And another thing tormented him. When she’d left the store he should have gone after her right away, not waited another hour for his shift to end. Why had he hesitated? What did that say about him? Maybe she’d been out there waiting—hoping—to see if he’d come after her, to see if he really loved her?
Cyril found himself contemplating suicide. Hanging was too grimly messy, drowning was too wet and cold, pills and booze he’d probably convulse and vomit, he couldn’t bring himself to jump head first out of a tree—certainly not their tree—which left shooting himself, which meant finding a gun.
As a boy he’d often imagined shooting Hitler and Stalin, sniper style, from the window of a bombed-out building. He’d wait patiently in the rain or snow or dust, through days and nights, though never would his resolve weaken, and then the moment would come when the Fuhrer or Koba raced past to a meeting of generals. He’d take aim. Tick. The rifle bullet pierces the Führer’s skull right behind the ear and the Führer’s head flops forward. Tick. Uncle Joe topples against the shoulder of his aide. Later, in London, Churchill would decorate him, and his mother and father would be there watching, and even Paul would have to give Cyril his due.
Not that his mother and father wanted reminders of the war. They’d avoided the prairies where so many Eastern Europeans congregated and come all the way out to Vancouver to escape getting caught up in an enclave that might have kept those wounds open. Paul had told him that, one of the few bits of info about the family prehistory that he’d shared. Another was the fact that the word slave came from Slav. “Vikings navigated the rivers from the Baltic into Russia,” he said. “All the way to Kiev, kidnapping locals on the way and selling them to Turks who’d come up from the Black Sea.”
Ukrainians tended to be tall and fair-skinned; Paul looked like an emaciated Peter Lorre, and while Cyril was bigger and healthier he was no tall blond. “What happened to us?”
“What happened to us? I’ll tell you what happened to us. While the Turkish slave buyers were waiting around in Kiev they got horny so went to the whorehouses, and guess what happened? Us!”
He could never tell when Paul was lying or being brutally honest. For as long as Cyril could remember his older brother had banked on Cyril’s naïveté: heads I win, tails you lose, chocolate milk came from brown cows, cats were female dogs, the moon was the sun with its back turned, they used to put bells in coffins so that if you got buried alive you could ring for help, Hitler was a vegetarian. Some of it turned out to be true and some BS. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were homosexuals. That one had thrown him for a loop and he’d never watched the show the same way again.
On television there were WASPs and Italians and Irish, as if the whole world was comprised of those three groups. Movies were a little more diverse with some token Jews, Negroes and Chinese sprinkled around the edges, though scarcely any Eastern Europeans at all, and if there were they were Commie spies or coal miners: sweaty, grimy and grim, like Stanley Kowalski, the lummox in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Subhumans. Untermenschen. The Nazi term for Slav, beasts destined to serve.
The first time Gilbert heard Cyril’s parents speak Ukrainian he was appalled. “What’re they doing?” he’d complained, the disgust in his voice tangible, his nose wrinkling as though the very language itself did not merely sound strange but smelled strange. Gilbert McNab’s view was that the world spoke English, only Krauts and Commies grunted like animals. And there was more than merely the language, there was the cabbage and garlic. Gilbert grimaced and waved his hand in front of his face. “Farts.”
FOUR
SIX MONTHS AFTER Connie vanished Cyril finally got hold of a gun thanks to Gilbert’s grandmother. Cyril had known the old lady for as long as he could remember, a tiny, trembly woman with an enormous head covered in wispy hair that looked like the dust that collected under beds. She spent her time in the middle of the living room couch sucking butterscotch sweeties in front of the TV; her Glaswegian brogue was all but incomprehensible, as if she was talking with a sock in her throat. When she died a jewellery box went into the coffin with her. Gilbert became obsessed with it, imagining money, gold, diamonds.
For weeks after she was buried Gilbert brought flowers each day to her grave. Sometimes Gilbert popped over in the morning on the way to school; other times he went over late at night. Her grave was right next to her husband’s, Gilbert’s grandfather, who’d blown his own brains out.
Cyril’s mother, who had no great opinion of Gilbert, remarked with wonder upon his devotion. “There he is again,” she said, peering out the kitchen window at Gilbert’s silhouette. “He loved her.” There was bewilderment in her voice. Cyril too was surprised. Gilbert had always referred to the old lady as what’s her nuts. As in, what’s her nuts was crabbin’ at me again. Or, what’s her nuts was in the can all night. Or, what’s her nuts hit me with her fuckin’ cane.
It was March, 1963, and as the days got longer Gilbert’s visits got later and later so that he was often there at midnight or beyond. Cyril was careful not to pry.
While Gilbert attended his grandmother’s grave, Cyril lay awake wondering what Connie was doing at that very moment in Los Angeles: working late at some waitressing job, rehearsing lines for a part, or—and this caused his gut to knot—was she with a lover, her leading man… He imagined going down there and finding her. He could support himself by sitting in parks and drawing portraits. He’d seen guys doing that here in Stanley Park on Sundays. Not a glorious artistic career, but down there in LA, in Hollywood, he could get discovered. He envisioned Elvis Presley or Steve McQueen strolling by with a starlet on their arm pausing to admire Cyril’s stuff and maybe even getting their own portrait done: word would get around and just like that Cyril would be made. It happened all the time in Hollywood, didn’t it? He thought of Natalie Wood’s character in Gypsy. Whenever he watched TV he paid particular attention to crowd scenes and peripheral characters, thinking he might spot Connie, but there weren’t many Orientals on television, just Fuji on McHale’s Navy and some extras on The Hawaiian Eye.
One night Cyril saw Gilbert pushing through the hedge into the cemetery packing something long over his shoulder. Cyril got dressed and went on over to join him. A chill drizzle fell and downtown glowed cold and grey. As he approached he heard dull thumps and muted cursing, so circled cautiously around the grave and saw a head on the ground—Gilbert’s head. All manner of explanation raced through Cyril’s mind, the chief of which was that Gilbert had been decapitated, though the reality was that he was standing in a hole.
Gilbert greeted Cyril cheerfully. “Hey, buddy.”
“Hey.”
“Dump this, will you?” Gilbert hoisted two pails of dirt up and out of the hole onto the grass.
Cyril lugged the pails to the hedge and emptied them. When he got back he heard the thump of a shovel blade striking wood.
“Drill.”
Cyril found a manual wood drill in a gunny sack. A dull grinding followed.
“Saw.”
Cyril passed down the saw and soon came the rasp of steel teeth on hard wood.