A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [46]
Nick lights cigarettes for us both and lies beside me with his head on my breasts, and we are lazy and do not have to get up yet, and through the window I can see the grey light of the evening.
“I could at least make some coffee for you,” he says at last. “I’m a hell of a host.”
Host. It seems an unusual word, under the circumstances.
We dress and go back down to the living room, and when the coffee is ready we sit together within the mammoth half-moon chesterfield.
Now I can’t think of anything to say. He talks so easily, when he wants, yet he does not seem bothered by silences. I’m the opposite.
“There’s no samovar.”
“What?”
“They have an ikon, your parents, but no samovar.”
As I’m speaking, I can feel how uncalled-for a comment it is. Not everyone who came from that part of the world would arrive complete with a samovar, for heaven’s sake. Now I would give anything not to have spoken.
“What a disappointment,” Nick says. He is laughing, but only just. “Well, to tell you the truth, my grandma started out with a samovar, but she never got it as far as this.”
“Why not?” How relieved I am, that he is doing the talking now. I’m interested, and yet it is the sound of his voice I like best, just to sit here beside him, in this security and hear his voice, whatever it happens to be saying.
“She traded it to somebody on the boat, and no one knows what she got for it. She used to claim it went for medicine for my dad, but he says he was the only one of all the steerage passengers who wasn’t sick. Personally, I think it probably went for vodka to make the trip endurable. Naturally, she wouldn’t say. But nobody would’ve blamed her.”
“They must have been terrible, the immigrant ships.”
“They were. My dad still talks about it sometimes. He can’t help it. It was the great traumatic experience, the new life beginning in a reeking hold with everybody retching all over everybody else, and cockroaches the size of bats, if he is to be believed. I used to get annoyed at him for talking so much about it. I was a relatively clueless kid in some ways. You can imagine, though – having to sit attentively while you heard the details for the millionth time. Well, maybe you can’t imagine. I guess immigrant ships would be a little bit out of your line.”
For some reason this angers me, although it’s quite true. With my father, it was the Great War, but he didn’t speak of it.
“My grandfather came over on an immigrant ship, as a boy. Perhaps he used to tell my father. Or maybe he didn’t – I don’t suppose that would have been his way. None of it filtered down to me. So then I forget, and feel apologetic towards people like your family, that they went through all that. But so did mine – only it was longer ago, and the memory’s gone now.”
“How odd you are, Rachel. Why should you feel apologetic?”
“I don’t know.” And yet it was he who made me feel like that, saying it would be out of my line, as though things had been easy for the people I came from, easy back into pre history and forward forever. What does he know about it?
“It was a funny thing about that trip, you know,” he is saying. “I guess all the ships were the same. Lots of the people who’d come over on the same boat kept in touch with one another for years and years afterwards. When I went to Winnipeg to college, my grandma said I had to look up a family that she and my dad had come over with. She used to hear from the Podiuks every Easter and Christmas, and my dad saw them occasionally when he went to the city, but she never went so she never saw them. Such good people, she says. My dad is translating all this for me, sternly, so