We get a shopping cart and push it through the aisles. It's fun to push the cart fast and then hop up on the back bar, but they'll make you leave if they catch you, the teenagers who work there. I hope we'll have enough space, says Mullen. He grabs a box of cereal, one of the marshmallow kinds neither of us is allowed to eat. I'll stop here, he says. You go to the butcher aisle. He puts a brown bag of oatmeal in the cart. Brown rice in a sack.
They sure have a lot of meat. Things I've never heard of, sliding in blood on Styrofoam trays. I get a pork tenderloin, some flank sirloins, ham hocks. The packages are real cold; I have to stack them up on my forearms. You can get wrapped chunks of what might have been heads, faces. I get a fish, Chinook Salmon, says the tag. Its big eye not quite staring at me. I have to balance the stack with the bottom of my chin.
Hey, Mullen, I got us a Chinook Salmon. Mullen puts some canned ham in the cart. Fantastic, he says. He prods the fish eye with the tip of his finger, it presses into the soft head. We stuff the bottom rack of the cart with cans of split-pea soup and dried pinto beans. You know anything about pinto beans, Mullen? Mullen grabs some more cans. Feel how heavy these are, he says. I bet pinto-bean cans are heavier than any other sort of bean cans. We push the cart around and it lurches, the wheels get turned sometimes and it makes like it might fall over.
At the till Mullen gets out the bank receipt. We need laundry detergent, he says, without any bleach. And a box of popsicles, I say, the sort where you get all the different colours. The teenager at the till looks at our cart: mop heads, cat litter, light bulbs. Are you going to need a hand out with that? It isn't ours, Mullen says. We found it by the milk cooler. What we need is laundry detergent without any bleach. Where do we find that?
Out in the parking lot, Vaslav sets two paper grocery bags on the hood of his truck. Takes a credit card out of his wallet and scrapes ice off his windshield.
Hey, you got some groceries? asks Mullen. Vaslav puts his wallet away and opens the door. Get in, kids, he says. Snow. Time to make mustard. Mustard? I ask. We get in the truck and scoot up against the passenger door so Vaslav has room to shift the stick. He starts up the truck, grinds the gears and coughs and backs up out of the
IGA
lot.
Mustard, says Vaslav. Have to make mustard when it snows.
Inside the Russians' house we all take off our boots and put them on the little shelf beside the door. We shuffle in our socks across the wooden floor. Vaslav sets his brown paper bags on the counter in the kitchen, pulls out bottles of white vinegar, jars of spices, cloves of garlic. Solzhenitsyn sits in his chair by the window, reading the newspaper. Folds it up so he can hold it in one hand and drink beer with the other. We sit in the wooden chairs and rock â none of the legs are quite the same length. Our feet don't reach the ground.
Summertime mustard is bad for the digestion, says Vaslav, and rain mustard gives you bad dreams.
I dreamed I had a beard, says Mullen. A big beard, all bushy, I could keep stuff in it. Pencils and matches and a harmonica. Do you know how to play the harmonica?
Rain mustard gives you mildew dreams, says Vaslav. Mould and rot and centipedes. He bends down and gets some steel mixing bowls out of a cupboard, a dented pot, a wooden spoon. In Petersburg we always made mustard on the first snowfall because that makes it the luckiest. First-snow mustard makes your kids grow up strong and smart, and melts women's hearts. There's no women in this town to melt, says Solzhenitsyn. He folds up a paper airplane and throws it over Mullen's head. Lands in a potted plant on the window sill. Vaslav coughs. Go chase a skirt, he says. Go down to the post office and buy some stamps. Right, says Solzhenitsyn, looking at us. Stamps.
Vaslav gets a mortar and pestle out of a cupboard, like on Steadman's Drugstore's sign. Pours in yellow mustard seeds and crushes them up. Sour yellow dust rises up in the air. Mullen kicks me with his damp sock under the table and I kick him back. Solzhenitsyn gets a beer out of the fridge and sits back down. Picks his paper back up, moves his finger along the hockey scores, counting to himself. Vaslav grinds up the mustard seeds and shakes the yellow powder into a steel bowl. Opens a white paper bag tied up with a string.
Pours in more yellow, more yellow dust rises. Napa Valley, he says. I have to get this through the mail. A goddamn headache getting it over the border. Solly coughs.
He stirs all the powders and sets the bowl on top of the toaster oven. Chops up garlic cloves, two, four, six. Smashes them with the blade of his big knife. The air gets thick. Sprinkles salt on the garlic and mashes it down flat into the cutting board. He turns on the gas stove and narrows his eyes at the flame, turns the knob slowly right, then left, right again, until the flame is the right size. He sticks his finger in the butter dish above the stove, drops a yellow smudge in the pan. When Brezhnev was in charge we couldn't get butter and had to save soap shavings, for fat, he says. You're full of it, says Solly. Vaslav drops in the garlic and it sputters and stinks. Brown sugar and salt, and ginger and cinnamon, and other spices, I don't know what they are and he doesn't say.
The most important part of mustard, says Vaslav, is vodka.
Russian vodka, I say, 'Cause it's the best, right?
You can't get good vodka even if you drive to Calgary, says Vaslav. He stands on his tiptoes and cranes up into the top shelf. Grunts. Good vodka, I mean Russian or Polish vodka, is repeatedly distilled, smooth, doesn't have any crap in it. But good vodka doesn't make good mustard. He grunts and gets the bottle down, puffs. Lloydminster's Finest Polar Vodka, says the label. Has a picture of a moustachioed man in a fur hat, with lightning bolts in the background. This isn't good vodka? asks Mullen. Vaslav laughs. This will take enamel off the side of a bathtub, he says.
The pan spits and stinks and steams and he opens the vodka bottle and turns it upside down over the pan and a big cloud goes up and sizzles. He stands with the bottle upside down and glugs the whole thing into the pan.
Lord, says Vaslav, Lord, the earth is hard. We dig in the cold earth and always, underneath, harder and colder. The stone heart of the earth will freeze the lungs and burst the
chest. We cough ice, we gasp and die, harder and colder, mouths full of snow and with picks and shovels left helpless. Lord warm my fingers, Jesus warm my toes, and I'll dig in your frozen heart no longer.
Have you heard the pipes making any more fuss? asks Solly.
Vaslav stirs the pan. I'm a busy guy, he says, I don't just sit around listening to the plumbing all day.
Sorry, I forgot, says Solly. Unfolds the newspaper, turns a page. Folds it back up. A very busy guy.
We need to get McClaghan to look at our hot-water tank, says Vaslav. When was the last time that thing got any attention? When did you last see a repairman? It's the water we cook our food in. The water we brush our teeth with. He picks up the steaming pan, moves it onto the back burner. Picks up the steel bowl with the mustard powder and pours in a stream of cold water. Stirs it into a thick paste.
Our water tank is fine, says Solly. It's the pipes, the pipes up this whole street. All these houses of McClaghan's. I don't trust any of it. At least he could move to central heating in most of them. In the places that aren't straight write-offs. A furnace, you just clean the filter. No need to panic. But these boilers, I don't know.
We have a boiler?
Don't you pay attention? Haven't you noticed the radiators?
I've got things on my mind, says Vaslav.
Someday, says Solzhenitsyn, I'm going to buy this place. He wouldn't refuse a reasonable offer. I bet I could get Jarvis Lester to cosign a loan for me. He's always on about how his packing plant is a family, how he's there to help us out. Not even McClaghan would refuse a reasonable offer. We'd tear out all those cranky pipes and radiators and get the sturdiest, least exciting furnace around.
Then what? asks Vaslav. You'd be bored to death. You'd turn up at the neighbours to listen to their pipes.
The point is, our hot-water tank is fine. Not that I'm advocating McClaghan profiting more off our backs.
McClaghan wants us all to get rickets and die in the cold, says Vaslav. He wraps a checkered cloth around the handle of the hot pan and starts to pour it, slowly, into the mustard paste. Stirs with his other hand. I want a cold wind to blow him into hell.
You should get him with the Milk Chicken Bomb, I say.
The what?
Don't you guys know how to make a Milk Chicken Bomb?
Whatever that is, kid, it sounds disgusting, says Vaslav.
I sit on the curb in front of the post office and watch her, in the window of the junk shop. She sits in the middle of the floor and changes the bits in a screwdriver. Pieces of cardboard boxes and Styrofoam packing blocks scattered all around on the floor. She builds a shelf, a piece at a time. Screwing brackets into tall wooden sides.
I want to stop everything and go in there. See what she's up to. Stop everything like in the school Christmas play, when the angel shows up to give her speech: all the kids in the shepherds' bathrobe costumes freeze, their mouths wide open, their arms up and their hands all spread. Those bathrobe shepherds are pretty good at holding still â they stretch out so it's really hard, and one of them, he's probably the best shepherd, he stands on one foot. I want to stop everything like that. Run across the street while she's frozen there putting a new bit in her screwdriver. I want to look in all her drawers, in her desk, under her table. I want to run up the stairs: does she sleep up there? Is there a little bedroom, up above the junk shop? Is she settled in, or is that all in pieces too, like the main floor? Is there furniture, a toothbrush on a shelf, a reading light, clothes hanging in the closet?
She looks up from her shelf at me. I duck under my comic book. After a while I peek up and she's still watching me. She sits there across the street, watching me, and after a while I put my comic book into my backpack and walk away down the street. She watches me go.
In the winter you can stay inside at lunch so long as you go to the library. Mullen and I always go outside at recess, especially when there's snow, but days he has to stay in detention all lunch I don't mind the library. Not all the books are school-type books.
The library used to be a courtyard. I remember in the first grade it was concrete tiles, weeds poking up out of the cracks, and old picnic tables. The inside classrooms had windows that looked out on the courtyard. I was in the second grade when they covered up all the windows with newspapers. We'd sit in math class or language arts class and listen to them hammering, listen to them sawing and digging. Kids who sat in the back row could maybe catch a look through the gaps in the newspaper and see the workers in their hard hats, sawing and hammering. They built a roof out of ribbed steel over the old courtyard. Like the inside of cardboard, on red steel beams. They poured a flat grey concrete floor. Any time I'm in the library I keep an eye out for weeds coming up through the concrete. They must be down there somewhere, the old courtyard weeds, growing and growing. All white and soft in the dark, like some big weedy octopus trapped under the concrete and carpet, listening to kids whisper and turn pages. The soft heels of their inside shoes. Waiting for the right day to push off all the concrete and climb out.
The librarian sits behind her desk. Flips pages in a catalogue. Licks a thick finger. I walk up and put my elbows on her desk.
Hello, I say, I'd like to find some books about Uzbekistan, please.
She looks over her glasses at me. Pardon me?
Uzbekistan, I say. It's in Russia.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, she says.
No, I say, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. In Russia, the country. Some of my friends used to live there. One of my Russian friends is a writer but he doesn't know too much about geography. But people have written books about everywhere else, so someone must have written one about the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. In Russia.
You can use the card catalogue, she says. Look under Subject. How is it spelled?
It's got a zed in it, I say. There's a desert, except it's very cold.
I find a heavy book in a plastic jacket,
The
USSR
in Pictures
. I flip the thick pages. Soldiers march past banners. A space-man, all alone in a rocket, stars reflected in his round helmet. Pruney-faced women with handkerchiefs, like the Hutterites who live outside Cayley and sell potatoes at the Millarville farmer's market. I flip to the index and find nothing about the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.
Dwayne Klatz and some of his friends hunch low around a big library table, books propped up in front of them. Dwayne waves me over to the table. How do you spell goddammit? he asks. I think about it for a while.
It's got two D's, I say. Pete showed me in one of his books once. Two D's and two M's. Goddamme it. No, says another kid, it's got a B at the end. What? says Dwayne Klatz. Say it slow, says the kid. God DAMBIT. The librarian shoots alook over at us and we all make like we're reading.
Dwayne opens his lunch box, orange plastic, a decal with a Viking. A helmet, with wings. He looks inside and makes a face. Anybody want to trade for a granola bar? he asks
A granola bar? says another kid. You're nuts.
A kid unscrews his Thermos lid, turns it over like a cup. Pours his hot soup, it splatters a bit on the table. He blows
on the steam. Lifts it and touches it with his puckered lips. Too hot, he says and sets it back down.
Come on, says Dwayne, it's got chocolate chips. It might as well be a candy bar.
I've got yogourt, I say, and a doughnut.
Dwayne peels the plastic wrap off his sandwich. Lunch meat and brown bread. He lifts the top slice to peek inside. Macaroni-and-cheese loaf, he says.