Blood and Salt Read Online Free PDF

centre of the tent. But what he sees is the big clay stove, the peech, in his family’s house back in Shevchana, that radiated heat all through the night. He tries to call up that warmth.
    From the corner of his eye, he sees the card players lay down their hands without a word. Toma gathers them into a deck and ties them with a bit of dirty string. Blows out the lamp. Each man tries some slightly different way to settle against the cold earth.
    Taras runs his tongue over his sore teeth. At least he can’t taste any more blood, but his left cheek throbs and not even cold drives out the pain.
    Tomorrow the guards will look at his face and know him for a troublemaker.

    In the mess tent a week later, Taras takes a seat beside Yuriy. Ihor sits across the table. Too late Taras sees Oleksa sit down on his other side, next to Franz Redl, one of the Germans.
    Redl and Oleksa hated each other on sight, which was well before Taras came to the camp. Oleksa loudly blames all Germans for starting the war and landing the internees in this place. Redl, a short, swarthy man who doesn’t fit the common idea of a German, says the Ukrainians in Canada should have gone back to the old country as soon as the war began and fought in the Austrian army.
    Neither man is shy about saying these things.
    Redl tries to get up and find a different place to sit, just as Scarman settles himself down on his other side, pushing Redl back onto the bench.
    Taras becomes interested in the contents of his plate. A whole potato. Not a very big potato, but still... Meat, who knows what kind, clotted with gristle. Watery gravy. Peas boiled almost grey. Crap, maybe, but he’s going to eat every speck.
    “Pig,” says a low voice. “Filthy, shit-eating sow.” Oleksa.
    Taras and Yuriy exchange looks. “Well, a potato,” Yuriy says. “Dobre.”
    “Tak. Tse dobre,” Taras says.
    “Turnip face. Cabbage brain.” Redl. Not up to the standards of “shit-eating sow.”
    Taras sees a blur of movement and Redl’s coffee spills over his plate and onto his lap.
    “Sorry,” Scarman says. “That was clumsy of me.”
    Again Redl tries to get up. Again Scarman holds out his arm. “No need to clean up your mess. Eat. It’ll get cold.”
    For five minutes or so everyone eats silently. It’s more than enough time to finish whatever a man has on his plate. You can have a second burnt coffee if you want, but Redl gets up before Oleksa or Scarman can react. Walks quickly out of the tent.
    Oleksa strolls toward the door looking bored, hands in his pockets. Sidles out the door. Something thuds against something else. Yells and grunts erupt, more thuds. The other German prisoners try to get out of the tent, but a line of Ukrainians blocks the way. Taras and Yuriy run outside. Already Oleksa is winning the fight, if you can call it a fight. Redl’s face looks like a smashed tomato. Blood streams into his eyes. Oleksa has him pinned.
    “Get him off me,” Redl begs. The guards pull Oleksa away and when he still struggles, one of them knocks him down with a rifle butt.
    Redl is taken in an army truck to the hospital in Banff with a broken nose and a swollen eye. Oleksa, whose nose now looks as bad as Scarman’s, is sent to the log guardhouse just outside the compound. The hoosegow, the guards call it. From the way they say it, it must be a humorous word in English. Anyway, it’s the internees’ jail. A small jail beside a big jail.
    After everything settles down, Yuriy tells Taras and Ihor that while it’s often hard to tell what’s lucky and what isn’t, this fight contains two examples of good luck. The coffee is never very hot, so although Redl got his face bashed, his private parts weren’t scalded. And Oleksa only got a few days in the hoosegow, and a log building, even an unheated one, is bound to be warmer than a canvas tent.
    It’s quiet in the tent at night. No one goes near Scarman because he’s mad all the time. When Oleksa comes back, after getting