The Restful Peace
Autobiography of Max Mathias Borschowa-Beaton
Published by J. Kent at Smashwords
Copyright 2009 by J. Kent
Max Mathias Borschowa-Beaton
1923 - 1976
Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE 5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 14
CHAPTER ONE 15
CHAPTER TWO 21
CHAPTER THREE 29
CHAPTER FOUR 37
CHAPTER FIVE 45
CHAPTER SIX 51
CHAPTER SEVEN 59
CHAPTER EIGHT 67
CHAPTER NINE 73
CHAPTER TEN 83
CHAPTER ELEVEN 91
CHAPTER TWELVE 99
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 105
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 111
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 117
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 125
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 131
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 137
CHAPTER NINETEEN 145
CHAPTER TWENTY 153
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 157
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 165
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 171
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 179
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 187
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 193
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 199
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 205
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 211
CHAPTER THIRTY 219
CHAPER THIRTY-ONE 229
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO 235
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE 241
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR 247
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE 254
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX 262
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - DUTCHOVA
PRISON 272
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 276
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 282
CHAPTER FORTY - MOSHAISK PRISON 290
EPILOGUE 304
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Monday March 4, 1974, was a typical dreary dull-gray day in Seattle. The sky was overcast, and the threat of rain hung heavy in the air.
I had a 9:00 appointment with an arthritis specialist in the Preventive Medicine Clinic in Seattle. This was an out-patient clinic. That is to say, that patients check in, received their daily treatment and left, to return again the following morning. This appointment meant that I must make the gigantic effort of getting myself out of bed and prepare for my mother to drive me to the clinic. During the drive, I was aware only of tremendous pain and an unbearable fear of what was to become of me, should I not be able to obtain some kind of medical help.
I was 33 years old and had always been very active and loved work. I am the mother of two young children and suddenly found myself an invalid. This was a crushing blow to me emotionally for I was used to being very independent, and now find myself almost totally helpless. The clinic was my last resort and after trying many doctors and many remedies and spending astronomical amounts of money, I was very skeptical.
Mother and I arrived at the clinic, and parking the car as close to the door of the building as possible, she assisted me from the car and into the lobby of the clinic where I sat on a huge brown over-stuffed sofa while she announced my arrival to the receptionist at the desk.
As I sat there waiting, I observed many other patients seated around me. All was quiet and solemn. As I gathered from conversations around me, many of these people had come from Canada. They had been drawn to the clinic through attending seminars held in Vancouver, British Columbia by the specialist I was to see. The walls of the room were paneled in walnut and the bright orange-red and yellow plush shag carpeting and the inspirational paintings on the wall failed to bring cheer to the atmosphere. At times I felt that people were staring at me. I was nearly in tears.
At last, the time came for me to speak to the doctor. He prescribed a routine set of treatments which were to consist of three-hour intravenous injections of a chelating solution and certain electronic muscle stimulating treatments. These were to be carried out daily for the duration of at least two months. This news added to my depression as the thought of intravenous injections for three-hours daily added to my existing feelings of nausea. However, I was desperate and arrangements were made for me to begin the treatments as soon as possible.
The next day (and many days to come) was to start out as much the same as the first, with my mother taking me to the clinic. This second day, a nurse escorted me down a long corridor and into a room which looked very much like a large living room in someone’s home. That is, if one could ignore the odor of alcohol and the shuffle of the nurses’ crisp uniforms as they moved about the room inserting intravenous needles into the arms of 13 patients, who were seated around the room in black reclining chairs. There was a chrome standard beside each chair, upon which hung the bottle of chelating solution which would take three hours to drip into the vein of the recipient, who patiently visited with the person next to him as he waited for the treatment to end.
This room also was carpeted in the same lush orange-red and yellow shag as covered the lobby floor. Still there was no impression of cheer as I looked out of the wall-to-wall windows to see the dismal gray clouds and the chilling rain beginning to hit against the glass. It seemed to me that most of the patients in the room were older people who, like me, had come to the clinic as a last resort after receiving little or no help from any other form of medical. Chelating therapy had proved to be most effective in the treatment of Cardio-Vascular disease, and so it was that most of these people were heart patients. I found myself sinking deeper into despair, and I began to think of all the things I would rather be doing than to be at this place. All I wanted was to be able to look after my children and my home again. I felt like saying, “What am I doing here? I want to go home!”
I stood at the counter, looking down at the register book which I was required to sign twenty times. Once for each day I was to have a treatment. I was pondering how I would accomplish this feat, since writing had become a near impossibility with my swollen and painful hands. My feet were the same, and I was forced to walk with a pronounced limp. It was while I stood at the register counter that I suddenly became aware of someone watching me. I quickly glanced around the room and my eye caught the gaze of the man who had been observing me. The moment our eyes met, I felt his great compassion towards me. He was seated across the room from the register and already in the process of his daily treatment. I wondered what he was doing in a place such as this, as he appeared to be healthy and seemed happy. I noticed that he had light brown hair, rather thinning in front, and he wore it combed back into sort of a wave. There was slight graying at the temples, which gave him a rather distinguished look. He was light complected, with a square jaw and friendly blue eyes peering out from behind gold metal-rimmed glasses. He was of stocky build, approximately 5’, 8” tall and weighing about 170 lbs. He wore gray pants and gray shirt with meticulously polished brown shoes. He gave me the impression of being a very clean-cut, closely shaven perfectionist. I could sense his kindness and understanding as we evaluated each other visually. I dropped my eyes back to the register and began the monumental task of the signatures. The treatment chairs were filled for the day, so I had to begin my therapy on the following day.
Morning greeting me in the same frightful way as before, only today I found the compassionate man I had become aware of on the previous day seated next to me. I was too ill to hold a conversation with anyone, but he remained perpetually cheerful as he conversed with other patients around us. He told of events which had happened to him during his incarceration in German and Russian prisoner of war camps during World War II. This attracted my attention, and finally one day he addressed me personally by saying, “Did I ever tell you about the time…?”
I became engrossed in the things he told me about his life, and we became inseparable friends. I learned that his name was Max Beaton, that he was fifty years old and that he was offered a transplant, which he refused. He was flown to Seattle to seek help through treatments to relieve blockage of the veins and heart by means of chelating. I learned that his doctors had given him six months to two years to live after the last attack on September 1, 1973. This attack left him with only one tenth of the heart muscle left. He was released from the Vancouver, BC hospital in November of 1973, when the doctors told him there was nothing more they could do for him. They warned him against attempting anything more strenuous than the walk from the bedroom to sit in a living room chair. This is where he was to sit out the remainder of his life. Max existed on oxygen, nitroglycerin, thirty or more Isordil tablets per day and about three to four sleeping pills in order that he might sleep only two or three hours at the very most each night. These pills left him with a tremendous headache and a hangover the next day. Still the pain was only lessened to the bearable degree. He suffered endlessly, with severe angina pain in his left arm and chest. I don’t believe anyone ever realized the pain he endured while yet having time and compassion for someone like myself, who by comparison, has never experienced pain like his or torment, loneliness or the fear and stress that comes to someone who knows he lives on the precipice of death every moment of his life. When I realized just how serious his physical condition was, I was very much ashamed for having burdened him with what now seemed to me to be my very trivial problems.
As our friendship developed, we began to confide in each other more and more. Max told me of his unhappy childhood and of the unhappiness and unfulfilled life he had led even since his return home from Europe. He told of his hope to someday have the story of his life as a prisoner published. He had wanted to write this story for the past 20 years, but had never found anyone who was willing or interested enough to sit down and help him with it. We decided that I would try and help him accomplish his goal.
We soon came to put complete trust in each other and I became aware of the fact that the sun had begun to make occasional appearances through those impenetrable drab clinic windows and it became apparent that spring was in the air. For two desperately ill people had discovered that as in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spirited inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.” Our illness had brought us together in a common bond of compassion as we confided our hopes and fears in each other, knowing that our hearts were in communion as we hoped and prayed for improved health and happiness. We watched each other’s progress day by day, and kept constant vigil over each other. I found that it required less and less effort for me to prepare for my daily trips to the clinic and began driving my own car again. I was once again able to use the electric typewriter, so we began work on the manuscript. Max was soon able to eliminate most of his medication. He too was able to resume driving and began to lead a fairly normal life.
Max lived every day to his very fullest capacity. He never accepted death for himself. He had a tremendous will to live. He always tried to see the humorous side of life. He fought death with determination and courage through unbelievable odds. During the war years as well as his illness, it was his hope that he might someday even return to work. I have never known anyone with the ability for positive thinking such as he had. His hobby and diversion, aside from his job, was photography. He held a Professional Freelance Photographer’s License for both the U.S. and Canada.
I knew Max for a short one year and eleven months, but he often told me that I was the only person who ever really knew him. I was with him when he experienced his sixth and fatal heart attack at 10:30 a.m. on February 6, 1976. That morning he talked about his appointment at the clinic later in the day and appeared to be as happy as he had been in all the days I had known him.
In the last six months of his life, he seemed more determined than ever to proceed rapidly with the writing of this manuscript. It had become a goal that no longer seemed impossible to reach.
In 1976, I traveled to Saskatchewan and located and photographed Max’s childhood home in Edenwold. It is now an abandoned farm. I was able to go inside the house and see it exactly as Max had described it to me. I located his bedroom at the top of the stairs and the hooks on the wall in the kitchen, just where he said they would be. I had the opportunity of interviewing a lady who worked in the post office in Edenwold, who remembered Max and his brother as being school mates of hers.
Through telephone information in Dusseldorf, West Germany, I was able to obtain a telephone and address listing for Hans Heidkamp. With the help of Reiner Doster and Hans Furtner, I began to correspond with Herr Heidkamp. His letters provided me with additional information, as well as, a copy of the photograph taken of Max and himself at Moshaisk.
It is my desire to tell his story exactly as he told it to me, that in so doing, his dream may be realized, through me.
It is to the memory of Max that I dedicate this book. The fulfillment of his dream.
Garnet Williamson
Seattle, WA, January, 1982
In Loving Memory of Garnet Williamson
1941 - 2009
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to the following special people who contributed, each in his own way, to the writing of this biography.
I owe personal thanks to Max’s daughter, Shirley for her help in providing me with photographs and documents, which so thoroughly prove the authenticity of my story. Also for her friendship and encouragement: to Hans Heidkamp, Max’s German comrade whom he met in the Russian prison camp, for his wonderful letters bearing further documentation; to Reiner Doster, a young German student at the University of Washington, and Hans Furtner, who translated many letters to Herr Heidkamp; to June Click of Western Publishes Service for editing and organizing my original notes; to Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, for his constructive criticism and editing of my manuscript; to Andy Franicevic of Vancouver, B.C . for his help with Croatian dialogue; to my dear friend of many years, Mary Norman, for her constant uplifting presence and counseling. Last, but not least, I wish to thank my family and friends for their encouragement in order that Max’s story might one day be told.
Chapter One
He opened his eyes and gazed at the pallid dawn that sifted through his cell window. The small square of light slatted by bars was his total share of the outside world. An unbidden memory of the curtained windows of his childhood room flickered for a moment in his mind, and then was obliterated by the ever present pain of hunger.
The oppressive heat made his clothes cling to him with sweat. He thought yearningly of a bath. A real bath, in a tub with soap and lots of clean water. The rank smell of his own clothes, his own body assaulted him.
He struggled stiffly from the lumpy mattress on the floor. The cell’s sanitary facilities consisted of a drain opening in the floor, and a faucet above it that produced a trickle of rusty water. His morning preparations were quickly over, and he settled himself to await the inevitable arrival of the guards.
They had been at him for three days now. He had thought anything would be better than the filthy cattle car that had only a prelude to torment.
Three days without food, three days of constant interrogation and three days of accusations flung at him in a language that crawled haltingly through his brain. The days of giving back to them the same answer, over and over.
I am not a spy! The same words over and over. An exercise in futility. A fallen leaf hurling itself against a stone wall. A candle flame resisting a hurricane.
Now he could hear them coming for him, the hard ringing echo as their boots struck the concrete outside his cell. The door creaked, almost as though it were unwilling to let them in. There were three of them – three burly men to guard one man wasted by starvation.
“Come on!” A heavy hand grasped his shoulder and hauled him to his feet. The beefy, red-faced Russian soldier shoved him through the door and followed him out into the corridor, gun held unwaveringly at this back, and the two others fell in beside him. The little phalanx marched through the corridor, the man shuffling to keep pace.
He knew the way by now. Three times a day for three days he had been marched thus to the Major’s office and three times a day for three days back again to his cell. This had become a way of gauging time, a way of convincing himself that his was not the only life left in the world.
His life. And how long was it to remain his? How long would they let him continue to live, if he did not cooperate?
They entered a sparsely furnished office already flooded with morning sunlight, already humid with the sticky summer heat. The man at the desk gazed impassively at the four men who stood at attention before him. No one spoke. A fly buzzed in the weighted silence.
The Major’s eyes spindled the prisoner, who stared back at him. Someone in the next room coughed and coughed, and the silence was heavier than before. The buzzing fly slighted on the top of the Major’s sandy-colored hair and crawled slowly toward his forehead. The prisoner watched the fly. His life was worth no more than the life of the fly, if the Major chose.
Then he began to be aware of something else in the room, something that seduced his senses with tantalizing fragrance. Food – the smell of it was suddenly overpoweringly, irresistible. He looked away from the Major, his gaze jerking quickly to the surface of the desk.
The desktop was bare except for a tray laden with food. He looked at it, not believing for a moment that it was real, thinking that perhaps he had become hallucinatory victim of his own intense craving.
But the smell of it was real. A wisp of steam rose from the cup of coffee – coffee turned dark gold from cream so thick that floating globules of oil reflected prisms of color from the sunlight. A large platter of fried meat and eggs beckoned to him, the golden eggs resting seductively in their beds of white, the meat thick and crisp-edged. He gazed wistfully at a muffin topped with butter, watching the butter melt slowly and send tiny yellow rivulets across the muffin’s surface.
He swallowed. A sudden dizziness overcame him as his starved body tried to reach for the food. The Major’s masklike expression cracked into a smile. “This food was cooked especially for you,” the Major said. His voice sounded friendly, conversational. “Why?” It was a croak, a despairing plea that rejected its own hope even as it cried out for help. He did not move toward the tray of food.
“Just confess that you are a spy,” said the Major in dulcet tones, “and you can sit down and eat. You can eat all you want.” The prisoner swayed but remained standing. He continued to gaze at the food. A slow rise of nausea overtook him. “I’m not hungry,” he said. The Major’s expression changed swiftly. “Eat, man!” he said peremptorily. “Don’t be a fool! Don’t lie to me – I know you’d sell your soul for that food!” “That’s exactly what I’d be doing,” said the prisoner, “if I ate it. I’m not hungry.”
The Major’s face turned pink with rage. Startled, the fly darted from his head as he lunged across the desk. “Fool!” he bellowed. “Fool!” “Fool!” “Fool” “I’m not hungry.”
The Major turned to the guards. “Take him back to his cell!” he shouted. “Let him rot there!”
The fly descended in circles to the tray of food and landed on the muffin’s edge. It crawled slowly across the bread until it reached the stream of melting butter. Caught by the stickiness, it fluttered its wings in a desperate attempt to free itself. The prisoner felt the gun at his back once more.
Without speaking, he turned. The little formation marched out of the room. Max was, once again, left alone to his thoughts and fears. As was often the case at times like this, his mind drifted back to his boyhood, and he tried to recall the course of events that had led up to his incarceration at the hands of these merciless barbarians.
CHAPTER TWO
The parents were at it again. The young boy sitting on the doorstep listened to their voices and wished that they would stop.
He got up and walked slowly across the kitchen yard, but their voices followed him, loud and irascible. The mother’s shrill voice rose discordantly above the father’s harsh tones as the words intermixed in a poisonous torrent. Neither of them heard anything the other said. Each was too busy creating new hatreds, each was isolated in a vacuum that shut the other out. Max’ mother was a short, rather buxom woman who usually had the final word.
Max stopped and picked up a pebble. He hadn’t gone to school today because he’d pretended to be sick, but now he wished that he had gone. He was bored and lonely and ill at ease with the parents quarrelling. He flung the pebble aimlessly and watched it as it arced across the rail fence and disappeared in the weeds beyond.
The sun was warm on his neck and arms caressingly warm without being too hot. Spring had come to the Canadian prairies, bringing with it a colorful riot of wildflowers and soft breezes that smelled of wild grasses. Farm life in Saskatchewan could be hard in winter, but on a day like this – especially if you are 11 years old – the winter just past could already seem far behind.
He squinted at the sun, estimating the time. His brother would be home from school in less than an hour. Fred would be able to think of something to do until milking time. Fred could always think of something.
It bothered Max that he didn’t like school the way Fred did. It wasn’t the learning that he didn’t like, especially when the learning was about how things worked or how they were put together. It was the very things that Fred liked most that Max didn’t like – the closeness of so many people, the playground roughhousing, the external yak-yak of the teachers. Especially the teachers, especially the one who talked so much about how immigrants coming to the new world found such a wonderful promised land and seemed to stare straight at Max when she said it. Listening to this father talk at home about the old country, Max sometimes had the feeling that the world left behind was the real Promised Land; at least, his father seemed to think so.
Max didn’t feel like an immigrant. He’d lived in Canada ever since he could remember. How could he be a foreigner? He knew that it was because his parents spoke with an accent and had a strange name that the teacher took the attitude she did. Just the same, Max sometimes felt that he was between two worlds, and the one that claimed him the most was the one he could not even remember.
There were times when he did think he could remember his grandfather in Yugoslavia, but maybe that was because he was seeing the old man the way his mother described him. What you had heard about your baby years could get mixed up with what you actually remembered. He sat down on a rock and idly drew stick figures in the dust with his forefinger.
Max Mathias Borschowa entered the world on November 24, 1923, in Mariolana, Yugoslavia, the second son of Michael and Katherine Borschowa. The lure of the new world drew the parents and their two small sons to Canada when Max was three years old, and it was there that his earliest impressions were recorded upon his memory. The family lived temporarily in Regina, where the father worked for a German newspaper. Then they tried farming, near Odessa; finally they settled as tenants on a farm near Edenwold. Years later the memories of boyhood life on a Saskatchewan farm were to sustain Max through challenges of misery that rocked the sanity of other men. Memories of adventures with his older brother – a narrow escape from drowning when they attempted to take an abandoned boat out on Strawberry Lake; and experiment with cigarette-smoking with his cousin (an attempt he did not make again for many years);the first girl he ever fell in love with – in the fifth grade. Home was a small house on a landlord’s farm, where Max and Fred helped with the milking of the landlord’s 20 cows, and the various other chores by which his father earned their livelihood during those depression years. Much later, he recalled his early experiments in building a crystal set, and his keep delight when he finally received a broadcast from a radio station in Salt Lake City. His ingenuity in assembling materials for this device from makeshift and discarded items stood him well in the later years.
From 1944, until 1952, Max Borschowa enjoyed only 16 months of freedom. The years between were spent in an incredible succession of German and Russian prisoner-of-war camps, where his Canadian citizenship was ignored, and where he was subjected to all the ignominies of man’s inhumanity to man.
The boy sat on a rock in the farmyard and waited for his brother to come home from school. He breathed the clean, aromatic air of a country springtime, and a surging sense of freedom of well-being assailed him. This was what he would always want – to be himself, to think his own thought, to order his own life in his own way.
The family tomcat approached him moving with a slow, sinuous grace and switching its great plume of a tail imperiously.
“Come here, Cat,” Max said softly, extending his hand toward his beloved pet. Cat obliged stretching his neck slightly to rub his big, tiger – colored head against Max’s arm.
Max stroked the cat feeling its warmth and it’s softness beneath his hand, feeling his oneness with the life of the animal and with all life on the planet. He felt soothed and comforted. The parents’ vicious anger could not follow him here, where the only sound was the lilt of the birds and the only other creature was the cat that leaned against him with love.
Putting the cat gently aside, he got up and went toward the barn. The nickering of horses welcomed him. He entered the barn and approached a dainty little mare with reddish-brown flanks and a patch of white between her velvet-dark eyes.
“Ho Ginger,” he spoke softly and passed his hand lightly over her glossy hide. She turned her head and tossed it in acknowledgment, and he went about the business of saddling her. His love for animals blessed the loneliness of life in an area where human friends were miles away.
Leading Ginger out of the barn, he mounted quickly and turned the horse’s head toward the open fields. The prairie swept on as far as he could see, undulating in waves of muted color that flowed from deep purple nearby to a mauve blur in the distance. Wildflowers were everywhere, and the tall waving grasses gave the impression of a colorful sea reaching for unknown shores.
Urging Ginger to a gallop, he felt a sense of joyous release as she carried him forward into the waving sea. Wind rushed past him, and he gave himself up to the delight of freedom and the smooth, easy motion of the horse beneath him.
Presently, he slowed her to a trot and turned her back toward the farm. He imagined himself the focus of a Saturday afternoon movie, one of the Hollywood westerns that captured his budding enthusiasm for adventure. Gene Autry, he thought. I’m Gene Autry, and the rustlers are fixin’ to burn the settler’s barn. It’s up to me and ole Paint to stop ‘em.
He slowed the horse to a walk, in no immediate hurry to stop the rustlers. Strumming an imaginary guitar, he began to sing “Back in the Saddle Again.” His enjoyment was a thing to hold on to, to relish eagerly in this capsule moment suspended in time.
As he approached the farmyard, he saw the big golden cat stalking with dignity along the top of the fence, like a sentry guarding the fortress. He drew Ginger to a halt beside the fence and leaned down to scoop up the cat.
“Come on, Cat,” he said. “Let’s take a ride.”
For a moment, the idyll continued while the cat purred contentedly in the crook of his arm. Then the cat seemed suddenly to become aware of where he was. Crouching to spring to freedom, Cat felt himself held tighter in Max’s arm. Outraged, Cat threw him a baleful look as the strong hind legs dug into Max’s chest and propelled the cat forward – onto the horse’s neck.
It was Ginger’s turn to be outraged. With cat’s claws digging into her neck, she reared, neighing shrilly. Max, caught unaware, slid from the saddle and landed abruptly upon the soft turf. Eyes rolling, Ginger leaped and bucked, trying to dislodge the fearsome thing on her neck, and Cat clung grimly, determined not to let this bewildering whirl of events get the better of him.
Ginger began to run, and with the smoother motion Cat regained his sanity. Leaping from the horse’s neck, he landed lightly on the tall grass and moved in a golden streak toward some safe oblivion. Ginger, relieved of her terrifying burden, slowed gradually to a trot, turned, and cam tentatively back toward Max, looking at him as though she no longer quite trusted him.
“There Ginger,” he patted her heaving flanks. “There. Everything’s all right. I guess you and Cat just can’t be friends.” He heard a tuneless whistling in the lane and turned to see his brother coming home from school. Fred approached him in the idle manner of a boy who has nothing to do for the next hour, swatting aimlessly at the tall weeds beside the lane.
Two years older and several inches taller than Max, he looked down at his younger brother with blue eyes that bespoke a friendly, open nature laced with a touch of mischief. “What did you do today?” he asked Max. “Nothing,” said Max.
CHAPTER THREE
There was a close bond between the two brothers, welded by isolation from other families, and the tensions that created a barrier between them and their parents. The world of adults could be a strange and frightening place, filled with baffling emotions and undercurrents of emotions that defied the comprehension of childhood.
Max was never sure of the real nature of the trouble between his parents, and indeed there were probably many causes. Those were the depression years of the early thirties, burdened by hard work for little pay and sometimes no work at all; the constant need to practice petty economies; anxieties produced by overdue bills; and the hopelessness of always postponing things. “Someday we’ll buy a new chair for the living room.” “Someday we’ll get a new kitchen stove.” “Someday we can buy shoes for the boys whenever they need them.” Only “someday” kept receding farther and farther into the dimness of the future.
There was also the father’s restless dissatisfaction with life in Canada, and his idealized memories of his old home, as opposed to the mother’s practical and opportunistic view of life. To her, expedience was the determining factor.
You took what was available where you were instead of wasting energy in impossible yearnings. She would always stand out in Max’s memory as she appeared in his boyhood, wearing her clean and starched cotton print house dresses with her hair worn severely back away from her face as she bustled around the house performing her daily tasks.
The day the divorce became a reality was a bitter one for Max. It was early November, chilly and raining. He was almost 14 years old, a time when life was confusing at best. Too old for Gene Autry and too young for girls, he was caught in a complexity of ambivalence that distorted the shape of even simple events into menacing foreshadows of doom. The catastrophe of his parents’ divorce became a larger-than-life spectre.
Of course the divorce had not been unexpected, but Max had refused to consider it. Fred being a little older and altogether a practical realist had predicted it.
“They can’t stand each other, “Fred had said matter-of-factly. “Someday they’ll split up.”
“We need them,” Max had said stubbornly. “They won’t let us down. We need them both.” “You’ll see,” Fred had spoken wisely.
The cold November afternoon was already darkening in that northern latitude. Max and his father sat in the shadowy living room, seeing each other’s faces as only pale blurs. Max would miss his father. He wanted to cry, but of course he was too old for that. You had to become a man sometime, and perhaps today was as good a day as any. “Where will you go?” he asked his father. “Will we- will Fred and I – see you again?”
“I don’t know where I’ll go,” said his father simply. “But of course you will see me again. You are my son, my flesh and blood. I will not be far from you.”
The court divided custody of the boys giving Fred to the father and Max to the mother. But the father whose future was indeterminate, and who felt that the boys should not be separated was leaving Fred with the mother until he finished school. After that…
“Maybe I’ll go back to the old country,” the father said. “When Fred finishes school, maybe I’ll take him back to Mariolana and go into the grain-buying business.” Max felt a tug at his divided loyalties; a tug that pulled him away from his mother, who had nurtured him, and toward the father who understood him.
“Take me, too,” he said. “If you go back to the old country don’t leave me behind.” The father reached out in the deepening dusk and clasped Max’s shoulder in a gentle squeeze. There had never been much expression of affection between them, but they had always understood each other.
“The world has become a strange place,” he said to Max. “When I was a boy, we worked hard, but we always had plenty to eat. A man did a day’s work and held his head up and ate the food he had earned by the sweat of his brow. Now in this land of plenty, this land of milk and honey, this land where the streets were said to be paved with gold; in this land, a man tramps the roads to nowhere and his children starve while doing a man’s work.” “We’re not starving, Papa.” Max said stoutly. “We get along alright.” He didn’t like to see his father this way. He wanted to make him feel better. And anyway, it was true. They had enough to eat. There were potatoes and turnips in the cellar, and in the pantry, the vegetables that the mother had canned the summer before. The landlord gave them flour and sugar and eggs, and there was always milk.
Max didn’t tell his father that the landlord gave them food. Somehow, he felt uneasy about the landlord. The man came and went mostly in silence, mostly unsmiling: but he seemed to be about the house more and more often. He was a widower, and Max’s mother had taken to going over to his house to clean twice a week. To earn the food he brought them, she said. Sometimes the landlord came to eat supper with them, which Max thought wryly used up some of the food he brought. Sometimes he stayed all evening, sitting in the warm little kitchen while the wind howled outside and drove the snow into drifts.
When spring came, Max’s mother married the landlord, and they all moved into his house. Nothing else changed much though. The boys still worked as hard as before, and when spring planting came, they had to stay out of school. The mother and the landlord didn’t act like a happy, newly-married pair, but they didn’t quarrel the way the mother and father always had. They went about their chores mostly in silence, and in the evenings they sat on the side of the porch in silence.
Max went across the field one day to the little house they lived in before the marriage. It was still unoccupied. Dust lay thick upon the front porch, unmarred by footprints, and a loose shutter banged desolately against the side of the house. He never went back there again.
The landlord didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was mostly to criticize the boys. They didn’t work hard enough, he said. They ate as much as men, they should work like men. It was not his task in life to take on another man’s great, lazy sons and support them in luxury, he said. The mother said nothing.
Toward the end of summer, the father appeared again. It seemed that mother had written him a letter asking him to come and take Fred. The mother hadn’t told either of the boys about the letter.
“She said she will send you to your grandfather in Yugoslavia,” the father told Max. “Her new husband wants to get rid of both of you.” “He says we don’t do any work,” said Max scornfully. “We do most of the work that’s done around here: How does he think the work will get done when we are gone?”
“That’s easy,” said the father. “He’ll get another family to live in our old house and do the work to earn their rent. There’s nobody these days who can pay him money for rent, but there are always families who will work if it.” “What will you and Fred do?” Max asked curiously. “I have a surprise for you,” said the father. “The three of us are going to Yugoslavia. It has been my plan for a long time, and I can’t let your mother send you there alone. Your grandfather is 78 years old. He has been sick a long time, and he may not live much longer. Then you would have nobody.” “But won’t the passage cost a lot of money?” asked Max.
“I’ve been saving,” said the father. “I have a job now. For almost six months, I’ve been working. Next month, I will have enough. Your mother’s new husband will pay for your passage; he wants so much to be rid of you. And by next month, I will have enough for Fred and me. We will go home, the three of us.”
The long, late summer days were filled with backbreaking labor, but Max now worked eagerly. Each day was bringing him closer to the time of great adventure. He imagined the journey, the great ocean liner plowing through the sea the way he had seen it in the movies. He imagined the town of Mariolana, which both his parents had told him about many times. He would be able to go back to school instead of working full time on someone else’s farm just to earn three meals a day. Life was opening up; there was a great future ahead. He felt strong and capable.
One night he heard his mother and her husband talking until quite late, after he and Fred had gone to bed. They were not quarrelling, they were just talking, their voices low. He fell asleep with the drone of it still in his ears.
The next morning quite early, his mother waked him. Still dazed with sleep, he saw that she had packed their bags, his and Fred’s. It couldn’t have taken her long. They didn’t have much to pack. “It’s time to go boys, she said, your father will be taking you to Europe.” “What do you mean?” asked Max. “Is he here?” He said it will be next month. It’s only been two weeks since he was here.” “No, he’s not here,” said the mother. “He’s going to meet you in Regina. I’ll drive you there in my husband’s car.”
There was not even time for breakfast. The landlord was in the barn, so they did not say goodbye to him. Their mother hurried them into the car, and they drove down the rutted lane toward the road to Regina.
Thus began Max’s journey across half a world. Still sleepy, he dozed during the ride and awoke feeling very hungry. They drove through the town, the unfamiliar streets a blur. At length, the car turned into a narrow alley and stopped beside a gate.
“Go through the gate, “said the mother, “and knock on the door of the house.” “Is Papa here?” asked Max, not moving. He was confused. His mother’s strange behavior disturbed him. She shook her head. “Not yet. He will meet you here.” “Who lives here?” asked Fred. “Why are we here?” “They are relatives,” said the mother. “They are expecting you. Go, now. Quickly!”
Max looked searchingly at his mother’s face. He saw nothing there but the same careworn expression touched with petulance, the same way she always looked at them. Fumbling with the door handle, he asked, “Aren’t you going in with us?” “No,” she said. “I must hurry back. I must get the housework done.”
The banality of the remark brought a sense of anticlimax to the farewell. Max and his brother got out of the car and slowly opened the gate. Behind them, the car had already surged into quick motion and was rattling down the cobblestones of the alley. Then it was gone, and they were alone.
The unfamiliar house was small, with rosebushes on either side of a neatly swept doorstep. Fred knocked hesitantly on the door, waited a moment, and then knocked more firmly. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman. Max had never seen her before. She wore her graying hair in a close bun at the nape of her neck, and her face although lined was quietly pleasant. She looked at the boys questioningly. “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you want?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Cousin Mary, the pleasant-faced woman who had opened the door to the two bewildered looking boys had not seen them since they were toddlers and of course did not recognize them. Neither had she been expecting them. The mother had lied about that, and about many other things. Max and Fred began to realize the enormity of the fact that they had been abandoned by their mother to a complete stranger. They tried their best to explain the events leading up to their arrival, and once understanding the situation, cousin Mary had treated them with the mother’s warmth that had been missing in their lives. Max was to seek this love throughout his entire life; never quite realizing what it was that drove him. Cousin Mary made them feel welcome until their father could come for them, and the quiet, peaceful weeks spent in her home were like a healing balm. Their days were spent helping Mary with the gardening, and the evenings were a time of reading and games.
The time between the arrival of their father’s letter to Cousin Mary, informing her of the day he would pick up the boys, and his actual appearance at the door seemed minable to Max and Fred. The mother had informed the father of their whereabouts, and he was anxious to claim them, knowing the circumstances that had placed them in the hands of his cousin.
As he neared the house, the father was greeted by two elated young boys, who nearly ran him over as they rushed to receive his loving embraces. The boys clung to their father, both trying to talk at the same time. The happy trio made their way laughingly up the walk to the house together. The father’s eyes sparkling with joy.
Max was young and healthy, and the resilience of youth soon made him forget at least most of the time the hard, unhappy life he had just left. He looked forward now to the future, to the adventure and to new life and to seeing faraway lands with this father.
Max and his father and brother traveled by train to Montreal, and then south to New York City. The noise, the lights, the press of the crowd, the sounds and smells of the biggest city in the world impinged upon his senses and shot excitement through him. Madison Square Garden swarmed with people all intent upon reaching the same place, preferably ahead of everybody else. Max and Fred and their father pushed along with the rest, sometimes borne along on the surge of the crowd and sometimes forcing their way through when the pace became too slow for them. It was the night of the Joe Louis-Max Schmelling fight, and apparently everybody in New York was there.
Max found such good fortune almost hard to believe. He was actually going to see the fight. He was actually in New York. He was actually going to Europe with his father and brother.
Scheduled to sail on the Queen Mary, their departure had been delayed by an outbreak of typhus on board the ship. The unexpected time in New York was a source of delight to Max. Three weeks at a hotel, with all expenses paid by the shipping company became a memorable vacation for a Canadian farm boy. Touring Rockefeller center and the Empire State Building; seeing the lights of Broadway at night; exploring Greenwich Village and the strange, misplaced pocket of Europe known as Hell’s Kitchen; pushing through the crowded, narrow streets of the garment district where sweating men propelled racks of dresses through the streets like vegetable carts – all this spelt adventure, excitement, the romance of far places.
One day, they took a ferry ride and passed close to the Statue of Liberty. Looming above them like a female colossus, she brought Max’s mind a fleeting picture of the “huddled masses yearning to be free.” He recalled the words of the teacher whom he had disliked so intensely as she talked about immigrants and described with such authority the scene as it must have been. Where had the dream gone? It seemed to him that that magnificent torch had somehow flickered out. All over the land people were hungry, restive, feeling that they had in some way been betrayed. The hordes of immigrants who had poured past this towering figure to land at Ellis Island had not always found what they sought after all. Some of them clawed their way to betterment, but thousands of them now found themselves living worse than they had in the old country. Liberty tastes acrid on an empty stomach. The freedom to starve is not a man’s goal.
Max’s impatience to be on with the journey was somewhat allayed by the hiatus in New York, but when the time came to sail, he was eager to leave. They left New York on the Europa, a German ship with fittings designed by no less a person than Adolph Hitler’s architect. The ship was bound for LeHavre.
Max and Fred’s quarters consisted of a tiny room furnished with bunk beds and a night stand with five shallow drawers. The floor was partially covered with a thin plaid rug of various colored threads. The beds fascinated the boys as neither had ever seen bunk beds much less had the thrill of sleeping in one. Quite naturally, an argument ensued as to who would occupy the top bunk. Max’s father quickly solved the predicament with a toss of a coin. Max, winning the toss, hurriedly climbed atop to examine his domain more thoroughly. He discovered, to his delight, a miniature door which could be opened for ventilation. A night light was attached to the wall at the head of the bed, and the bed itself was equipped with a pair of straps to restrain its occupant in the event of rough seas. A conglomeration of pipes ran overhead at approximately three feet above the mattress. Max found it fascinating to lie on the bed and wonder the purpose of each. He looked forward to bedtime with eager anticipation while a grumbling Fred resigned himself to his place of rest below.
Max’s father was quartered across the hall in a similar stateroom, which he shared with another passenger. Since having left the farm, privacy was a luxury that had to be forfeited.
Learning to walk on deck was fun, and Max developed sea legs quickly. He liked to stand at the ship’s rail and gaze out across the water, imagining mighty fleets of tall-masted, barkentines appearing on the horizon. He liked the feel of the deck beneath his feet as the ship followed the swell of the ocean in a steady, gentle rhythm. One day, they passed another ship going in the opposite direction, and everybody gathered on deck to wave and shout while the two ships saluted each other with deep-throated whistles.
The voyage was pleasant, with calm seas and good weather. Blue-green waves with creamy crests chased each other alongside the ship, catching the light of the sun that crowned each with a jeweled tiara. Max remembered one day when he had cast a pebble into the pond at the farm in Edenwold. The stone had created first one ripple that moved outward to make room for another, and on and on until the surge of ripples threatened to become infinite. Once the stone was cast, there was no way to stop the ripples until they ceased of their own accord. A momentary insight had revealed to him that this is sometimes what happens in life - you take an action or something happens that creates a ripple and the ripple is inevitably followed by another and there is no way to stop the sequence of events. However, he mused, you can throw another pebble and start a whole new series of ripples.
Max was almost sorry when the voyage ended, but once again, the excitement of fresh adventure spurred his imagination when they boarded a train at LeHavre. Max’s father had always dreamed of traveling in Europe, and seeing the countries he had read about and sometimes was required to write about when he worked for the German newspaper in Saskatchewan. Although it meant they would arrive in Mariolana almost penniless, he was determined to spend every last bit of his savings on this once in a lifetime excursion with his sons. He was certain that he would be able to recover his losses in a short time with profits from the grain buying business.
They traveled to Paris, where the narrow, twisting streets of Montmartre and the tall peaked houses were so different from any other city he had ever seen before; to Liege in Belgium, gray and soot-stained by its factories; and finally to Germany and Dusseldorf, where the sweep of the Rhine brushed the city’s toes.
From Dusseldorf, they embarked on what seemed to Max a really grand tour of Germany – Dortmund, Essen, Koln, Bonn, Frankfurt on Main, Weisbaden, Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Augsburg, Munich, and then to Zurich in Switzerland. European cities, some of them with buildings centuries old, wore an air of ancient wisdom, reminding Max that they were already old when the New World was still an unexplored wilderness. Rich with tradition, laden with many centuries of experience, these cities seemed to say that here was history itself.
From Zurich, they traveled to Innsbruck on the Austrian border, which seemed to Max must be the top of the world and on to Vienna. This gracious city, wrapped in old – world charm and elegance, had a Dresden- china quality that made Max feel that if he stared too hard at anything, it might break. Their tour took them on to Budapest and then back through Vienna to Graz and south to Milano and Rome. Here, surrounded by the crumbling symbols of antiquity, Max felt a sense of the immensity of time. If there were mutterings of war in these cities that he visited, Max did not hear them. Too young to concern himself very deeply with the problems of nations and governments, he threw himself whole-heartedly into enjoyment of the journey. The world had now become something more than a geography book to him. He had seen places that had once been only names, heard the wash of the sea and the mournful wail of a train whistle as the train carried him through the alien darkness of mountain fastnesses and the sunlit splendor of deep-hewn valleys. He was a voyager into life, and he welcomed new experiences.
He was also completely happy in being with his father. His father had always been kind and loving to him, perhaps more so because of the mother’s sharp tongue. They felt at peace with each other, the father and the two sons, and they enjoyed and appreciated mutual understanding. There had been hardships before, and there would be hardships ahead, but this cameo-like vacation would remain carved upon Max’s memory to the end of his life.
At last, they began to near the end of their journey. Crossing into Yugoslavia, the land of his birth, Max gazed intently at the countryside as though trying to summon up subconscious memories. Of course, he could remember nothing of this country. But the landscape looked as it had been described to him. The city of Ljubljana, with its great university buildings, was such as his father had described it, and so was the bridge at Sarajevo. Here King Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Rothenberg, were assassinated on June 28, 1914, plunging the world into its first great war.
Passing through Belgrade and Vrsac, the travelers at length reach Mariolana. Max looked at the houses and shops, at the streets, many of them unpaved, and tried to imagine what it was going to be like to live here.
Since their exact arrival time had been unknown, there was no one waiting to meet them as they got off the train. Although Max was skeptical of what this new life would bring, his father’s joy at finally returning home was a sight that warmed his heart. Tears glistened in the man’s eyes as he gazed upon familiar houses and landmarks. The town had changed little in the years he had been away, and he looked forward to being with old friends once again.
Max walked with his father and brother along a street whose name he could not read. He heard people about him talking in a language that he could not understand. All over Europe, this had obtained of course; but he was a traveler then, a stranger when he came and a stranger when he went. No one expected him to know the language or the customs. But this was different. This was home.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sunday dinner was being cleared away as the old man approached the door, and the small house still held the smells of roast meat and cabbage soup. Max’s father was deep in conversation with his partner in a new grain-buying venture, and Fred had just left to pay a visit to a girl he had met a few days before. Max stood in the doorway and watched the old man mount the steps, his movement slowed somewhat by age and arthritis.
“Are you Max Borschowa?” the man asked in Serbo-Croatian. Two weeks in Mariolana had taught Max enough of the language to understand that, but not much more. He replied, haltingly, in the same language, that he was Max Borschowa. Then the old man burst into rapid-fire speech, peering eagerly at the boy and reaching out to grasp him warmly by the shoulders. Not understanding a word, Max looked questioningly toward his father, who had now ceased his conversation and was coming toward them.
Max was surprised to see a look of displeasure on his father’s face, since the old man was clearly glad to see them. Max’s father spoke rapidly to the old man in his native tongue, and as Max watched, the old man’s expression began to change. The eager glow in his eyes dimmed first to bewilderment, then to disappointment, then to an infinite sadness. His hands dropped slowly to his sides. He looked at Max longingly, but he did not say anything until Max’s father at last stopped talking.
Then the old man spoke again, slowly, his voice husky with entreaty. Max heard a word that sounded like “Katie, “ as the old man drew a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket and offered it to Max’s father. And suddenly Max knew that this must be his grandfather.
His father scanned the paper hurriedly, a frown on his face, then he crumpled it in anger and flung it from him. Another torrent of Serbo-Croatian burst from him, and he waved his arms in angry gestures. The old man’s shoulders drooped slightly. He looked at Max once more, and there were tears in the eyes dimmed by age and weariness. He said something briefly to Max. Words that Max understood to be words of farewell even though he did not know their meaning, and then the old man turned and walked slowly away.
Max watched his grandfather going away from him, the shoulders bowed with fatigue and disappointment, the gait slow and uncertain. Then Max stooped and retrieved the crumpled piece of paper from the floor. Smoothing it out, he strained to see past the unfamiliar language, to find some magical formula for instant translation. The handwriting was his mother’s, but the words were in this strange new language.