox to get out the cream. Georgie began slicing bread for toast.

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Dr. Oliver took a quick gulp of coffee and opened the paper. Georgie buttered the toast and Lexi slathered it with blueberry jam, his favourite. She placed it on the table in front of him. “Thanks. And by the way, Aleksandra, it’s good to see you looking like yourself again. I hope you slept well?” He smiled at her and she flushed. She was wearing a pair of Cammy’s trousers and a yellow blouse. Her freshly washed hair hung down her back. “Ja, I did. Thank you.” She’d woken up out of an exhausted sleep at four and been wracked until dawn with the memory of his kiss. He turned back to the paper, ate his toast and drank his coffee while the two girls hovered, not daring to speak. Finally, he closed the paper and stood up. Lexi felt him leave with her whole body. “Whew!” she said, sinking into a chair. “Hey, kiddo, what’s wrong?” “He just makes me feel nervous. I’m not used to him anymore.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Well, good. Now tell me about this John Doerksen.” “No. You tell me about Wayne.” Georgie turned pink and took a minute to find another cigarette. “He wants to marry me,” she said, exhaling. “Oh, Georgie. Do you love him?” Lexi had a vision of Georgie in a wedding dress, shuffling down a long aisle, grinning happily. “I guess so. He even brought me tiger lilies once. That was a surprise!” Lexi laughed. “What does he do?” “Mechanic. Car jockey. Down at Schwartz Motors. He’ll never get his stupid fingernails clean. He even gets it on his nose. But what’s a little grease, eh?” Georgie blushed. “I think you’re in love,” said Lexi. “Yeah, maybe. He wants to save up for a house, so when I get pregnant…we can move out of Mom’s place.” Lexi smiled at her friend. “I’m happy for you. That all sounds… good.” “Not exactly running off to Toronto, like we planned, eh?” Georgie took a long drag of her cigarette. “But what would I do in Toronto? Work in another restaurant. Meet another guy. Do the same thing. Might as well do it here, I guess.” Was it like that? thought Lexi. Was that all there was?

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“But do you feel happy when you’re with him?” She wanted to ask Georgie if she felt desire, a desire so vigorous it hurt, but she felt she couldn’t. “He doesn’t talk much. And I sort of tag along. It’s fun. His idea of a good time is to take one of his beat-up old jalopies out for a drive on the raceway. Not that any of them could really race.” “What does he look like?” “Oh, just ordinary. Nothing to write home about.” Georgie looked away. “He’s kinda fat. Not ugly fat, just big. You know?” Lexi nodded. “He eats most of his meals in the back of the restaurant. Which makes Mom real happy. They get along good.” They looked at each other. Georgie shrugged and then took a long drag of her cigarette. “OK, kiddo, your turn. Spill the beans. Who’s this John Doerksen?” “There’s nothing to tell. I’m never going back. I’m never going to marry him, even though he moons at me like an old cow.” Georgie laughed. “Oh, come on, Lex. He can’t be that bad.” “The thought of living in Millheim, or even Saskatoon, for the rest of my life with someone so…I don’t know…boring, so Mennonite…” “Wow. You really have changed.” Georgie stared at her for a moment. “Well, Wayne’s boring too, if you get right down to it. They all are. At least the good ones. Frank wasn’t, but look what happened.” There was a small silence between them. Surely that wasn’t true, that all the good ones were boring. Dr. Oliver wasn’t boring. Or their actor friends. Maybe they’re not all nice but at least they have some life, she thought. “I think you’re wrong, Georgie. I think…” Georgie looked at her and smirked. “I want things to be different somehow. I don’t exactly know how, but I just think that they can be. Otherwise…” “Boy, I never had you pegged for such a dreamer, Lex. I just wanna get married to a guy who’s gonna bring home a paycheque, have a bunch of kids and make the best of it. What else is there? It’s better than the restaurant.” She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up and stretched, as if she suddenly felt energized.

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Lexi laughed. “We’ve switched roles! You’re more like a Mennonite and I’ve become a worldly dreamer. Perhaps you’d be happy where I just came from? You could catch a train west and go and look after my little sisters.” Georgie shrugged and looked up at the clock. “Maybe it will be different for you, Lex. I’m not beautiful like you. Maybe being beautiful makes a difference.” Georgie didn’t sound the least bit envious. “Well, we’d better get to work. You want to get the kids up?” Lexi looked at the clock. It was already eight-thirty. She ran upstairs, her feet sinking silently into the deep carpet. She was glad to escape Georgie and the kitchen for a moment, glad to have a few seconds for her thoughts. Surely Georgie was wrong, surely. She had a fleeting thought of Ted’s book, The Way of All Flesh. Hadn’t the son run away from the stern minister father to another life? A much better life, surely. Georgie left the Olivers on Lexi’s eighteenth birthday. September eighth, only a week after Lexi had come back. Sally and Simon carefully stuck eighteen candles into the cake Georgie had brought from the restaurant. A card had arrived the day before from her sisters, homemade with crayoned yellow daisies, red tulips and a heart, inside of which Maria had written: Some say love is like a flower That blooms and fades away. But we miss you every single hour Every minute of the day. Under the printed signatures of Hildy and Renate, Maria had carefully signed, “Love, Maria.” And under that she had written “DO NOT WRITE BACK. PAPA DOESN’T KNOW WE’VE WRITTEN.”

Lexi had placed the card on her dresser, and sobbed. Cammy came into the kitchen wearing a long peach silk evening dress, cut on the bias, that clung to her bony hips. Around her shoulders she’d flung another silk scarf, a delicate blue. Her hair was pinned up with rhinestone clips. Little wavy curls, looking still wet, framed

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her cheeks. In her right hand she held the black cigarette holder studded with rhinestones that she used for parties, and in her left hand she held a bottle. Dark red toenails flashed from under her skirt. “What’s a party without champagne! Especially an eighteenth birthday. You know, darling, that you are now grown up?” She stared intently at Lexi. “When I was your age, Mommy gave me my first real party. I was the belle of the ball.” Cammy waltzed around the kitchen with the champagne bottle until she bumped into the cupboard. Sally and Simon watched her warily. “Oh, come on, darlings. Cheer up! Georgie, open this.” She thrust the bottle at Georgie. “Let’s have a little fun for a change.” Georgie popped the cork while Lexi got champagne glasses from the dining room. “Now I know it’s only four in the afternoon, but I’m going to make a toast. A toast to Lexi.” Cammy held up her glass. Was she already slurring her words? “Lexi is…no, Lexi came to us from the wilds of the west, from the outback of Saskatchewan, that outback of all outbacks, from the poorest…circumstances and Lexi has been…a wonderful girl…” Cammy smiled a too-wide smile. “Just look at you. You could almost be…” Cammy pulled the blue silk scarf from around her neck. “Here! Your birthday gift from me.” Lexi took it from her, blinking and not knowing what to do or where to look. “Thank you, I…” She put the scarf on the table and took a long drink of her champagne. “Let’s have some birthday cake,” said Georgie. “Come here, Sally. Help me light the candles. Lexi, sit down. Think of a wish.” Georgie placed a small, badly wrapped gift in front of the cake and Simon placed a larger gift, wrapped with silver paper and a bow, beside it. Lexi was touched by the gifts. She took another gulp of champagne and liked how the alcohol buzzed up behind her nose, how it seemed almost instantly to fizz in her brain. She’d hardly eaten all day. She’d hardly been able to eat since she came back to the Olivers. She took another sip and smiled. Cammy came up behind her and draped the blue scarf around her neck.

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They sang “Happy Birthday” as Georgie carried the cake to the table. “Wish for anything you want, darling,” said Cammy. “But don’t tell. Daddy says you’re not allowed to tell,” said Sally. Lexi laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll never tell.” The champagne was making her feel lovely and light and the room swam in beautiful colours. Cammy’s peach dress shimmered in the square of afternoon sun hitting the table. Surrounded by their smiles, she felt loved. She closed her eyes and almost swayed. Her wish had something to do with Dr. Oliver, but it was fuzzy and unclear. And then, just before she opened her eyes, her sisters appeared and vanished just as quickly. “Now blow!” said Simon. She blew around the cake and got all the candles except one. “Your wish won’t come true,” said Sally. “Can I blow it out for you, Lexi?” “Sure. Blow away.” She’d never felt so light-headed, so lighthearted. These people were her friends. She could feel her eyes shining. Cammy was pouring more champagne and she wanted it. She ate the large piece of chocolate cake that Georgie placed in front of her, ravenously. “Aren’t you going to open your presents?” asked Sally. She picked up the silver package first, knowing that Cammy had probably ordered this from a department store. In a silver box lay a pale blue silk nightgown with lace around the deep neckline. Lexi gasped. “It’s beautiful! Thank you.” “Mommy picked it out,” said Sally. “She said you only have old flannel nighties. That they should be thrown away.” Cammy laughed. “Did I really say that?” “Open this!” Simon thrust the other gift at her. “Georgie helped us picked it out.” Lexi unwrapped the small package. It was a bottle of eau-decologne. She unscrewed the lid, sniffed, and smiled at Georgie. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s lovely. My first perfume.” “I want to try it.” Sally edged up beside Lexi and grabbed the bottle from her. “Sally!” said Georgie, reaching for the bottle. But Sally was pour-

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ing the cologne into her palm. “I want to smell just like Lexi,” Sally said. Cammy disappeared into the living room and in a moment they heard the gramophone blaring. The very thought of you…makes my heart sing… Cammy waltzed in, grabbed Lexi and whirled her around. They danced awkwardly. Lexi had never danced, at least not since she was young and danced in circles around Mama. She couldn’t manage her legs. She couldn’t stop her head spinning. Or was it the room? Georgie took Sally’s and Simon’s hands and swung them around. Lexi could smell flowery Blumenort, the blossoms from the trees, the sticky sweet watermelon syrup. She could feel her Oma and her Tantes watching her, watching her swing and sail up towards the sky. She turned to wave to them. Dr. Oliver stood by the back door. She felt a flash of disappointment and then amusement. Nothing stayed stuck in her head, one moment, one feeling, rushed into another. She laughed. “Dr. Oliver!” she called out. “Come and dance. It’s my birthday!” She laughed some more as Cammy pulled her around again. “Oh, come on, darling. Don’t be a stick in the mud. Here.” Cammy took Lexi’s arms by the wrists and held them out towards him, offering her. Dr. Oliver glared at Cammy. Her hair had fallen down and her lipstick had slid off her lips. He refused to look at Lexi, who continued to smile, vaguely aware that the muscles in her cheeks were starting to strain. He brushed by both of them, heading into the hallway that led to the dining room. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Cammy, I want to talk to you. Immediately.” Cammy let Lexi’s arms drop and winked at her. “Oh, he’s mad,” she said. “Mad as a hatter.” She fumbled with her cigarettes, managed to insert a new one into her holder and light it. Then she picked up her glass, lifted up her skirt, and padded off to the dining room. They heard a door slam. “I don’t want any more birthday cake,” said Sally. She reeked of cologne. “Me either,” said Simon. “Time to clean up.” Georgie was gathering the plates. “I’ve got to get going. You two run and play in the yard for a while.”

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After the children had left, Georgie put her hand on Lexi’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Those two are crackers. He’s just as bad as she is.” Lexi’s eyes were wet. She couldn’t help it. She stood looking at the ravaged birthday cake, feeling dizzy and awful. How could she feel so…so perfect one moment and then the next so empty? Lexi took off the blue scarf, folded it into a square, and placed it in the box with the nightie. “I’m going to make some coffee.” She hiccupped. “Want some?” “Just one cup. I’ve got to get to the restaurant. Wayne’s waiting.” She looked at Lexi with a small smile. “As of today, I no longer work here.” The next day a letter arrived from Willy. Lexi tore it open. She still had a headache and her eyes were scratchy. Dear Lexi, I was very surprised to hear of your sudden departure from home. Papa wrote that you’d gone back to Waterloo. That you were not coming back. What happened? Surely you haven’t run away. Could this possibly be true? You know Maria can’t take on all the responsibilities, even though I know that you did at her age. But you are so much more practical than Maria will ever be.

Was that supposed to be a compliment? She’d never had a chance to be anything other than practical. It wasn’t fair of Willy to lump her into the category that most Mennonite women got lumped into. Was she always to be the practical one while Maria got to be the student? Was she always to be the Martha preparing the dinner while Mary sat at Jesus’s feet? Was she always to be “only just a girl”? The letter went on about his studies and about how, in spite of the heavy teaching schedule they’d given him for the school year, he was working on his book. Once again, he wrote, Don’t tell Papa!! Lexi thought about The Way of All Flesh. Was he writing a book like that? Emma and I are becoming closer by the day. Soon you may be invited to a wedding here. But don’t mention this to Papa or the girls. We want to wait to tell them.

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A wedding in Kansas. She wouldn’t possibly be able to go. If Papa had really shunned her, he wouldn’t allow her near the family. The letter ended with birthday wishes and Willy telling her that she was now grown up. Why did everyone say she was now grown up as if she hadn’t been forced to act as if she were grown up for years? It felt ominous and deadly to be so “grown up” at eighteen, as if she would now suddenly leap to being a forty-year-old woman, forever having lost her chances for adventure, for another life. That morning when she’d come down to the kitchen to make breakfast, she felt anything but grown up. Dr. Oliver had hardly spoken to her. He hurriedly drank his coffee and left for the hospital. And now Georgie was gone. Georgie was going to work in her mother’s restaurant, marry Wayne and disappear. She put Willy’s letter in her pocket, went to the downstairs bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were almost turquoise with a pale brown sunburst that radiated out of the pupils, making them look green and deep. There was something steady and fierce in the way her eyes looked back at her. She liked that, how they refused to waver. Sometimes she could feel them blazing, as if they were on fire, electric. They were like Mama’s eyes. Mama’s eyes in her wedding picture, and Mama’s eyes just before she died. She imagined Mama scolding her for being vain, for staring at herself. But this wasn’t like that. If only she could see that thing she knew was alive in her, that thing which refused to be sucked dry, even by the great Depression that was all around her. Try to erase bitterness. What did that actually mean? Was she a bitter person? Or might she become one? Perhaps Mama meant to be careful or she would become bitter, like she had. If all she became was a housekeeper for the Olivers, she’d become bitter. If she didn’t become a nurse. Yes. If she didn’t become a nurse she’d become bitter. Her eyes told her that. And so did her Mama.

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twenty-six She heard their voices arguing in their bedroom as she was falling asleep. Dr. Oliver’s was like a growl, rising and falling. Cammy whined and then laughed her crazy laugh. Then silence. She heard the thump of a chair, the door being opened and then firmly closed as someone slip-slopped to the bathroom and back. She thought she heard someone turn over in bed but that was impossible. She imagined Willy in Kansas scribbling furiously, Emma at his side, waiting for him to finish his book, watching as he wrote a letter to his sister, waiting for him to ask her to marry him. She thought of Renate, Hildy and Maria putting on their long nightgowns over their dresses and then slipping the dresses off underneath before they crawled into bed in the small house, where the only sounds would be the crickets in the prairie grass and the occasional hoot owl or coyote. Lying in her narrow bed on the third floor of this large brick house, she felt as if she were on a small raft floating above Cammy and Dr. Oliver and the children. But she was also anchored to this house, to its swaying and heaving in currents of turmoil, excitement and sadness. She closed her eyes, thinking of the son in The Way of All Flesh struggling with the destiny his father had imposed on him. She saw the son running into a dark fog as she fell asleep. In the dream something heavy pressed down on the top of her head, like a sea animal with snaky legs, wriggling. She tried to brush it off, felt herself struggling, trying to call out. Her hand rose to her forehead and she woke with a terrible start. There were real fingers on her hair. A hand came gently to her mouth and stopped there, preventing her from screaming. “Shhhh,” he said softly. “It’s only me, Aleksandra.” “Dr. Oliver!” she blurted, in a low whisper, through his fingers. What was wrong? Were the children sick? Cammy? Did he need her help? His hand stroked her hair again. His fingers were part sea animal, seaweed, slippery, thick and salty. The back of her throat thickened. The bulk of his body sitting on her bed weighed it down on one side, tipping her towards him. She felt his buttocks against her hip

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and tried to move away but she was falling towards him. He was staring at her face, smiling tightly looking into her eyes. A thin, pale light was coming in from the window over her bed. She could smell alcohol on his breath. “You’re so beautiful,” he said softly, still gazing. She could smell soap on the fingers of his hand, it moved from her mouth to her cheek. A finger traced the outline of her cheekbone. “What’s wrong? Should I get up and…?” she said in a ragged whisper. Her breath had jammed in her lungs, making it almost impossible to speak. Again his fingers came to her lips and closed them as someone might close the eyes of a dead person. As she had closed the eyes of her poor Mama. “Shhh, Aleksandra. Don’t talk.” He leaned over and kissed her lips, urgently, and she felt something stir in her in spite of her terror. “Yes,” he whispered. “You want this too.” She tried to shake her head no, but his kiss became harder. The faint fragrance of Old Spice, left over from the morning, mingled with the whisky on his breath and the sharp odour of perspiration coming from under the arms of his silk pyjama top. His lips were pressing, bruising hers, and she tried to move her head away, but his tongue jabbed into her mouth and then he seemed to be swallowing her whole face with his mouth. She could barely breathe. No, she needed to say no, to let him know this was wrong, but her mouth, her tongue, her lips were pressed flat, paralyzed by his. Like dried pressed flowers under a heavy, heavy book. She tried to turn away, tried to curl into a ball, but a heavy arm fell across her waist, pinning her down and then, without taking his mouth from her face, he quickly shifted from a sitting position to lying on top of her. One hand held her head, pulling her hair. The other grabbed at the blankets between them. He jerked his body up and down as he yanked the covers away and flung them to the floor. The buttons of his pyjama top pressed into her belly and then a hand shoved her nightie up until it bunched around her waist. The hand fumbled with her underpants and worked them down over her right leg. He paused for a moment. He was feeling her rags and she prayed that her bleeding would stop him. But he was used to blood. He shoved the underpants

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and rags down her left leg and flung them to the floor. Her legs felt fragile as matchsticks under the monstrous weight of his body. A hand was pushing them apart even though she was squeezing them together. “Ahh!” he gasped. She felt a searing pain and then a relentless pounding at her most delicate part. Mama! She heard the voice in her head, saw the soldiers holding guns. Tears spilled down her cheeks, dropped on his fingers. When she opened her eyes, Dr. Oliver’s face was like a grotesque mask, squinting eyes, twisted mouth, teeth bared. Anarchist! He threw back his head and groaned. The pounding stopped. His body lay over hers for a moment, a dead weight on her chest, flattening her breasts until they hurt. Then he slowly moved from between her legs. They both saw the dark gash of blood on his thigh before he hurriedly pulled up his pyjama pants. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. He pulled her underpants up over her feet until the stiff rags were once again against her body, then lifted her body up so that he could pull the nightgown down behind her as he might try to make a patient in the hospital more comfortable. Then the blankets came up over her, a soft, comforting weight, and she wanted to cry. “Aleksandra?” he whispered. She couldn’t open her eyes. “Aleksandra,” he whispered again. Her eyes flew open and she saw the embroidered roses in Tante Gertie’s shawl, his face framed by its wings. He was standing over her bed, smoothing down his crushed pyjama top. His face looked grey in the moonlight and his mouth had a crumpled, almost frightened look. “I’m sure I didn’t hurt you. Now don’t be silly.” She closed her eyes again. Her bed was a boat rocking on a violent sea. She was going to throw up. He was kneeling by her bed now. He took her hand and she tried to pull it away, but he hung on fiercely. “So, I see you’ve finally captured him,” a voice drawled from the doorway and the light flashed on, blinding them both. “How lovely. Down on bended knee, no less.” Lexi heard Cammy’s forced laugh as if from a great distance.

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Dr. Oliver dropped her hand. She had to get to the bathroom. She pushed out from under the blankets and, holding her hand over her mouth, tried to rush past Cammy, who was blocking the doorway. Cammy grabbed her arm and slapped at her as if she were a noxious insect. She gagged. A stream of vomit hit the floor. “Goddamn it!” Cammy jumped back. Lexi ran into the bathroom and hung her head over the toilet until the retching stopped. She heard only snatches of Cammy’s voice. “Shut up and go back to bed,” he said. “I’ll look after her.” “What the hell were you doing up here?” “I heard her call for help. Obviously she’s not feeling well.” “You were kneeling beside her bed.” Lexi could hear the scratch of a match and then its short sharp flare. The sound hurt her ears. The cold air on her face, her hands, her bare legs, stung. Everything hurt. “Aleksandra,” Dr. Oliver said from close behind her, his voice stern, authoritative. “Back into bed. You’re obviously overtired.” She could hear them both there behind her, breathing like monsters. She pushed herself up from the toilet and walked dizzily to the bed. There were bloodstains on the bottom sheet and on her nightgown. She burned with shame. She crawled in, pulled the blankets up around her and closed her eyes. “Do you need an aspirin?” he asked. “A pill to make you sleep?” She shook her head, terrified. “Well, then get some rest,” he said. “And don’t worry about breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ll get some at the hospital.” “But you’ll need to get the children up,” said Cammy. “At their usual time.” She heard Cammy’s slippers going down the stairs. Her body was trembling violently now, every cell freezing. She wanted to call to Cammy, to beg her not to leave her alone with him. Something horrible was rising in her throat, threatening to cut off her voice. She felt him moving closer to her bed. “Go away! Just go away!” she rasped. “All right, I’ll go away. You’re a stupid girl, aren’t you? With the imagination of a peasant.”

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She heard his footsteps on the stairs and then the click of the bedroom door on the floor below as she lay shuddering under the blankets. Cammy was shouting, “Bastard! Bastard!” over his angry voice. There was a loud thump and then the house fell silent except for the faint sound of weeping. She lay in complete stillness for several moments, her chest exploding like a cannon. She would never get warm again. The air in the room was stuffy and fetid. The small surges of warm liquid between her legs made her feel sick. She thought of Mama lying on the floor in their house in Russia, and Willy, crouching in the corner, terrified. Lexi and Mama and Willy. They had a secret, they knew something together. What was it they knew? They knew Mama had been helpless. They knew…Oh God, oh God, this had happened to Mama. This. She’d not understood what exactly until this moment. Why had he been so cruel, so rough? Why did he not stop when he could feel her trying to get away? Why did he behave like an animal, a monster, a… She tried to imagine Mama in heaven and for a moment she saw a pale, sad figure, her head bent as if she might be weeping. She wanted to reach out to her, to beg her forgiveness, to find comfort in her arms. But the pale figure didn’t move. Another figure, a black one, moved away from her too. Her Papa would truly hate her now if he knew, accuse her of provoking this desecration. But she was lost to him already, she was dead as far as Papa was concerned, she was… but, yes, she had provoked this, hadn’t she? Yes, she knew she had. She forced herself to get out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom. She cleaned up the vomit on the floor, gave herself a sponge bath with cool water. If only she could float in a cold clear lake; she’d always wanted to do that. She found a clean nightgown. She soaked and pummelled the bright red blotches on the sheets in the small basin and rubbed out the dark stain on the mattress as best she could with a washcloth and then put clean sheets on the bed. Why had he called her a peasant? That painful, monstrous lurching and pushing. She saw his face as he knelt beside the bed, blotched and ugly to her for the first time. The face of an anarchist, the face of

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Makhno himself. Before this night, all the time she’d been in Saskatchewan, she’d dreamed of loving him, dreamed that he might one day love her back. That was gone now, that outrageous and frivolous and sinful dream. All love was gone now. Her family especially. Everything had been taken away. God had been watching and God had judged her. In the very early morning, she heard their bedroom door open and soft footsteps on the hall rug, the tiny creaks of the hardwood floor beneath as someone walked towards the stairs. A few moments later the car started up in the garage and then drove away. She slowly sat up, as if testing her strength. She had to get up. Cammy had told her to wake the children. She had just taken her second sip of very strong coffee when Cammy appeared at the kitchen doorway. Her heart stopped. She felt a cold wave of nausea. Cammy was wearing a flowing purple silk gown and her hair hung limp and thin-looking, as if it were wet. Her face looked grey. She fumbled with lighting a cigarette. “Can I have some of that?” she asked. Lexi found a cup and shakily poured the coffee. “I guess you haven’t slept much,” Cammy said, staring at her curiously, but without her usual smirk. “Me either.” She took a long, contemplative drag. “I should have warned you, you know.” Lexi stared at her. “That was the problem with our last maid too. But she wasn’t a Mennonite. Not that that’s made any difference with you.” She smiled a rueful smile. “I should have made you stay in those awful old clothes. I’m such an idiot. But you’d be beautiful no matter what. I wanted a Mennonite for that very reason, so he wouldn’t…” Lexi’s body was seizing, nausea threatened again. “…I’m not telling it right, am I? You know that. Gerald is always at me for…you know…and truthfully I can’t stand it. I can’t stand his smell, his arrogance, his…smarmy ways. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the world, you know. He thinks…oh, it doesn’t matter, does it? He’s just a silly man and we should allow him his silly infatuations. Really, he’s harmless, Lexi. Pay him no attention.” Lexi had to sit. But her shaking hands couldn’t pull the chair

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from the table. She leaned into the table, her knees weak and threatening to collapse. “He’s just all talk, you know, Lexi. Down on bended knee! Hah! So typical. He hasn’t been able to do anything for years.” She took a sip of her coffee, wrinkled her nose and took another sip. “I hear gossip from the hospital, too. I have a friend there.” She suddenly seemed on the verge of tears. “Gerald has no idea how much I hear…” “I have to get the children up now,” Lexi said coldly, putting down her empty coffee cup. “Will you be having breakfast too?” “Breakfast?” She looked around the kitchen as if searching for a food that might become breakfast. “Sure. Why not? I’ll have…a peach,” she said, looking at the fruit basket. “They’re not rotten yet, are they?” Lexi took a white plate out of the cupboard and placed a small bruised peach on it. She handed it to Cammy and went to the doorway. “Lexi, come back!” Cammy stood holding the plate with the peach on it out in front of her as if it were a foreign object. “I came down early to ask you…” She put the plate down and flicked hair out of her eye. “I just couldn’t stand it if you left again. I can’t have Georgie here. The children like you so much better. And Gerald barely tolerated her.” Lexi couldn’t speak. There was nothing in her head, no words, no pictures, no feelings. She couldn’t understand what it was Cammy was saying. What did she mean when she said that he hasn’t been able to do anything for years. Do what? What did Cammy think happened last night? Did she not know that he had got on top of her and pushed into her with.… Pushed into her with himself. It had felt like the whole of him had been shoved up inside her and…now she wasn’t sure about anything anymore, about what had happened and what had not happened. “Please don’t leave, Lexi. We need you. Please.” Cammy’s fingers trembled as she lit another cigarette. As Lexi trudged up the stairs she felt more tired than she had ever felt in her life, more tired than when her mama had died, more tired than after two days of sitting up on the train. She could no longer think, no longer feel anything. Dr. Oliver and Cammy had smashed her. She wanted to fly away like one of those modern women pilots, soar over Canada to Russia and land in her Oma’s garden. She would

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sit on the old swing in the cherry tree and rock herself back into innocence. She wanted to go home. Home. But now she couldn’t. She had no home.

twenty-seven In the first light of the next morning she could barely open her eyes. Her whole body ached and her bed was drenched with sweat. In the few hours in which sleep had come she had terrible dreams, dreams of dead bodies floating down rivers, hurtling through torrents of water, dreams of blood pouring into the water. In one dream she was desperately searching for clean rags in her Oma’s house in Russia and Nestor Makhno jumped out at her, leering. Dr. Oliver was there too, dressed in filthy peasant clothes, like one of Makhno’s men. She woke up gasping and then fell into an exhausted sleep, only to enter more terror. The silent house below her was like an endless black sea, unfathomable now, roiling with monstrous possibilities. She woke again to faraway voices. When she opened her eyes Cammy was standing by her bed looking down on her, smoke streaming from her nostrils, as if she were a nervous horse, pawing. Simon and Sally stood there too. It had been their voices she’d heard, asking when she was going to wake up. “Well, there you are,” said Cammy. “We were wondering where you were. You don’t look very well. In fact, you look terrible.” Cammy coughed loudly. Lexi squinted into the painful light. “I tried to get up but…” Her voice was a whisper. “I’m sure it’s nothing. A touch of flu.” Cammy took a long drag. “I’ll call Georgie. Gerald’s gone to the hospital. You don’t think you need him to look after you, do you? She shook her head vehemently and closed her eyes. “Well, then…I guess…we’ll let you sleep…” She laughed nervously. “Come on, children, let’s go and call Auntie Louise.”

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When she woke it was dark again. There was something heavy on her forehead, weighing her head down into the thin hard pillow. She reached up, afraid. A damp cloth. She had no memory of anyone putting it there. Her bed still felt hot and her sheets and nightgown were damp. She thought she felt slightly better, even though she was still so tired. Beneath her the house sounded alive. She heard a peal of laughter. Louise? Possibly Cammy. They sounded a lot alike. Feet running. The children were still up so it couldn’t be in the middle of the night. She liked this floating feeling, this feeling of hovering over all of them in the darkness. No one wanted or needed her. They’d forgotten she was up here. Could it have been Georgie who’d placed the wet cloth on her forehead? She closed her eyes and was overtaken for a moment by a wave of nausea. But then it left and she felt empty and calm. She could go anywhere in this dark room. She could imagine another life for herself and then get out of bed and go there, wherever it was. She tried to imagine Mama in heaven again but instead saw Mrs. Doerksen sitting beside Papa at the school picnic and then Mrs. Doerksen handing her a jar of pickles in her kitchen. She wanted to erase this image, to get to her dead Mama, but it seemed so real, so full of life. Mrs. Doerksen was beckoning to her. What did she want? This plump smiling woman she’d known all her life took her hand, pulled her close and whispered in her ear, “You are the way, the truth and the light.” Lexi was shocked. This sounded blasphemous. Mrs. Doerksen just smiled. Ted rose up in her mind, his spectacles, his dark serious eyes, his flushed cheeks. She still wanted to read his book, The Way of All Flesh. He’d said that the seminary was just down at the end of King Street. Georgie would know. She sank deeper. She’d been holding herself in a suspended state for a few days and she felt its edges tearing away now, like ancient gauze gone rotten. She lay very still, tumbled farther down into the blackness, down to nothingness. There was only blackness. Then, without warning, she felt her chest heave, her throat catch. A needle hot stream of tears flew out of her eyes. Her whole body convulsed with sobs.

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All her sorrow poured into her pillow. Dr. Oliver’s first kisses. The memory of his fingers on her face. For the first time in her life someone had really looked at her, had wanted to touch her. His hand on her hand. His touch had promised sweetness, had promised to make up for a lifetime of cold. Tears burned on her face and she covered her mouth with her fingers. Dr. Oliver’s fingers had covered her mouth and she hadn’t been able to scream. But she never wanted to scream. She only wanted, up until the last few minutes when she felt only pain, some other impossible, perfect love. She’d been wrong. There was no love. Love was a worldly lie. She was melting now, dissolving into a tiny speck of dirt. Nothing but a liability. Her Papa had already swept away the piece of dirt, tossed it like a fleck of ash into the prairie wind. She could be carried anywhere now. No one would care. She had sinned. She was worthless. Perhaps all that was left to her was to stay. How could it be otherwise? She was slipping into a darkness different from sleep. She allowed herself to fall, naked, terrified, hurtling headfirst. And then, in the midst of the falling, she heard Mama’s voice: Try to erase bitterness, meine Lexi. A voice so tender, so steady. When she woke, light hovered over her eyelids and for a moment she imagined that when she opened them she would see Maria, Renate and Hildy. She would see their scrubbed faces and smell the Sunlight soap on their soft skin. But only dust motes whirled in the morning sun as she half opened her eyes. After a while she propped herself on her elbow and looked out the window behind her bed. A few red leaves drifted from the maples in the backyard. She pulled the blankets off the bed and felt a sudden relief from their weight. She got up, feeling light, as if her bones were the weight of birds’ bones, and put her feet down on the cool polished floor. Dizziness threatened for a moment. And then, as she slowly put one foot in front of the other, she realized that she was ravenously hungry.

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twenty-eight Three days later she walked into the garage to take the car out for the first time since she’d returned to Waterloo. She went straight to the car door, unable to look at the corner in the garage where Dr. Oliver had once kissed her. Her hands shook as she inserted the key into the ignition. She took a mighty breath. Her chest was caving in. Her foot barely touched the gas pedal and the car crawled backwards out of the garage. Aunt Louise had taken Cammy and the children for a picnic and Cammy had given her a list of groceries to pick up while they were gone. But she drove past the grocery store, going west on King Street, until the houses ended and she saw a small field. Across the field was the red brick building that Georgie had described. She drove along the narrow road to the front door of the building and parked the car. There were a couple of other smaller brick buildings nearby and several young people with books in their arms walked between them. The large wooden door loomed above her. Should she knock? Should she walk straight in? She stood there a few moments, thinking that this was a silly idea after all and that she should just go back and do the shopping, when a young man came out. He was short, plump and dressed in a rumpled white shirt and baggy tweed trousers. His wide-eyed smile made her realize that she was too dressed up. She’d worn one of Cammy’s nicest dresses, a dark blue crepe with a white lace collar. “Can I help you?” he asked, smiling broadly. “No. Ja. I mean…I’m looking for someone. I wasn’t sure if I should knock.” The young man laughed. “Well, you can come into the first floor, it’s only the library and the classrooms.” “Oh, I…” “Who’re you looking for? I know just about everybody here.” “Ted Bauer. He’s just starting…” “Sure. I know Ted. Just ran into him upstairs, as a matter of fact. Come on in. I’ll get him for you.”

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He turned and opened the door, held it for her and motioned for her to go in. The building smelled of chalk and musty books. The wood-panelled hallway, on which hung a dozen pictures of severelooking men in black with white clerical collars, led to a large reading room with cracked brown leather couches and armchairs. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and long narrow windows across one end of the room let in a little of the bright day, even though she could see that the room lived in an atmosphere of permanent dimness. There was another hallway across from the entrance and at the end of it an elderly woman sat at a large desk entirely filled with wooden file boxes, her head bent down in concentration. “Just wait here. This is our reception room, the cleanest room in the building.” He laughed again. “You wouldn’t believe the mess the fellows live in upstairs.” She smiled. He was so obviously enjoying his role as a student. “I’m Aleksandra,” she said. “You could tell Ted that the girl from the train is here.” “Sure.” He held out his hand. “Lloyd Shouldice. Pleased to meet you, Aleksandra. I’ll sniff Ted out in a jiffy. Have a seat.” Lexi moved towards one of the couches but didn’t sit down. She walked over to the bookcases. There was a whole wall of the works of Martin Luther, volumes of all sizes bound in black, maroon and green leather. Other bookshelves contained commentaries on Luther and the Gospels and books of sermons. But at the bottom of one bookcase there was a small ragtag collection of paperback editions of William Makepeace Thackeray, Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens beside collections of poems by Tennyson, Thomas Grey and William Cowper. She was surprised. Surely, there would be no novels in a Mennonite Bible School, they were far too worldly. But, poetry, yes. She had studied Schiller and Heine and Goethe in German class, on Saturdays in Millheim. “Aleksandra.” Ted strode towards her, one hand out, the other adjusting his glasses. “You look so different.” He glanced at Lloyd, who was right behind him, but Lloyd made no move to leave. She took his outstretched hand and felt a sudden shudder of nerves. It had been a huge mistake to come here. But she had hardly been able to think for the past three days. She couldn’t think of where

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else to turn. “I thought you might have finished the book by now,” she said, quickly withdrawing her hand. Ted instantly blushed and again glanced over at Lloyd. “That book about the church,” Lexi said, beginning to blush herself, “the one you were telling me about.” “Yes,” he said. “I have finished that book.” She wanted to run. The Way of All Flesh now sounded obscene and sinful. She should never have come. Ted stood smiling at her, uncertain of what to say next. “Say, Aleksandra,” interrupted Lloyd, “why don’t you come for coffee with us? A bunch of fellows go over to the caf every morning around ten for a coffee break. It’s just the next building. The food’s awful but the coffee’s all right and on Thursdays,” he glanced at his watch, “there are doughnuts.” “Yes,” said Ted. “Why don’t you come? If you have time, that is.” She hesitated. Cammy and the children wouldn’t be back until suppertime and she wanted to stay away from the house as much as possible. She’d seen Dr. Oliver only in passing for the last couple of days and couldn’t bear the thought that he might come home when Cammy was away. “Well, ja. I mean if it’s all right.” “Coffee’s on!” Lloyd shouted up the back stairs. In a moment she heard thumping noises from overhead and then heavy feet on the stairs. A man’s voice called out, “Morning, Mrs. Schultz,” and three young men, all in their early twenties, emerged into the reading room, adjusting their jackets and straightening their ties. They stopped when they saw Lexi. “Ah, fellows, this is my friend, Aleksandra,” said Ted. “She’s coming with us for coffee.” “Wonderful,” said a handsome young man with curly blond hair. He looked like one of the fighter pilots she’d seen on a recruitment poster. The others nodded and one of them, a tall one with pimply skin, took out a pipe and fiddled with match after match, trying to get it lit, as they all moved towards the front door. Ted stayed on one side of her and Lloyd on the other as they walked over to the cafeteria. These male voices and arms swinging so near to hers were frightening and yet, in spite of the heavy darkness

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that threatened to engulf her every moment, she felt a small spark of curiosity. These seminary students were so unlike what she imagined when she thought of Willy and Papa at Bible School, in black, poring over the Bible. They entered the college building and were immediately met by the aroma of coffee, sweet baking and a cacophony of student voices. Most of the students sitting at the small round tables were men, but there were girls too, not much older than her, in little groups, looking terribly serious and intelligent, some with small round glasses and their hair in buns. But one jaunty girl wearing bright red lipstick was holding forth and laughing loudly with a table of male students. Lexi felt her head go light and almost grabbed Ted’s sleeve to steady herself. For a moment she was back in the Millheim schoolhouse, kneeling on the floor, Papa declaring that she could not go on to grade nine. And then Dr. Oliver…surely they could all see it, could see the stains of ignorance and sin written all over her, like the mark of Cain. “Over here, Aleksandra.” Lloyd had found an empty table in a far corner and the seminary students were threading through the other tables towards it. Ted took her elbow and steered her along. “What can I get you?” Lloyd hovered, smiling. “Oh, coffee. Coffee will be just fine,” she said shyly. “No doughnut? They’re the only good thing here. Come on, have one,” Lloyd urged, patting his ample stomach. “You look as if you could use one…not that…I don’t mean that…I mean…” “Shut up, Lloyd, and go and get the girl a doughnut,” said the handsome blond one whose name, apparently, was Warner. Lloyd hurried off. Lexi squeezed into a chair at the back of the table. Wedged into the corner of the room, she was like a mouse peering out of its hole, trembling. But when she looked out, everyone was talking and laughing as if nothing had happened. A tall thin shy one sitting across from her hadn’t yet said a word. The other students were ignoring her, going on with their conversations. The seminarians began loudly recounting how at seven this morning they’d lifted one of their fellow students out of his bed, kicking and fighting, and dumped him, long johns and all, into six inches of cold water in the bathtub.

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“Poor old Poggemiller!” laughed Lloyd. “Did you see the look on his face?” “I bet that’s the last time he sleeps through chapel,” said Warner. “We’re not always this rowdy, you know,” said Ted. He looked at her more intently. “Are you all right?” She tried to smile back at him. She liked his serious face. He reminded her a bit of Willy. “Ja. It all sounds like…fun. I didn’t think that college would be so…free.” “Wait till you greenhorns get to the mid-terms,” said Harold, who’d been holding back from the conversation with an air of smug superiority. He told Lexi that he was in second year and that he was merely putting up with the antics of his vastly immature classmates. “You’ll be cracking the books till two in the morning. Old Williston’s a tyrant. Over half the class failed the first-term Hebrew exam last year.” “Oh, Hebrew,” said Warner dismissively. “All you have to do is to charm Williston. Be especially pious. He’s a puppy dog underneath.” He smiled a brilliant smile, and Lexi suspected that he was used to using his beauty to get what he wanted. The thought startled her. Is that what she had done? Used her beauty to…? “Well, I don’t know about you fellows, but I’m terrified of him,” said Wilbur quietly. “All that Hebrew is Greek to me.” They all groaned. The cafeteria had begun to empty. Coffee break was over and everyone was gathering up books and hurrying off. Lexi suddenly wanted to cry. She wanted to stay here with these students, never to have to go back to the Olivers, never to spend another moment in a kitchen making meals for other people or doing their laundry or watching their children. “Well, time to face Hebrew,” said Ted, pushing his chair back and moving out of the way so that Lexi could get out of the corner. “Nice to meet you, Aleksandra,” said Warner, and hurried off. “Likewise,” said Harold. “Come back and visit us again.” Wilbur said nothing but hung back behind Ted and Lloyd as they walked her back to the front door of the seminary. “I forgot. The book. I’ll run up and get it,” said Ted.

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Lloyd hovered, looking anxious. “I guess I’d better go. Don’t want to be late for Williston’s class.” He held out his hand to her. She hesitated and then took it. “Bye, Lloyd. It was nice to meet you. Thanks for the doughnut.” “It was nothing. I hope we see you again.” He pushed open the front door. “Oh, good,” said Ted, coming out as the door closed behind Lloyd. “I don’t think he’d understand.” He handed the book to Lexi. “I’m so glad you came by. I hope you like it.” His face was flushed. “You’ll be late for class,” she said, lowering her eyes and looking at the book. Her face felt hot. “I’ll bring it back when I’ve finished it. Thank you. I…” “Are you all right, Aleksandra?” She fought back the tears that were threatening to spill out of her. Why had she glimpsed this life with these kind students only to have to leave it? “Ja. Ja, I’m all right. I have to go now. I’m sorry, I…Goodbye.” She ran to the car and quickly got in. He stood by the door and watched as she drove off. From the rear-view mirror she saw him run into the building. She drove to the grocery store, parked, and in half an hour, sitting in the car, devoured the first twenty-five pages of Samuel Butler’s book. His words were was shocking, ruthless. She’d never read anything like it. He despised the pretentious and the religious. And under every casual, cynical word she felt Samuel Butler’s despair: Young people have a marvellous capacity of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy—very unhappy—it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness. Their own sinfulness. Hadn’t that been what she’d felt all of her life? A sinful girl, trying to make amends. She was mesmerized by the tyrannical father and by the submission of the son, by the mocking voice, which so clearly saw the destruction lurking behind the soft hypocrisy, like a knife hidden under a cushion. The voice stayed in her head as she loaded twentypound bags of potatoes and flour into the trunk of the car and drove

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home to the Olivers’. Not the actual words, which she couldn’t remember, but the tone of it, the fearlessness of the criticism. The voice hung onto her as she Hoovered the living room rug and swept the dining room floor, as she washed the children’s clothes, as she stood at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes for supper. “Hello.” She’d been so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard the door until he stepped right inside the kitchen. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to her since he’d left her bedroom four nights before. She stopped peeling the potato. It was a pale, slippery stone in her hand. “Aleksandra?” Her back and neck were burning. She felt the imprint, still, of his hands on her. On her spine. On her belly. On her… “Aleksandra?” She didn’t move. The cool, hard potato in one hand. The peeler in the other. “I was wondering what was for supper.” His voice was uncertain. She could hear the brushing of his shoes on the kitchen floor, moving towards her. She whirled around. He kept moving towards her. She held up the potato peeler as if it were a shield. No, as if it were a weapon. No one had fought back when Makhno and his men… “Oh, come. There’s no one here. Look, I…” He moved closer, trying to smile at her. “I thought we had an understanding.” He touched her arm and she tried to step backwards to get away from him but she was trapped in front of the sink. “No. Don’t.” “Oh, come now.” His voice was soothing as if he were calming a patient. He came closer to her and tried to put his arms around her. She jabbed at his jacket with the potato peeler and he jumped back. “Aleksandra, this is ridiculous.” He stared at her. She could stab him. She could poke his eyes out. His bulging, greedy eyes. But her arms wouldn’t move. “Now, don’t be silly, Aleksandra. No one knows a thing. No one need ever know.” Like Mama’s secret. Like Mama’s silence.

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She could slit his throat. She could … but a good Mennonite never…a good Mennonite always, always lets God decide, lets God be the one to deliver the punishment. “Cammy has no idea, Aleksandra. She’s deluded, to put it mildly. And she’s hardly a wife. Certainly not one you have to worry about. As far as I’m concerned…” “How can you say that? How can you…how can you not care? You’ve made me so…so ashamed.” She began to cry. She was crying, but she wasn’t sad, was she? No. She was full of rage and hatred. “Don’t be a child, Aleksandra. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I care about you…” “I want to leave.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, vowing to herself that there would be no more tears. “Mrs. Oliver asked me to stay, but I want to leave.” “Now, listen, we can’t have you leaving again. You just got back. Where would you go? You have nowhere to go, Aleksandra. I certainly don’t want to write to your father…” He stepped away from her, towards the door to the dining room. “…and you did ask for it, you know. You’re far too passionate for your own good. I’ve told you that before, Aleksandra.” His voice softened at her name and then resumed its preachy tone. “If you’re not careful you might really get into trouble one of these days.” He turned his back to her and walked through the door and disappeared. She sat down on the kitchen chair still holding the potato and the peeler. For several moments she was still. She heard a finch singing outside, saw the late summer sunshine falling across the kitchen floor and onto the table, reaching towards her. She looked down at her hands and jabbed the potato peeler into the potato. Slowly she began twisting, twisting the peeler harder and harder until she felt the jab of its point in the palm of her hand, until her hand spurted blood and the potato lay split apart.

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twenty-nine Standing by the kitchen sink, Lexi took another sip of her coffee. She’d made bacon and eggs for Dr. Oliver and he was wolfing them down. Cammy and the children were sitting at the table as if waiting for a ceremony to begin. Cammy was smoking furiously, stopping every now and then to cough. She glared at Dr. Oliver. “So, I guess that’s it,” Cammy said in a flat tone. “Louise was hoping that Lexi could bake for her party at Thanksgiving…” Cammy glanced at Dr. Oliver who went on eating, ignoring her. “Oh, what the hell.” She got up and poured herself more coffee. “And I suppose you won’t be home for supper, either, will you, Gerald.” She glared even more fiercely at him. “Don’t expect that I’ll do anything about it. This is your fault, you know.” “Shut up, Cammy,” he said calmly. “You shut up!” “But can’t Lexi come back and visit us, Daddy?” asked Sally in a small voice, tugging at her hair. “That’s up to her,” said Dr. Oliver. Lexi tried to smile. She wouldn’t be back in this house. The last month had been hell, every day strained to the breaking point as she found ways to sneak out, to make her secret appointments. Every time she looked at Simon and Sally, she was swamped with guilt. She’d left five children in such a short time. In leaving her sisters she’d abandoned a part of her heart. Leaving Sally and Simon was punishing the children for the sins of the father. “Why do you have to go?” asked Simon, running one of his toy cars along the edge of the table. “I don’t want Georgie to come. Georgie’s boring.” “Me, too,” wailed Sally. “Georgie will only be here for a few days,” said Cammy, stubbing out her cigarette. “Until we find someone else.” “But I don’t want someone else,” said Sally, giving in to noisy tears. Lexi could barely stand to stay in the kitchen.

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“Maybe you could come and visit me,” she said to Sally. “Really? Can we, Mommy?” Sally swiped at her cheeks. “Oh, we’ll see. Lexi’s going to be terribly busy.” Cammy pushed her chair back, stood up and then sat down again. “But I want to!” Sally stamped her foot and looked pointedly at Dr. Oliver. He picked up the paper and began to read. He’d been reading like that two weeks earlier when she’d blurted out that she’d gotten another job. He’d barely bothered to lower the paper. “When were you planning on leaving?” he asked in a dry tone. “A week from Monday.” “I see. And have you told Cammy?” “No, I…” “You will not be leaving. Do you want to send her off the deep end? We held this job open for you for months, Aleksandra. No matter what’s happened, you have a responsibility. To me, to her, to the children.” He folded up his paper, stood up and, after a long pause, left the room. Later that afternoon, she stood behind the pink silk-covered chair where Cammy sat trying on a new lipstick. Their eyes met in the mirror. Cammy looked startled. Lexi had come into the room without knocking, wearing a faded green and black plaid skirt and white blouse. Her going-away clothes. A few days earlier she and Georgie had rummaged through boxes of clothing donated for refugees in the basement of the Lutheran church, laughing hysterically, holding up hideous old dresses against Lexi and then flinging them back into the boxes. But she’d come home with a decent pair of brown leather shoes, an old pair of galoshes that would have to do, a brand new pair of stockings and a couple of other skirts and blouses. “I’ll be leaving next Monday,” she said, keeping her voice as firm as possible. “I have another job…” Cammy grimaced but said nothing and turned away to light a cigarette. When she looked up again, Lexi saw that her eyes were filled with panic. She began coughing and couldn’t seem to stop. Lexi put her hand on Cammy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry…I…” After a moment, when the coughing had died down, Cammy shrugged and wiped the corners of her mouth, as if touching up her

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lipstick. She shook Lexi’s hand away. “I knew it couldn’t last,” she said, her voice cold. Dr. Oliver banged down the lid of the car trunk and when he turned to face her in the glaring sun, the shadows under his eyes were dark stains in his chalky skin. Cammy and the children were standing at the front window. Sally waved a small wave and Lexi waved back. Simon turned away. Dr. Oliver slowed as they approached the Lutheran Seminary, a look of distaste on his face, as if he were dropping her off at some disreputable place. She glanced at the battered wooden door. She’d been through that door several times in the last three weeks, first being interviewed for the job of assisting Mrs. Schultz in the library and then being interviewed again by the dean of the seminary, who had turned out to be the infamous Dr. Williston, professor of Hebrew. He’d wanted to make sure that she would be a suitable female to live in one of the vacant residence rooms. Dr. Williston had been polite and formal and she knew she had the job as soon as she told him her father was a Mennonite minister. Dr. Oliver stopped the car in front of the dormitory, got out of the car and opened the trunk. He put her suitcase on the ground and then stood looking at her, an uncertain expression on his face, more resigned than angry. Red blotches were spreading from his neck up into his cheeks. His fleshy, sweating body repulsed her. She wanted only to get away. She glanced up at the dormitory. The rows of windows shone silver in the sun. When she looked back at him, to say goodbye, she found him staring at her, surveying her clothes, a baggy white blouse she’d long ago sewn for herself and a gathered cotton skirt from home that she’d shortened in an attempt to make it look more modern. She hadn’t brought a single one of Cammy’s things with her. “You’re not pregnant?” His voice was gruff. She shook her head. “Good.” He attempted a smile. She did not smile back. His question was another invasion. “You’ve been a great disappointment,” he said. “The children… Cammy needs…”

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She hated the hint of whining in his tone. He was an even bigger baby than Cammy; an ugly, spoiled baby. She looked down at her suitcase, and then looked up at him harshly. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at the ground. “I don’t know how to put this, Aleksandra, but…you’ve spoiled yourself now. You’ll never amount to…” Her heart raced. This was her last chance to say something, to speak up for herself. “I come from good people,” she began, “people who believe in nonviolence and…” She almost said “forgiveness,” but she would never forgive him. “God will look down on you and judge you.” He had a strange look on his face, like he might either start to laugh or start to cry. “We were respected in Russia. My grandfather was the mayor of Blumenort. He represented all Mennonites in the Russian Parliament during the reign of Nicholas the Second. I am named after the Czar’s wife. I…” Lexi stopped. She bent down and picked up her suitcase. The sudden movement made her head spin, made the trees and buildings and the Olivers’ yellow car blur. She felt giddy, like she’d felt with those first sips of champagne. She had nothing more to say to him. The dormitory reception room was filled with ratty overstuffed chairs, a dark wall of books and beige and grey paintings. But as she stood in this dull room, which smelled of mildew and old leather, watching the dust motes float in the ray of sun coming in from the open door, every object, even though it was completely ordinary and battered with use, seemed clearly outlined, almost beautiful. She heard the tires on the gravel outside and then the sound of the car’s engine fading. The yellow slash of sunlight on the floor suddenly made her think of a field of wheat, and for a moment she had an image of a white bird crazily wheeling over the Russian steppes and landing in Oma’s garden. Without a backward glance, she closed the door and headed up the stairs.

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Epilogue “We can take you now, Mrs. Bauer.” Aleksandra unlaces her sore fingers and puts the notebook back in her purse. She rises wearily, and tries to match the nurse’s quick stride. At seventy-eight she prides herself on the fact that she hasn’t let herself go like so many other widows she knows. She’s kept her figure. But her underarm on her right side is aching terribly. Lying on the table, as still as she can possibly be, she distracts herself from the discomfort of this cold, windowless room with its gleaming equipment and the soft buzzing noises of the radiation machines by thinking of Stephen and Anna, her children, imagining them here beside her. Anna, still as pretty at forty-five as she was as a child, would be fluffing pillows and arguing with the nurses, as fiercely protective of her as she is with her own children. Stephen would be smiling, unselfconsciously charming everyone, moving around, taking pictures with his movie camera. Even here. “Just one more shot, Mom,” he’d say. “You never know. I might be able to use this in my next film. You wouldn’t mind, would you?” And then he’d laugh. For some inexplicable reason, even though she could still see her own mother shaking her head in stern disapproval at such a breach of privacy and dignity, she wouldn’t mind. Aleksandra feels warmer on this cold table thinking of them, remembering the night she and Ted found out that they were going to

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be posted to India to teach in a Lutheran missionary school. They were newly married and she had just become a nurse and she’d said that it would be all right with her if they didn’t have children. She was almost thirty then, had just finished three gruelling years of nursing training, and she was desperate to begin her career. She’d been lucky; it was the shortage of nurses during the war that had allowed someone of her “advanced age” to be accepted into nursing school. When she said she wouldn’t mind if they didn’t have children, Ted’s patient face fell into a pained look she’d never seen before. Within two months she was pregnant with Stephen. But it had all worked out in the end, hadn’t it? She’d practised as a missionary nurse in India and had her children. And she could do all of that because of the help she had at home. Because of the maids. That was never lost on her, the fact that she had been able to accomplish so much because other women had supported her. The way that she herself had supported her mother, her father and Cammy. “You can move now, Mrs. Bauer.” The nurse gently helps her to release her right arm from its rigid position. Aleksandra sighs with relief and slowly gets off the table to go to the tiny dressing room. It hurt to bend down and put on her shoes. In India she’d worn only sandals, easy to slip in and out of, and after a while she took to wearing long fitted tunics over pantaloons as the local women did, and sometimes, on special occasions, saris. How she loved the embroidered silks, orange, red, gold and emerald, alive against her skin, transferring their brilliance to her, banishing all traces of cold. She often had dreams of appearing before her father and mother in a dazzling gold sari, radiant in the heat and colour of India. How many costumes, how many uniforms, has she worn over the years? How many selves has she been? Mennonite girl. Servant girl. Lutheran girl. Wife. Nurse. Mother. All of these selves because she had been restless, she had not been satisfied to stay home and do as her father demanded. She’d struggled, over this long and full life of hers, with fears that she had been selfish with her life. Especially that she had put her needs before her sisters’. Just like Papa had said. Wilful, ungrateful, worldly girl. She never forgot those last words he said to her.

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Did Maria and Renate and Hildy think that of her also? Surely they did, or they would have responded to the letters she sent them over the years. Letters that begged for their forgiveness and understanding. Willy told her not to send them. He asked her to put herself in their place; how could they reply, he said, when they were still in that world? She and Willy had both escaped “that world,” though Willy, who had become a teacher like Papa after all, had managed to escape without being shunned because he’d been able to hide the truth of what he believed from all of them. He had been her informant, letting her know about the marriages and births. The marriage of Papa to Mrs. Doerksen, for instance, and then his death many years later. He sent her photos that he took at family gatherings. She memorized each face, the face of each aging brother and sister. She took such joy at seeing the young ones bloom into little Marias and Renates and Hildys. And some of them looked like her, too. And like Mama. Hildy’s eldest, Dorothy, had Mama’s fierce, determined eyes. She looked strong and certain of herself; she looked like she might easily break out into a laugh. The last letter she sent to her sisters had been almost twenty years ago now, after Papa’s death. She had been so sure that once he died, they would reply. But they never did. The birthday card they sent her for her eighteenth birthday was the one and only communication she ever had from them. She struggles into her winter coat. Her right arm feels almost useless. They don’t know she is dying. The thought is so laden with grief that she can feel her chest collapse inside the reality of it. But it has been the reality for all these years. She had felt the same way when her children were born. How could it be possible that she was not able to share these huge moments with her family? Well, she hadn’t and she never would. It had been her choice to step away from that world when she was eighteen and it remained her choice still. She knew, even back then, that there were huge consequences to that choice. Her family doesn’t know her children. And they never knew Ted or that he died almost two years ago now. They don’t know what a good and kind man he was. They don’t know how much she has thought of

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them over the years and wished only the best for them. They don’t know what a good life she has had, a full life. A good life, yes, but until recently something had been niggling under the surface. She’d be sitting alone with a cup of tea, or listening to Handel, or watching a sunset. Quiet, solitary things. And there it would be, an uneasiness. An uneasiness she could never quite get at. But since her diagnosis six months ago, with little energy left but to sit still, she’s slowly come to realize that all these years she had been holding onto the belief that she deserved the shunning by her father, she deserved what Dr. Oliver had done to her, the way he had seduced and then hurt her. She believed that what happened to her was her punishment for being too passionate, too worldly, too eager for her own life. But no longer. She woke one morning, after all her reflection, and that belief was gone. Perhaps it is old age. Perhaps it is the realization that her life is coming to an end and there is no time left for such selfdoubt and criticism. Whatever it is, it pleases her, it feels right. And now, replacing that uneasiness, there is forgiveness for that young Lexi, so beautiful and, yes, passionate. Passionate for life. Dr. Oliver had said too passionate for your own good, and she had believed him. But she sees now, all these years later, that he was wrong, wrong to blame her for his own misdeed, and wrong also to try to curb her youthful exuberance and passion. These are, after all, the qualities that have carried her so energetically into the rich adventures of her life. These days, sitting alone in her Waterloo apartment, day after day, seven floors up with nothing to see but sky, flat and endless like a prairie sky, she thinks of the great gift that Mama has given her. Such a difficult task and yet such a great permission: to erase bitterness and embrace her life fully. She closes her eyes, leans back against the cool wall of the dressing room and whispers to herself: I have lived the life I wanted to live. I have claimed my place on this earth. I have brought joy to the world. Aleksandra pulls on her warm woollen hat and walks slowly down the corridor of the hospital, and suddenly there’s such a strong image of herself at nine, huddled on the frigid deck of the boat that was taking them to Canada, watching the endless, agitated, tossing ocean

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and praying that she would see the world. Well, she has, hasn’t she? Such a small, insignificant Mennonite girl. Such a brave, such a courageous young dreamer. She has erased bitterness and embraced the world. Mama would have been proud.

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Afterword by Di Brandt

What an interesting experience it has been collaborating with the deceased woman author, Annie Jacobsen, and her living and dead relatives, in bringing this remarkable narrative to publication. Brian Henderson, at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, deserves credit for recognizing an important story in the making and assembling a working editorial team to polish up the final draft of Annie’s first novel, completed during the last days and weeks of her too-short life. It was a privilege to work with accomplished English-Canadian novelist Jane Finlay-Young, whose graceful attentiveness to the cross-cultural nuances of the events in this novel was impressive and moving. Watermelon Syrup tells the story of Aleksandra, or Lexi, a young traditional Mennonite village woman who was sent by her Canadian immigrant family to work as a maid in a well-to-do household, in a modern city some distance away, during the Depression of the 1930 s. It is the common story of many young Canadian Mennonite women in the ’20 s and ’30 s, newly arrived from Russia and Ukraine with their destitute and politically traumatized extended families and village communities. Approximately 20,000 German-speaking Mennonites emigrated to Canada as political refugees in the 1920s, fleeing political violence in Russia and Ukraine during the turbulent rise of Communism. They were sponsored in Canada by their Mennonite relatives, who had immigrated several decades earlier, in the 1870 s, and had established

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successful farm and small business communities in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while continuing to practise strict cultural separatism in order to maintain their traditional pacifist peasant village ways. How was it that hundreds of young Mennonite women from the 1920s group were encouraged to leave their families and communities, to break with a strong heritage of cultural separatism and communalism, and serve as domestic maids in upwardly mobile non-Mennonite urban households? Cultural historian Frieda Esau Klippenstein observes that it was typical of new immigrant families in Canada at the beginning of the century to send their young women into domestic service as a way of getting financially and culturally established, and has been so ever since, but nevertheless its practice among Mennonites was shockingly nonconformist and was precariously justified as an evangelical urban “mission” (209). It seems that the experience of serving as “maids” in urban North American households, in what has been termed the “commodification” of immigrant women, ironically contributed to their empowerment in the early part of the century and perhaps later (LindstromBest 1988, Ng 1986, Stansell 1986, cited in Klippenstein 202 – 203), partly in protest against oppressive employment practices, partly through separation from their own families and traditions at an impressionable age, partly in imitation of the more privileged lifestyles of their English-speaking patrons. The women interviewed by Klippenstein for her study on Mennonite domestic servants admitted to all these influences as well, though most of them did return to the Mennonite community, if somewhat altered by their experiences, afterwards. Annie Jacobsen’s story adds a painful and perhaps not unusual (though for obvious reasons much less documented) twist to the story: the “maid” who was sexually exploited by her employer and, to add insult to injury, shunned by her family for failing to keep strictly enough to traditionalist ways. This is Jane Eyre and Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the Canadian-Mennonite timbre—with a considerably happier ending, however, in that the experiences of shunning and sexual assault become the catalyst for Aleksandra’s self-determination and freedom, in the opportune mode of the “New World.”

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It is a Mennonite story nonetheless, an act of ancestral loyalty on the part of Annie Jacobsen, who wrote this novel to make sense of her own maternal family heritage and, in so doing, fashioned a tale that speaks richly of a cultural experience that has been too little told, highlighting the courage of a generation of young women whose perseverance and creativity under duress, encouraged secretly by their unhappy mothers, deserve greater acknowledgement and admiration. It’s also, just simply, a good read!

References Klippenstein, Frieda Esau. “Scattered but Not Lost: Mennonite Domestic Servants in Winnipeg, 1920 s– 50 s.” In Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women’s History, ed. Catherine A. Cavanaugh and Randy R.Warne. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000. 200–31. Lindstrom-Best, Varpu. Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada. Toronto: Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario, 1988. Ng, Roxanna. “The Social Construction of ‘Immigrant Women’ in Canada.” In The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism, ed. Roberta Hamilton and Michelle Barrett. London: New Left, 1986. 269–86.

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.

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Books in the Life Writing Series Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties edited by Edna Staebler with an Afterword by Marlene Kadar •1995 / x + 165 pp. / ISBN 0-88920248-6 “I Want to Join Your Club”: Letters from Rural Children, 1900–1920 edited by Norah L.Lewis with a Preface by Neil Sutherland •1996 / xii + 250 pp. (30 b&w photos) / ISBN 0-88920-260-5 And Peace Never Came by Elisabeth M. Raab with Historical Notes by Marlene Kadar •1996 / x + 196 pp. (12 b&w photos, map) / ISBN 0-88920281-8 Dear Editor and Friends: Letters from Rural Women of the North-West, 1900– 1920 edited by Norah L. Lewis •1998 / xvi + 166 pp. (20 b&w photos) / ISBN 0-88920-287-7 The Surprise of My Life: An Autobiography by Claire Drainie Taylor with a Foreword by Marlene Kadar •1998 / xii + 268 pp. (8 colour photos and 92 b&w photos) / ISBN 0-88920-302-4 Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood by Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke •1998 / xvi + 153 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-350-4 The Life and Letters of Annie Leake Tuttle: Working for the Best by Marilyn Färdig Whiteley •1999 / xviii + 150 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-330-x Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute” edited by Christl Verduyn •1999 / viii + 576 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-333-4 cloth / ISBN 0-88920349-0 paper Be Good Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie by Audrey Andrews •1999 / vi + 276 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-334-2 Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents edited by Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar • 2001 / vi + 120 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-341-5 Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women by Helen M. Buss • 2002 / xxvi + 206 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-408-x cloth / ISBN 0-88920-410-1 paper Chasing the Comet: A Scottish-Canadian Life by Patricia Koretchuk • 2002 / xx + 244 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-407-1 The Queen of Peace Room by Magie Dominic • 2002 / xii + 115 pp. / ISBN 088920-417-9 China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott by Shirley Jane Endicott • 2002 / xvi + 251 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-412-8 The Curtain: Witness and Memory in Wartime Holland by Henry G. Schogt • 2003 / xii + 132 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-396-2 Teaching Places by Audrey J.Whitson • 2003 / xiii + 178 pp. / ISBN 0-88920425-X

Through the Hitler Line by Laurence F.Wilmot, M.C. • 2003 / xvi + 152 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-448-9 Where I Come From by Vijay Agnew • 2003 / xiv + 298 pp. / ISBN 0-88920414-4 The Water Lily Pond by Han Z. Li • 2004 / x + 254 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-431-4 The Life Writings of Mary Baker McQuesten: Victorian Matriarch edited by Mary J.Anderson • 2004 / xxii + 338 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-437-3 Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong,1859 and 1869 edited by Jackson W.Armstrong • 2004 / xvi + 228 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-440-3 Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939 –1942 by Olivia Cockett; edited by Robert W. Malcolmson • 2005 / xvi + 208 pp. / ISBN 0-88920458-6 Incorrigible by Velma Demerson • 2004 / vi + 178 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-444-6 Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions edited by Julie Rak • 2005 / viii + 264 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-478-0 Tracing the Autobiographical edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan • 2005 / viii + 280 pp. / ISBN 088920-476-4 Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries edited by Christl Verduyn • 2005 / viii + 304 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-481-0 Food That Really Schmecks Edna Staebler • 2007 / xxiv + 334 pp. / ISBN 978-0-88920-521-5 163256: A Memoir of Resistance by Michael Englishman • 2007 / xvi + 112 pp. (14 b&w photos) / ISBN 978-1-55458-009-5 The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost,1915–1919 edited by R.B. Fleming • 2007 / xxxvi + 384 pp. (49 b&w photos, 5 maps) / ISBN 9781-55458-000-2 Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted: Surviving in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany by Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker • 2007 / x + 170 pp. (58 b&w photos, 2 maps) / ISBN 978-1-55458-006-4 Watermelon Syrup: A Novel by Annie Jacobsen with Jane Finlay-Young and Di Brandt • 2007 / x + 268 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-005-7