The Sky Is Falling Read online

  “Anyway. Can you help me?” she asked.

  There was a demonstration at the art gallery. The Americans were trying to deploy more missiles in Europe. At first, the West Germans wouldn’t take them, but now that the Soviets had shot down the Korean airliner, it looked like it was going ahead. Sonia wanted her banner to be in Russian.

  “What do you want it to say?” I asked.

  “End the arms race.”

  I suspected this couldn’t be directly translated. I could write “weapons” for “arms,” but maybe you couldn’t refer to it as a “race” in Russian. Finish the weapons’ athletic competition! No one would be able to read it anyway. “I need my dictionary,” I said, then did my best up in my room, working out the phrase and bringing it back down to her on a clean sheet of paper. Ostanovitye gonku vooryezheniy! She was in her room, cutting a bedsheet in half lengthwise. Then she laid it, a white runner, in the hall. Pete was on the phone in the kitchen. We could hear him saying, “Why can’t I go in through the window?”

  “I’m going to write the letters first, then paint them,” Sonia said.

  “Do you want help?” I asked.

  “Would you? It’s chicken scratch to me.”

  Pete: “I’ll climb.”

  Pete: “Well, that’s just fucked.”

  Then he roared. Hammering—the receiver against the counter, again, again. Sonia and I rushed to the kitchen where Pete was redialling. We heard Belinda’s faraway hello. “Did you hang up? You didn’t? Are you sure? They cut us off then, the fuckers!” He hurled the receiver and charged past us, knocking aside Sonia. She went over, picked the phone out of the sink, and, with the greying dish cloth, wiped some tomatoey stuff off the earpiece. “Belinda?” she said.

  Upstairs, a door slammed. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. O-hi-o.

  “He’s mad,” Sonia said in the phone. “He went upstairs. Were you really cut off? Jane and I are making the banner. Maybe she will. Anyway, I’m going to ask her to the movie. Are you going? Nobody’s going? So? I’ve seen it before too. I’ve seen it four times. All right. I’ll ask Jane.”

  “That was Belinda,” Sonia said, on the way back to the hall. “She asked if you were coming to the demonstration.”

  I said no, I had to study. “Is there something the matter with the phone?” I asked.

  “It’s probably tapped,” she said.

  Which was why, apparently, it provoked such awe. I didn’t believe it, though I didn’t say so. I just nodded and tried not to show how silly I thought that was. Meanwhile, Sonia settled cross-legged to watch me sketch out the Cyrillic letters.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “What?”

  “That you can write Russian.”

  I shrugged, though I was pleased. I stored the compliment the way my aunt socked everything away in bread bags—the shoes in her closet, her bits of costume jewellery, little pastel shards of soap. My aunt would pick an expired bus transfer off the ground and put it in her pocket, as though it were legal tender. I’d saved the things Pete had said to me, too—that I was funny and intelligent—and a comment Kopanyev once scrawled on the bottom of my paper: Jane, you are a very sensitive reader.

  After a minute, Sonia asked, “Why are people afraid of the Russians?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s because they haven’t met any. If they knew a few, they wouldn’t be so afraid.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Personally, I’m more afraid of the Americans. They have more bombs. Do you know a lot of Russians?”

  “Not that many,” I admitted.

  When I was nearly done, she went to her room, walking on the edge of the banner, one tiny foot placed in front of the other, close to the wall. She returned with brushes and a plastic yogurt container half-filled with paint, which she set in the middle of the banner. We each started at an end and worked our way toward the centre, filling in the letters.

  “There’s a movie playing at the SUB. If You Love This Planet with Dr. Helen Caldicott. Have you seen it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you want to go? You don’t have to study on Friday night, do you?”

  She extended the invitation to Hector and Dieter too. I thought for sure Dieter would come, but he only pushed up his glasses and sneered. “It’s a fundraiser for SPND, isn’t it? I wouldn’t give them a cent. They’re useless.”

  “What’s SPND?” I asked Sonia as we were putting on our coats.

  “Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. I used to be in SPND when I lived in residence. Dieter and Pete were in it too, but we broke away. All they ever do is have bake sales and march in the Walk for Peace.”

  Hector was in the living room watching a sitcom. “Adios, Hector,” Sonia called. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

  Hector pointed to the TV. “I’m watching this.”

  Once we were out the door I asked, “Is Hector living with us now?”

  “Oh dear,” said Sonia. “I think we’d better have a meeting about Hector.”

  The night was clear and cold, the only clouds formed by our breath. I could even see stars, puncture holes in the night, rare for November. Sonia had put on a funny knitted toque with earflaps and a couple of sweaters, both of which looked like they came from my aunt’s stash. Over them she wore an anorak and scarf, yet she still seemed too thin. Her clogs resounded on the wooden steps as we went down them.

  “They bring speakers in too.”

  “Who?”

  “SPND. That’s what they’re into. Education. And that’s why I joined. But education isn’t enough if you don’t do anything with it.”

  It occurred to me then that nothing I studied had any practical application whatsoever.

  Sonia: “We’ve got to do something. Right now.”

  The bus was nearly empty and, when we arrived, the campus seemed deserted too. The forested Endowment Lands cut the university off from the city, though in the residences and the frat houses, in the Pit Pub under the Student Union Building, life was undoubtedly going on. We saw scant evidence of it, however, as we walked past the glass wall of the Aquatic Centre; only a few swimmers were clocking laps. The SUB itself felt evacuated, the cafeteria closed, the cookie kiosk too, the couches mostly empty with barely a handful of people milling around before the movie started.

  The lobby was down a set of stairs. More people were there, maybe twenty, all of whom Sonia seemed to know well enough to embrace. We bought our tickets from a girl she introduced as Ruth. “This is Jane, my housemate.”

  Ruth wore a fringed paisley scarf like a sloppy bandage around her neck. Her long blond hair was divided evenly by the part and her eyes were a very pale blue. Sonia took her ticket and wandered off to talk to someone else. Ruth held on to mine. “You live in Trutch house?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  The way she looked at me, so intently, I felt washed in blue light. “But I’ve never seen you at anything.”

  “Here I am.”

  “I tried to get in there.”

  “In the house?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Move in, you mean?”

  She nodded. I only remembered the man with the violin, not the other names on the interview sheet. Yet Belinda had told me I was the only woman to apply. She’d said they needed “gender balance” and that was what I thought she meant. “Are you vegetarian?” I asked Ruth.

  “Yes!” She sighed. “It must be great living with Pete and Dieter. They’re so committed. Dieter’s probably going to Nicaragua next summer. Are you in NAG!?”

  “In what?” I said.

  “Non-violent Action Group! I thought everyone who lived there was.”

  An older couple approached the counter and Ruth finally handed over my ticket. Sonia was standing with her back to me, an arm around a much taller person’s waist. I bought popcorn and a Coke and waited in the corner until the theatre doors opened and people started filing in. Son
ia looked around then, smiling when she saw me.

  We sat at the very back, near the door. “That girl Ruth?” I said, holding out the popcorn.

  Sonia refused, wrinkling her nose. “Ruth’s in SPND,” she said. “She’s really nice.”

  “She wanted my room.”

  “I know. I felt bad when she didn’t get in. It’s horrible rejecting people.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  “A couple of reasons. Well, one. No, I can tell you. Two. We thought she was using it as a way to get into the group. She really wants to be a Nagger. Afterward, I phoned her and told her she should get some people together. And make a new group. Like we did.” She pulled off her toque and tossed it on the empty seat in front of her. Staticky feelers of hair reached toward the light. “She cried. I felt terrible.”

  “What was the other reason?”

  Sonia glanced around before answering. “Belinda was worried about Pete. He sleeps around.”

  “Really?” I said. Wasn’t he doing it enough with Belinda? It seemed I was always trying to shut out their groans and laughter. If I was studying or writing a letter to my parents, I’d screw toilet tissue into my ears. If I was trying to sleep, I’d muffle them with my pillow. Yet in the morning, crossing paths with Belinda in the hall or on the stairs, I’d be the one to blush. “Then why did she move out?” I asked.

  “It was getting too intense,” Sonia said, disappearing inside the anorak then shucking it like a cocoon.

  “How many people applied?”

  “To move in? Lots.” She smiled. “I’m glad we picked you.”

  Belinda had picked me. She’d picked me to keep her boyfriend safe. I was offended. Hurt. I was sensitive. Overly sensitive, my mother told me all the time. “It’s not always about you,” she would say. Last year Kopanyev had written it on the bottom of my paper. And then the lights dimmed and the movie started and I didn’t think about the humiliation of being Belinda’s foil again, not for years and years.

  The funny bits were first, clips from old black and white Ronald Reagan movies and hokey newsreels from the war. I leaned back with my popcorn and my drink. Then Dr. Caldicott, lecturing in a pink blouse and pearls, began to describe what happened the morning the bomb fell on Hiroshima, her Australian accent counterpointing the chorus of angels on the soundtrack. I had seen footage of an atomic bomb exploding. It was not unfamiliar to me: a white ball of light gradually detaching from a flat plain of smoke, rising slowly, levitating, while underneath it a boiling pillar formed. Then the head, the ball, changed too, expanding, growing petals of ash. The glow inside was horrible, yet beautiful too, the way it folded in on itself and bloomed. And the angels sang higher and higher until they were keening, and the flattened city stretched before us, a treeless ruin. There were mountains behind it, just like Vancouver. That bomb was small, Dr. Caldicott said. Today’s hydrogen bombs were twenty megatonnes, equivalent to twenty million tonnes of TNT, and today the United States had 35,000 of these bombs, enough to kill every Russian forty times, while the Soviet Union had 20,000 bombs, enough to kill every American twenty times. The probability of a nuclear war occurring by 1985, a little over a year away, was fifty-fifty. Many famous and brilliant scientists believed this to be true.

  I set my drink on the floor. It tipped over and some detached part of me could hear the can rolling all the way down to the front of the theatre. The other part listened as Dr. Caldicott explained in exact clinical detail what would happen in the event of a nuclear war. In the remaining eternal half-hour she presented to us our certain fate. How every person within six miles of the epicentre would be vaporized, then up to a radius of twenty miles killed or lethally injured, thousands severely burned. The film showed what these burns were like on Japanese survivors. I saw a skinless child lying on a cot, a man face down, his back a map, the countries burned on him, rivers of scars. Living people melted, like wax. We saw footage of houses imploding in nuclear test blasts, dummies being sucked out windows, dummies lying dismembered in the rubble. She warned us about the flying glass, the steel thrown around like toothpicks. What was left of the buildings would be lying in what was left of the streets. And if you looked at the blast even from forty miles away, if you happened just to glance at it, you would be blinded. As she said this, the hideous burned face of a living person turned its poached eyes toward us. Everything that was flammable within an area of three thousand square miles would start to burn, creating an unstoppable conflagration so that everyone idealistic enough to have taken refuge in the bomb shelters would be pressure-cooked or asphyxiated. Afterward, the millions of decaying corpses would cause uncontrollable outbreaks of disease—polio, typhoid, dysentery, plague—uncontrollable because no medical infrastructure would remain. Unlike in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there wouldn’t be an outside world to come and help. Civilization, the doctor said, would be laid waste. Almost more sickening to me was her explanation of what this meant: no architecture, no painting, no music, no literature.

  Dr. Caldicott: “And the survivors would die of a synergetic combination of starvation, radiation sickness, epidemics of infection, sunburn, blindness, and grief.”

  At these words Sonia, who had been quaking next to me, lurched from her seat and bolted for the door. It opened with a yawn into the silence on the other side before thudding closed again. I was still sitting in the theatre, stunned, but I knew I would follow her through that door and that on the other side everything would be different now.

  We huddled together on the rocks. More than cold, we were frightened. I was nearly numb. This is what people feel like when the doctor tells them they have cancer, I thought. I thought: I’m going to die. I have until 1985. I have thirteen months to live. We’d gotten off the bus at our usual stop, but instead of going home, Sonia had taken my hand and led me the two blocks to the beach. We staggered together, helping each other along an unlit path between two houses, down a set of slippery concrete steps. I’d hardly been to the beach, never at night or by this secret route, so when I looked around I really was seeing it for the first time. Across the strait, the mountains wore tiaras—lights from the ski hills. West Vancouver twinkled at their feet. I saw the void of Stanley Park and the Emerald City brilliance of the West End. In thirteen months it would all be gone.

  Sonia put her head on my shoulder and began to cry. After a few minutes she stopped. It was physically impossible to keep shedding tears at the rate she had. “I’ll never get married,” she said, using her sleeve to dry her face. “I’ll never have children. I’ll never have grandchildren.”

  I started crying too when, the moment before, I’d been in shock. I never expected to get married and have children either, but the fact that Sonia wouldn’t seemed unspeakably sad. But what Dr. Caldicott had said about the end of civilization, the end of literature, that was what broke my heart.

  No Turgenev. No Tolstoy. No Chekhov.

  Sonia: “For me it’s the children. The children who’ll never be born and who’ll die so horribly.”

  I asked her what we could do.

  “We’ve got to talk to people, Jane. Tell them the truth. All over the world it’s happening. People are saying no. They’re saying these weapons aren’t making us safer. The opposite!”

  The house was dark when we got back. Hector was asleep in the living room and Pete and Dieter were out. Sonia brought me to the kitchen. I felt for the light switch but when I turned it on, she immediately snapped it off and, letting go of my hand, shuffled away in the dark. I heard a click. Gradually my eyes readjusted and I saw the shape of her waiting at the stove, hands clasped like she was praying to it. The coil blushed and, as the colour deepened, I could make out her face in the glow. She was grimacing.

  “This is what I do,” she told me, letting her hand hover above the burner. “This is how I’m getting ready for the burns.”

  Many times that weekend I started a letter to my parents, both to warn them and assure them that, contrary to the impression I might have given
over the last few years, I loved them very much. Unable to find the words that truly expressed our predicament, I tore the letters up. I thought of my father at the bus depot in Edmonton telling me that if anything bad ever happened to me he’d buy a horse, a dog, and a gun and ride away and no one would ever hear from him again.

  “What will you call the horse?” I’d asked, like I used to when I was little.

  “Casimir.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Patches.”

  “The gun?”

  “Black Beauty.”

  There wouldn’t be a horse. There wouldn’t be a dog or a gun.

  I decided to tell them when I went home for Christmas. If it hadn’t already happened.

  I’d handed in my shoe paper the week before. Now I was supposed to come up with a discussion topic, but when I looked to my venerable bookcase, I could think only of the incinerated libraries and the books that would disappear forever. I mourned them all, but mostly the Russian ones.

  Finally, I opened the first page of “The Duel.”

  The stout, red-faced, flabby Samoylenko, with his large, close-cropped head, big nose, black, bushy eyebrows, grey side whiskers, and no neck to speak of, with a hoarse soldier’s voice as well, struck all newcomers as an unpleasant army upstart. But about two or three days after the first meeting his face began to strike them as exceptionally kind, amiable, handsome even. Although a rude-mannered, clumsy person, he was docile, infinitely kind, good-humoured and obliging. He called everybody by their Christian names, lent money to everyone, gave medical treatment to all, patched up quarrels and organized picnics, where he grilled kebabs and made a very tasty grey mullet soup.

  I couldn’t imagine a world without Dr. Samoylenko! These characters were realer than most real people, more important to me than the students in my seminar where we discussed them. That was why I was learning Russian. So I could know them better. Kitty and Levin, the Nihilist Bazarov, old man Kirsanov with his cello and his tears—after my parents, they were the people I cared about most, as well as, and especially, Chekhov’s characters. That slippered fool Ivan Layevsky, Alexei Laptev, the Hamlet of Moscow, even poor, bewhiskered Staff-Captain Ryabovitch in “The Kiss”—they had all endeared themselves to me with their foibles and struggles and depressions. Heroically, or unheroically, they endured the boredom of provincial life, the disappointments of love. I loved them. I loved their galoshes and felt boots and smoky icon lamps, their black bread and tea with jam, the old men in slippers sleeping on the stove. I loved the mud and the vodka, the wasted days, the gambling, the flies. I loved that dog named Syntax. It was easy to imagine them perishing, not just the books they lived in. The people in the film were Japanese, but who could tell, they were so badly burned. They were human beings. Only human beings, like Anna Sergeyevna and Alexei Laptev and Dr. Samoylenko, burned and blinded and dying of grief.