A Death Most Cold Read online

  He was a bit aghast but didn’t want to contribute to a scene, considering that Ted Mack and Benson McDougall had stopped by to cheer him up. Besides, he was through with histrionics; best to let her take what she wanted and be done with it. So while he and his college colleagues sat around the kitchen table, talking shop in muffled tones, his grim-faced wife marched in with her “movers” (Where’d she find Curly and Moe? Tarasyn vaguely wondered) and proceeded to take things out. The sofa (it was ugly anyway), the two side chairs (no great loss), the stereo system (ouch! that hurt; it was a Telefunken), a lamp, the coffee table, and generally anything else that she had presumably grown attached to at some time or other during their five years of acquiring chattels together.

  “Are you going to just let her walk out with all that stuff?” asked Ted Mack as he watched Curly and Moe doing their heave-ho routine.

  Myron shrugged and stared into his beer. “Sure, why not? I’m a little short on bullshit repellent just now.”

  “Bad move,” replied Ted. “She’ll walk all over you.”

  “I’d say she already has,” offered, Benson shaking his head.

  In retrospect, he should have protested the carting off of the Kurelek pencil sketch that had hung above the stereo. It was a delicate piece of a boy lying on the grass in an open field, chewing on a blade of straw, looking up at the prairie sky. True, she had picked it out (which in her mindset meant that she was entitled to it — end of discussion), but he too had grown rather fond of it. Days of long lost innocence and all of that…not to mention that it was valuable art, which would only appreciate with time. But he felt too hollow, distracted, and distressed to do anything but watch with a kind of numb detachment as she took it down, tucked it under her arm, and resolutely spirited it away.

  When at last her work was done, she paused at the door, bit her lip thoughtfully, and evidently having made up her mind, declared, “Since you have guests tonight, I’ll come back later for the dining table and chairs.”

  With that, she was gone.

  ***

  They met at York University in Toronto. Myron was a teaching assistant/marker and in the throes of writing his doctoral thesis. Nadia was an English major who chose history as an elective, and his seminar section was the only one that fit into her timetable. She was enthusiastic; he was intrigued. They hit it off but prudently restrained themselves until the semester ended.

  “I’m happy!” she exclaimed the day after she moved into his ratty one-bedroom apartment near Jane and Finch.

  “A course in Canadian history will do that to you,” he mused.

  “No,” she said, “only certain profs—”

  “I’m not a prof. I’m a mere graduate student, simply doing what profs do but for a pittance. I may become a prof, though, whereby I can continue to do what profs do for a whole lot more — if I can ever finish my thesis.”

  “Oh, you’ll finish,” she proclaimed confidently. “You’re one of those plodders — and plodders always finish.”

  And he did: a thick tome on the rise and consolidation of prairie radicalism, 1914–1921, overstuffed with footnotes (which thesis advisors loved and which drove Nadia nuts typing). Meanwhile, he raided a couple of his more meaningful chapters to produce a paper, which became a “useful” article in a respected academic journal. This was considered obligatory to get his career launched in higher education. Shortly thereafter, he was ready for the fast-track lane on the “sessional circuit,” an accepted route for those aspirants to an eventual permanent university position. Sessional lecturers were hired on a limited-term basis (usually eight months with a chance of renewal), often to replace a tenured professor gone off on sabbatical. Every year, there were numerous such positions advertised across the country.

  Myron’s CV went nationwide, with a long string of nays, until he was lucky enough to be hired by the University of Edmonton sight unseen. Subsequently, he learned that indeed a senior member of the History Department had perused his “useful” article and thought him a deserving candidate. It was an eight-month appointment at subsistence wages. Both he and Nadia were elated. They decided to get married before driving west together to seek their fortune.

  That presented some complications, however. Nadia’s mother was none too keen to see her daughter whisked away in matrimonial bliss by a strange man to God knows where — even if he was from the right ethnic background.

  Myron and Vera Karpovich didn’t exactly hit it off. From the moment he arrived at Karpovich’s modest bungalow near Myrtle Station just north of Whitby, Myron felt the suspicion and resentment of an outsider who dared to come into Mrs. Karpovich’s tightly run matriarchal world to claim for himself her most treasured prize.

  Part of it was that Mrs. Karpovich was a widow; Stan Karpovich had died about two years before. To be sure, he left her with a paid-up mortgage and a relatively comfortable existence thanks to an insurance policy and a tidy pension from GM, where he had worked for almost thirty years. Still, she was alone and anxious that her flesh and blood should not abandon her in her twilight years. Aside from that, Mrs. Karpovich had another trait that Myron found all too evident in Nadia; she was possessed of great reserves of nervous, volatile energy, which, coupled with the immutable conviction that she knew what was right for everyone concerned, inevitably produced emotional eruptions. Through some fathomless deductive process, she concluded that he wasn’t good for Nadia. And she proved correct, after a fashion.

  “So…Nadia picked you,” she finally acknowledged to Myron when he had shown up for the sixth or seventh straight time — some sort of record, Myron imagined. They were sitting around the kitchen table with Mrs. Karpovich’s shrewd black eyes appraising him once more. Evidently, she decided that he was one apparition that wasn’t going away easily.

  “We picked each other,” Nadia amended, giving Myron a quick smile.

  “Yes…yes…and now he wants to take you far away to Elberta!” She shook her head indignantly.

  “That’s where he got a job… It’s a good opportunity for Myron’s career,” Nadia argued.

  “Can’t he find a job here?”

  “University positions are scarce just now. I’m lucky to get this one,” Myron contributed, trying to be more than the silent third person in the conversation.

  “And it’s not forever,” added Nadia, all too aware of his limited-term appointment. “In a year or two, Myron might get a job in Ontario…closer to home. But before we go, we want to get married,” Nadia pressed on. “It would only be right.”

  “Yes…I s’ppose,” Mrs. Karpovich sighed.

  “A small wedding — just family and close friends before we leave,” suggested Nadia.

  Mrs. Karpovich appeared to acquiesce, albeit reluctantly (Myron later discovered that mother and daughter had a donnybrook over her proposed marriage to him and the subsequent plan to move west, with Nadia tearfully prevailing). Now, with ruffled feathers apparently smoothed, Mrs. Karpovich insisted that the marriage take place in her church and that the reception be held in her home. Myron agreed in the full knowledge that his side of the family would not object.

  Speaking of which…the Tarasyns had much in common with the Karpovichs. To begin with, both came to Canada in 1949 as part of the 30,000 or so “displaced persons” that the country allowed in from the postwar refugee camps in Germany. And while adjusting relatively well to life in the new land, each family carried its share of old world cultural baggage.

  No less than Vera, Myron’s mother, Marta, was the linchpin of the Tarasyns, but for entirely different reasons. Myron’s father, Bohdan, was one of those incredibly useless individuals who never accomplished much on his own, had no evident skills, and would have drunk away whatever the family had were it not for the firmness and resourcefulness of his wife. Bohdan was an illiterate, ignorant, self-serving man who abused the trust of those around him, and Myron wondered why Marta married him. But it was wartime Germany, she was a peasant girl plucked from the steppes of Ukrain
e and he, twenty years her senior (also transported to Germany as part of the Nazi labour requisition campaign in 1942), was one of the first individuals she encountered who took an interest in her. They met at her assigned village farm about an hour’s drive west of Bremen.

  “He wasn’t always so bad,” Marta told Myron one time, “but the drinking pickled his brain.”

  Although Bohdan more often than not exhibited poor judgement (he wanted to go to Brazil rather than Canada until Marta interceded with immigration officials and straightened him out), he did have an innate peasant cunning and instinct for self-preservation. And, after all, he did have enough good sense to woo and marry Marta.

  Once in Canada, Marta slowly liberated herself from his boorish, overbearing ignorance; she strove to adjust and embrace her new environment while her husband drank with his cronies and stagnated. She went to school to improve her English, obtained a driver’s licence after many painful attempts, and finally, with the children grown older, secured employment in a furniture factory in Pickering. The family bought a small farmhouse on a few acres about ten miles northwest of the city.

  Marta gave up on Bohdan, who was for the most of his life only sporadically employed, and concentrated her energies on bringing up her three sons, of which Myron was the oldest. Although she never really understood Maroslav’s (which somehow got transcribed in the Canadian documentation as Myron) academic pursuits, she was nevertheless proud of his success. When he introduced Nadia, she was delighted, taking an instant liking to her. And when he announced that he had gotten a job in Edmonton at the university there, she said, “Good for you,” followed in the same breath, “is Nadia going too?”

  “Of course…but before we do, we want to get married.”

  “That’s good too! When?”

  “End of June. We want to leave early in July so that we’re settled in before I start work August 1.”

  As Myron anticipated, where they were to be married was of no consequence to his mother as long as she could be there.

  The wedding went off fairly smoothly (although privately, Nadia and her mother continued to argue). There were a few moments of anxiety when Myron and family got lost on their way to the church, but the ceremony did proceed on time and without any hitches. The reception at Mrs. Karpovich’s house also seemed to go well. The two mothers-in-law were polite to each other, albeit restrained in their conversation — particularly Mrs. Karpovich, who found it difficult, given her reservations.

  The two women did make quite a contrast, Myron observed, not only in their personalities but also in appearance and interaction. Vera was an angular, bony woman with the skittishness of a doe ready to bolt; Marta was smaller, rounder, with a more relaxed, placid manner. One scurried about worried that something was amiss; the other hardly raised an eyebrow, letting the flow come to her. Bohdan, meanwhile, along for the ride, so to speak, simply melted into a corner, drank a continuous stream of beer, and looked sheepishly on Mrs. Karpovich’s small living room congested with a plethora of milling people.

  Not that there were really that many — no more than thirty. Aside from the immediate family members, there were a number of aunts and uncles from Nadia’s side that Myron had never met until the wedding. The remainder were an assortment of friends, mostly from university, on either side. All told, a very small, inexpensive, and relatively intimate affair that left both Myron and Nadia profoundly relieved.

  ***

  For a time it appeared they would live happily ever after. Myron successfully completed his eight-month contract with the university and was retained for another year. Meanwhile, he moonlighted at a city college one evening per week and taught a summer session to supplement his meagre income. Nadia, who had a BA in English, obtained an administrative position in the university’s older adult outreach programme.

  Alas, Myron’s time ran out. Since he wasn’t on a tenure stream, two years was the max. Once more, he sallied forth in search of employment in academia. A promising opportunity presented itself one day on the Department of History bulletin board. Great Plains College, located some three hundred miles northwest of Edmonton, on about the same latitude as Smolensk/Moscow (Myron looked it up on a map), was in need of a history instructor in its “university transfer programme.”

  Upon further research, Myron discovered that unlike in Ontario, the Alberta college model allowed for a direct connection to the province’s universities. As part of a “comprehensive postsecondary education,” many colleges (including Great Plains, as it turned out) offered two years of university courses directly transferable to degree-granting institutions. The idea was to create “university places” for students who would otherwise (usually for economic and/or geographic reasons) not be bound for the hallowed halls. To Myron, it was an enlightened policy. Not only did it ease the problem of access to higher education, but it also provided another institutional pool for employment of academics like himself.

  He forthwith sent in his application and in due course received a reply. He had made the short list and was invited for an interview. The Department of Humanities & Social Sciences Selection Committee, consisting of two English instructors — one of whom was the departmental chair — and a psychologist greeted him most pleasantly on his arrival in the city, took him on a tour of the facilities, and then out to a Chinese restaurant, where the main topic of conversation centred on the pleasures of the Great White North and if he was an avid cross-country skier or moose hunter. Myron was neither but got the job anyway.

  He was somewhat puzzled as to why the history instructor that he presumably was to replace was not on the committee. Normally, she would have been, he was politely told, but she was in Calgary on pressing family business, and the committee felt the need to get on with the interview/hiring process. Myron nodded in understanding; he would have wanted to meet his potential predecessor and engage in some shop talk, but he appreciated the committee’s evident resolve to hire as soon as possible.

  Early that spring, Myron and Nadia took an exploratory drive to Great Plains. It was a sprawling, squat city, which, despite its relative unattractiveness, did seem to have the appurtenances of urbanity: a decent-sized mall anchored by a large Zellers and a newly erected Tim Horton’s on the major road leading into the heart of downtown. The highlight, in fact, was the college, an impressive curvilinear brick structure located alongside the city bypass. The edifice seemed to arise from the landscape like an amoeba, replete with eccentric curves and conjoining edges.

  “I think I’m going to like it here,” Myron remarked.

  Nadia was less certain. She was saddened that she had to give up her position at the university and leave the provincial capital for the raw frontier. Myron assured her that there was more to Great Plains than gussied-up pickup trucks, grubby mobile homes, and slightly moronic cowboys. Exactly what, he wasn’t sure — yet. Nadia, to her credit, took it in stride and indeed, as the time came closer, she became excited about the “challenge” of living in Great Plains.

  Later that summer, they moved permanently. Great Plains, already an established regional administrative centre, was in the midst of an oil-and-gas boom, and accommodations were tight. Fortunately, as fate would have it, there was a vacancy in Mackenzie Towers, a vacancy created by the retirement of Ms. Hazel Knolls, whom Myron just happened to be replacing. He never did get to talk shop with his predecessor as he had hoped; by the time he and Nadia arrived, Ms. Knolls had retired to warmer climes in Kelowna, BC.

  For over a year after, it appeared that Myron and Nadia’s marital bliss would remain intact, despite the occasional flare-up. Nadia, however, showed signs of becoming…unhappy. She was an extroverted creature who could become quite agitated when she felt that all was not right in Camelot. Myron couldn’t pinpoint precisely (although he wracked his brains trying) when things started to go seriously wrong.

  Perhaps it began when she got a job as a journalist with the Great Plains Daily Reporter, a chain publication that scoured the com
munity for noteworthy (and sometimes not so noteworthy) news. Myron began noticing that when he came home Nadia was either out or in the process of going out to cover some event or other. It wasn’t that she was avoiding him but rather simply the nature of her job, or so he assumed. When he finally pointed that out, she reacted.

  “You’re a sedentary slob, do you know that?” she screamed.

  True, he was a mite lethargic at times, and he had developed a little paunch, but that was due to her good cooking. Of course, that was then; since, he had lost over thirty pounds — a testament to what marriage stress can do.

  That fact was brought home to him when he met an acquaintance he hadn’t seen in a number of months. Williams was astonished. “My god, what prisoner of war camp did you emerge from… You’re emaciated! Have you been sick?”

  “Been on a diet… It’s my new gaunt look,” Myron joked.

  But it was true. His face, once round and fully packed, had developed distinctly angular features; the eyes sank deeper, the cheeks were shallower, and the neck seemed…stretched. And his clothes, he realized, hung on him like drapery, at least two sizes too loose. Indeed, he was, as the phrase went, but a mere shadow of his former self. And this was not to mention that his hair was turning grey at an alarming rate for a thirty-two-year-old.

  The final crunch between him and Nadia came one evening when on her way out the door, pen and notebook in hand and the ever-present Pentax slung over her shoulder, she announced with considerable force that she couldn’t stand the way he walked, the way he talked, the way he did things — in fact, she couldn’t stand him!

  Later that same night when she returned, in more subdued tones she laid it on the line. “I want to be alone for a while — sort out my life. I’m getting my own apartment.”

  Myron was hurt and bewildered. He pleaded, he cajoled, but she would have none of it.

  “But Nadia—” he tried one last time.

  “Just piss off!” Her mind was definitely made up.