Candles

In the second week of torrential rain, the trees bent low under the weight of water. Sandy’s mother kept him home from school. The ground squished beneath their boots, water squirting up from the saturated lawn with every step. His mother would not let the children play outside anymore. Forced down by unremitting wet wind, the lower branches of the balsam trees spread like drenched rugs on the grass.

“I don’t like the look of the sky,” she said to his father over porridge that morning.

“It’s raining so hard, how can you even see the sky?” His father spoke through a mouthful of porridge. He preferred kasha but his wife refused to cook it, saying she lacked the imagination for foreign cereals even if she could find them in the grocery stores. He knew a Russian merchant in Toronto’s Kensington market who sold imported grains like bulgur and kasha.

“It’s been raining cats and dogs all week. The river is rising so fast, I’m frightened.”

Sandy looked out the kitchen window, curtained by water, and wondered what a real storm of soggy cats and dogs looked like. The wind sounded like yelping dogs, yowling cats slithered down the sky. The river had risen above its banks and spread over the yard like a muddy lake.

“Shouldn’t we leave now before it’s too late? The wind is fierce.”

“It won’t be too late. Sure, the yard’s flooded, but we’re high enough above the river, we’ll be fine, don’t worry so much, this won’t last.”

In the afternoon they stood in front of the window and watched the Humber River rise, expand, heave, eddy and swirl towards the house. Objects floated by, objects Sandy didn’t ordinarily see floating in a river: a bicycle, a wagon, a laundry basket, lawn chairs. He couldn’t hear the words. The rain pounded on the walls and windows. If it wasn’t raining cats and dogs, it was raining something pretty hard, like stones, Sandy thought. The rain would hurt. His mother said something about the house trembling and his father again told her not to worry, the foundation was strong as Gibraltar, which Sandy understood because he had seen a picture of the great rock rising above the sea in his Grade Three geography book. His father had constructed a house strong as a rock, very strong, indeed. So his mother was not to worry. The river heaved above the banks and swept towards their swing set.

His father had built this house before Sandy was born, his mother told him, because she wanted to live in a new house in the valley by the water. She wanted a large picture window through which she could see the river and her children playing. It was a very special house on a stone foundation, all shining wood floors and second floor windows that opened outwards in panels. His father had carved cupboards and closets under the stairs and into the walls.

“We’re not leaving yet,” his father said, “it’s a flood, sure, we’ve seen it before, but the water won’t reach us and we can always get out if we have to. There’s time.”

The black sky thundered and roared with pounding winds. The flooding waters heaved and delved, lifting the trees off their roots, the swing set off its moorings, and swept up the stairs on to the porch where it roiled against the front door. His mother screamed. Cicely was wrapping her tiny arms and legs around his, yelling for a horse ride. Sandy tried to shake her free. She couldn’t see the water as her head was below the window sill. Cicely could be quite a pain. But his mother wasn’t well everyday and she needed help to look after the “baby.”

Too late to get out of the house without assistance, until help arrived by rowboat which, his father said, it certainly would, they gathered some papers from the desk downstairs and all the family photos. In a box, his mother packed tins of vegetables and soups, the unopened loaf of bread, and the left-over meat loaf from last night’s supper. His father also hauled his red tool box up the stairs, along with their giant flashlight and two umbrellas. It wasn’t raining in the house. Sandy didn’t understand the purpose of the umbrellas. His business was to mind Cicely.

“Mind Cicely.”

Well, Sandy did mind Cicely who, growing a new tooth, was crankier than a skunk. Smelled like one, too, sour milk on her breath and a pissy odour in her pants because she never made it to the toilet in time. He was told not to let go of her hand or forget her favourite doll in the kitchen where Cicely kept it by the table in a high chair made especially by his father. His father brought planks and sheets of wood home, stored them in his work shed, then over a period of time spent measuring, sawing, hammering, sanding, he produced chairs, cabinets, and painted wooden angels, stars, elves and reindeer for the Christmas tree. They were kept in a wooden box in the basement, now flooded. He heard water beneath the kitchen floor, a low, sloshing, shaking rumble. Now the river rocked beneath his feet and they were climbing the stairs to get above the water, slipping inside, muddy water dirtying his mother’s polished hardwood floors.

As if a hand rose out of the swill and turned the knob, the front door swung open and water swept into the hall, hoisting the console table under the mirror off the floor and tumbling his father’s samovar into the flood. The house shifted. His mother cried out again and Yuri grasped his shoulder. Sandy watched the door push up and out of its hinges, which creaked and snapped off the frame, and the door fell like a boat lowered from the sides of a ship into the sea. The river churned into the hallway after it and knocked it against the bottom of the stairs. The door bobbed on the waves in the corridor. Even the greatest ships in the world plunged to the depths of the sea. Was it possible for the house to slip under the soggy lawn and disappear beneath the uprooted trees?

“Yuri!” his mother cried.

“We’ll be all right, Margaret, someone will come.”

“We should have left when I said, I told you we should have left.”

“The water won’t rise forever, Margaret. Stay calm. Don’t panic, we’ll be safe and dry upstairs.”

“Don’t panic, he says. God, my beautiful house!”

“It’ll be fine after, Margaret, I promise. Alyosha, hang on to Cicely.”

He picked his sister up, just managing to hold her as he climbed the stairs. At the top of the stairs, they all looked down. The water has risen above the first two steps. Wind and rain hurled into the foyer through the space left by the front door. Pots of African violets floated like lily pads. The console table, upside down like a dead animal, slapped against the newel post his father had carved. The silver and porcelain samovar bobbed in the eddy, the tea pot in which his father brewed the concentrate of black Russian tea floated out of sight into the dining room.

“Yuri….”

Cicely was heavy in Sandy’s arms. When the house shifted under his feet, he almost dropped his sister. Like a waking, growling bear, ill-tempered and hungry after resting for so long, the house trembled, and impelled by the force of the flood cracked and separated from its stone foundation.

“Yuri!”

Sandy struggled to keep from slipping down the stairs. The front door was now a flat-bottomed boat rising and falling on the waves of a rough sea. His father grabbed his arm and hoisted Cicely on to his shoulders.

“She’s too heavy for you, tovarich.”

A Russian defector who had enthralled Sandy at bed time with his stories of fabulous adventures on dangerous treks through the Russian steppes and Siberian taiga, capture by patrols, detention in a camp and subsequent escape from certain death by way of Finland, Sandy’s father did not like to leave what he had built. A refugee from post-revolutionary St. Petersburg in the twenties, he eventually found work on a freighter for two years, crossing the Atlantic several times, acquiring English by reading trashy paperbacks in his bunk. He disembarked in Halifax almost as an afterthought. Canada had never been a goal, had scarcely been a shadow in his consciousness, but it was large and empty enough to begin life all over again.

“I really wish you wouldn’t call him Alyosha,” his mother always complained, “his name’s Alexander. Sandy’s a fine, English-sounding nickname.”

“He’s half-Russian.”

“What good will that do him, I ask you?”

His father always shrugged off his mother’s protests and continued telling tales of old Russia, of Tsars and bears, of troikas and droshkies, of skating on the Neva, of electric lights newly installed in the Winter Palace, of slaughters in the streets and starvation in the towns during the revolution. His samovar, carried and coddled, hidden and protected during all his travels, was the last remaining vestige of the world he had forever left behind. Now it dipped and bobbed like a giant porcelain apple before it too, swept by the current, disappeared from view.

With the rain smashing against his parents’ bedroom window, it was difficult to see the brown river heave and rise and bubble like a thick brown pudding, swirling debris and objects in strange configurations and weird patterns. In the cavernous closet built into one wall, a stairwell led up to the attic. The house seemed to be shifting, teetering. Cicely whimpered into her father’s shoulder.

“We must…higher up go, I think,” his father said, still carrying his tool box, his voice uncertain.

“Yuri, we can’t.”

“We must.”

Then the floor rose and the bed slid on its casters against a wall.

“Don’t fear, Alyosha, be brave, there’s no danger.”

“Yuri, the house…”

“Don’t worry about the house. What is broken, I can fix. We must go up until help comes. There’s no danger. The water can rise only so high and I do not think it can rise higher.”

The first fingers of flood crept along the second floor corridor, the entire first floor now the bottom of a muddy river, mounting and swishing, pushing up and up. Sandy, fascinated, pointed. His father pushed him towards the closet door.

“Come, Margaret. We’ll be safe. Help is coming, I know. Just a flood. What’s a little rain?”

“Oh, Yuri, our wedding picture in the hallway.”

Each night on his way to bed Sandy saw the picture at the top of the stairs, next to his parents’ bedroom door. His mother was wearing a knee-length white dress which puffed out at the shoulders, a crown of flowers in her hair, a bouquet of roses in one hand. Yuri stood like a soldier in a striped suit. Both were unsmiling, posed in front of a phony backdrop of a many-turreted castle rising above a bank of blue mist.

“Forget the picture, Margaret.”

“But it’s irreplaceable. It’s our wedding picture! Oh, Yuri, it will be ruined.”

“Go with the children, up to the attic. You’ll be safe. I’ll get the picture. And some clothes for the children.”

“No, don’t go, Yuri.”

“It’s just outside the door. Go upstairs. Alyosha, help with Cicely. Here, Margaret, you take the flashlight and the box. Sit by the attic window. Help is coming and we shall be all right, soon, I promise. A little flood damage to the house, a hammer and nail will fix, you’ll see. I’m one minute out, then back in.”

He caressed Margaret’s cheek, wiped away a tear. Sandy led Cicely towards the closet, his legs unsteady on the shifting floor. His mother followed behind, pushing him. Sandy looked behind. His father waded into the corridor, now a canal of muddy water rushing into the bedroom. Yuri also looked back and waved at Sandy as if he was saying good-bye. Winking and smiling, he gestured for Sandy to climb the attic stairs.

“Sandy, don’t dawdle. I need your help!”

“Yes, mama, I’m coming,” but he watched the water soak the bedroom carpet and swill around the legs of the furniture. He thought he heard his father in the watery corridor, but so many noises of windy rain and objects knocked against the walls, the house itself screeching and sighing, tilting in the waves, he could no longer distinguish a human voice. The house lurched. Sandy steadied himself as he climbed the attic stairs.

-

Hanging on to a door rocking and rolling on the wild river like an oarless row boat over a furious current, he kept shouting to Cicely not to let go of his arm. His sister was crying, her small fingers too small to secure a grip, and he was terrified of crushing her infant hand. It kept slipping as if some underwater creature were tugging him away from his sister and down in the black and smelly currents of the river. Like a fish, she kept slithering to the edge of the door and sinking farther into the wild river. Kicking his legs against the fierce monster, he tried to secure himself on top of the slippery, precarious door and to pull Cicely’s body up out of the water.

The door dipped and submerged, the water roaring above their waists, then rose again above the waves. Cicely’s skin looked white and blue and her crying sank into whimpers, then silence. He would hold her in his arms as they rode out the storm. To get a better grip, he might have to let go, only for a moment. Help me, he remembered shouting, his baby sister’s arm always escaping his grasp.

Oh, Moses, Moses, he remembered the story, had been discovered and rescued by an Egyptian princess who parted the reeds after the storm. Surely, his sister would be rescued if he let go. But he had promised his parents to look after her. They were not here anymore. He saw his father’s head circling like a doll’s above the water before it disappeared. The door rocked and dipped and swirled in eddies. His fingers darkened to purplish-blue and hurt so bad he thought they’d snap off like sticks, separate at the knuckles. Darkness rushed through his mind like a flood and the world suddenly disappeared and he felt himself rocked in a wild, yet soothing kind of sleep on the waves. When he awoke, half his body lay over the door rocking like a cradle on a lake, his legs numb in the water and his baby sister was gone. Only her heavy, wet blanket remained in his fingers.

-

For a week or two after the rescue, they lived in crowds: volunteers, police officers, soldiers, firefighters, newspaper reporters, nurses, women with helping hands wrapping them in blankets, holding bowls of hot soup to their mouths. So cold, he was sure his bones had turned as blue as Cecily’s fingers slipping out of his hand. He himself could scarcely speak. When he did gather together a bundle of words, Sandy tried to describe the sounds made by the shifting of his house off its foundation. He mentioned Yuri’s samovar. Few people, however sympathetic, seemed to understand what he was talking about and, patting his hair, advised him to calm down as everything was okay now.

Questioned about his sister, he opened his mouth, his heart turned like a capsized boat, and the words sank. He could still remember her sour milk smell and the touch of her fingers against his, and how the brown muddy water turned their hands blue. His mother at first did not look at him from the hospital bed.

He had been hauled sputtering and choking out of the river, pulled right out of the mucky, roiling waters just as he slipped off the door. Hoisting him out of the flood, the taste of mud deep in his belly and the smell of sewage swilling in his head, they wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the land, which he had believed had disappeared forever. That night, he vaguely recalled being fed hot chicken soup and being held by a large woman in a blue uniform with a gold cross on its lapel. He didn’t speak and slept long, untroubled by dreams or nightmares. The next day, when the good people took him to see his mother in the hospital, not the same one where he had been taken to spend the night after the rescue, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the ceiling, her body covered in a white smock, holding her hands together.

“Mama, mama.”

She did not lower her eyes or smile when he ran to the bedside and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Mama.”

“You have been saved, Sandy?”

The voice sounded distant, unclear, a mouthing under water. She did not caress his head as he hugged her waist and cried in her lap.

“You have been saved, Sandy?”

“Yes, mama, I’m alright. They saved me in a rowboat.”

“Where’s Cicely? Where’s Cicely? Why don’t you listen to me? You never listen to me. I told you to look after your sister. You’re saved, but where’s Cicely? Why couldn’t they bring her back from the dead, if they saved you?”

“Oh, mama…”

She did not touch him as he tried to hug her as hard as he could. She didn’t mention his father and he had so much wanted to ask if they would ever see him again, although he knew they never would. Waking up the first morning in the apartment above street car tracks that volunteers had found for them, uncertain of where he was, his memory still crowded with Cicely’s face bobbing out of the muddy water, calling his name, of her blue hands impossibly reaching for his, he touched the floor with his bare feet and recoiled as if he had stepped on a bed of stinging nettles.

He returned to school and fought against sleeping because of the dreams, and tried not to get in his mother’s way. She cooked his meals and washed his clothes, but never hugged him, rarely spoke except to issue an order. When she didn’t go to the basilica to light candles for the dead, she spent a lot of time staring out the dirty window. On Saturdays when he went to the movies, then to the library, she didn’t notice he had left the house.

-

Ingrid Bergman was amazingly beautiful. She glowed on the screen, light beneath her skin bright and shimmering around her face in the dark cinema. He had not realized that a woman who had been shot and carried bleeding out of a room, or who had fallen off a truck of dead bodies to be saved and wrapped by a kindly soldier, who had wandered throughout cold, starving Russia during the last years of the revolution, who escaped to Germany, suffered from amnesia and had long stays in hospitals, could be so beautiful. Why hadn’t such disasters ravaged her face, spoiled now and then only by tears and sadness? His eyes raised to the wide screen, his neck hurting from the angle at which he held his head, he sat motionless, transfixed by Ingrid Bergman, who played the Anastasia who had miraculously survived the bullets and bayonets of the Ekaterinburg slaughters.

Like coming back from the dead, although this wasn’t like the horror or ghost movies he enjoyed so much, going every Saturday since the flood a few years ago, this was real life. Anastasia on the screen was no walking corpse, even if she seemed to have forgotten much of her early life. That would be understandable: being executed must affect a girl’s memory. Sometimes he couldn’t follow the conversation between her and the bald actor named Yuri Brynner, just like his father’s name. So, Anastasia had the slaughter. The movie said she did. In the library, where he often spent time to stay out of his mother’s way, he read about the Tsar and all his children and his son, Alexei, a form of his own name, Alexander, whom the Bolshies also shot. He knew it was only a movie but, oh, his hands pressed between his legs, how lovely the lady, how enchanting her story.

He had also read stories about children who had disappeared, been kidnapped, lost, wandered afar, presumed dead by family and friends, and found their way home – all of them. Many assumed false identities, disguised their faces, changed their names and clothes, overcame incredible obstacles, and endured the mockery of people who doubted their existence. Yet, they had survived! They had lived through smoke and fire and rivers. Like Anastasia. There she was, a bright angel against a dark sky. Maybe Alexei, the Tsarevitch, also survived. He looked a lot like the young grand duke. In those stories, so many told by his father before bedtime, no one who was really good died, it seemed.

Alexei was good. Sandy was good, too. Cicely was good. His father, too, swept away in the flood, swept away to another life somewhere. Like Anastasia, maybe even Alexei wandering through Siberian forests, traipsing among the Ural mountains, trying to find his way back to life, to his family who missed him so much, so much. It hurt so much to remember his father, like a paper cut on his finger. “Yuri, dead, Cicely you let go, dead, dead, don’t you understand, dead!” his mother had screamed at him when she cried in the small apartment kitchen. He had tried to console her, crying himself: “maybe, Cicely’s not drowned, mama, just lost, maybe.” She pushed him away, raised a fist against his face, but did not strike.

Maybe even Cicely would return one day and his mother would laugh again and talk to him. He dreamed about Cicely so often on some nights that he woke up, seeing his sister’s shadow at the foot of the bed, reaching for his hand, her face swollen and green. Yul wanted Ingrid to pretend that she was the real Anastasia, miraculously surviving assassination and river-dunking, but of course she was real, so why must she pretend? Once found, Cicely would be lovely when she grew up, would have been … so close to his hand that Sandy felt he could touch her ragged, dripping dress. He would just have to wait for his sister to leave his dreams and walk right through the front door, knowing somehow they no longer lived in papa’s special house, the one that he built out of love for mama which had been swept away and swallowed by the flood.

He kept coming back to the same film. There were so many ways not to die. Falling into the water and swimming safely to the beach or a floating door; dodging bullets; ducking arrows and knives; swerving to avoid a crash; kneeling against the wall in the basement, covering the back of his neck with his hands during an atom bomb attack, the way the teachers had taught him in school. Then brushing the radioactive dust off when he went outside. Papa and Cicely didn’t seem to know any of them, except papa had known not to die when he lived in Russia. Poor Cicely, too young to know much, but maybe she would come back grown up and be nice to him, love him, and not mind that he had accidentally let go – honestly mama – he had tried – it wasn’t his fault – her hands were so cold. Maybe Cicely would stop drowning in his dreams and come back as a beautiful lost princess like Ingrid Bergman. Spun out of gold and diamonds, her hair glistened in the shadows and her face shimmered as if candles burned inside her heart and soul.

© 2010 Kenneth Radu

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Kenneth Radu’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming online in Danse Macabre, The Tower, vis a tergo, Medulla Review, Spilt Milk and elsewhere. He is the author of several books, including A Private Performance, a collection of short stories published by Vehicule Press of Montreal.

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