Little Fortress

Chapter 5-2

“This cannot be where we’re stopping.” Ofelia’s voice was sharp and desperate against my ear.

It was.

The duke and Ofelia believed that they were travelling lightly – and, for them, they were. I’d already become accustomed to what they carried with them, but no one in the tiny Western Canadian town could fathom the number of things we had. When all thirty large steamer trunks were set out on the platform, a crowd gathered around us. A young man pushed through it with a camera, a flashbulb going off, each of us wiping at our eyes as we looked around the tiny station. “Well, I hope that doesn’t end up in the daily,” the duke joked with the estate agent who was there to meet us.

“Oh no, sir – I mean, Duke, Your Highness.” Leone waved his hand to indicate that formality wasn’t necessary. “The Vernon Daily News respects our citizens’ privacy. Of course, your arrival is news, but we wouldn’t print photographs of your possessions.” He didn’t understand that the duke was joking.

“Good to know.” The duke nodded to him.

A small crowd looked from the luggage to us, staring quite openly, as though we couldn’t see them watching us. I don’t know who was more stunned, the locals who had gathered to view our small group or Ofelia, who stood perfectly still on the platform. I sensed I was not noticed, not really, certainly not as much as the duke, Ofelia and even Sveva, who laughed as she spun circles around us. The man ensured that most of our belongings would be stored at the station, found a porter for our remaining luggage and ushered us to a waiting Ford. The duke took Sveva’s hand and I held my arm out to Ofelia like a thin ballast. She placed her fingers along my forearm, nothing more, though if she needed to steady herself it would be easy enough to wrap her hand into a grip.

The man opened the door to the car with an almost exaggerated movement. “You have many of these in Europe yet?”

“Automobiles? Oh yes, we’re not that far behind the times!” The duke lifted Sveva into the car, then helped Ofelia. I kept my hands at my side, nodded at him and got myself into the car before he closed the door. He sat in the front beside the man, who drove us two blocks over pitted dirt roads to a three-storey wooden structure on the main street of town. It was so close to the station that the porter had simply walked from there and was now ready to take our bags to our rooms. “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here.”

We looked up at the building, Royal Hotel looped in fading paint. Ofelia leaned into me. “He’s sure, is he? He’s the only one then, I’m afraid.”

Sveva ran up and down the boardwalk, delighted at the sound of her boots on the wood. Leone took Ofelia around the waist, smiled up at the building, squinted. When their daughter ran by the next time, I put out my arm to stop her, then knelt to her. “Go to your parents now. Tell them how happy you are to be here.” Someone should be. The duke was probably delighted, Ofelia horrified. I convinced myself I was used to being an afterthought, my reactions not entirely worth noting. If they had been, I would claim the territory between optimistic and noncommittal. I tried to convince myself I was still open to new experiences, though that word – open – hardly seemed to apply anymore, each move and change blocking off different parts of me, my mind a series of closed doors, storage trunks overfull, locked.

The next day, the estate agent came to pick up the duke to show him some houses for sale. Leone thought we might prefer to stay at the hotel. “Or go for a walk along Main Street, perhaps?”

Ofelia stared at him, tilted her head – and did her eyes narrow, just a bit? “Oh no, we’re coming with you, darling. Who knows what you’ll purchase at this point – a teepee?”

The duke rubbed his chin, looked above our heads as he said, “The Indians of this valley don’t live in teepees but in structures built into hills and mounds of earth. They’re called, depending on the area, quichis or kekulis.” When he looked back at us, his expression was earnest, as though he were quoting from an anthropological text, which he may well have been.

“Fine, I also do not want to live in a mound of earth. Come, Sveva, Miss Jüül, we’re all going.”

The man drove us around what there was of a town. We passed a large structure – an open-air factory, it seemed – stacked with large wooden crates. “The fruit-packing plant,” he explained.

The duke turned to us and smiled. He put his hand on Ofelia’s. “See, darling – it really is warm enough here to grow fruit.” Ofelia nodded, something like a smile pulled tight across her mouth.

“Oh yes, all sorts of fruit in this valley – perfect conditions, they say. We even have a fruit growers’ association now, a kind of union.” He let out a ragged laugh then cleared his throat. “Though I suppose you wouldn’t know much about unions, sir.”

“Here you’re mistaken. I actually consider myself a union man.”

“Oh?”

“Being born a duke held me back in Italy, but I did help those on our family’s holdings to form union-like groups, to take more ownership of the land.” He looked from Ofelia to me, nodding, as though looking for our confirmation. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve moved my family to Canada, a free country as they say, one in which we can be free of the narrow strictures of a culture based on blood, not merit.”

Leone said all this in English and the man nodded along, though it seemed heavy conversation for a morning drive.

We were passing the high wooden fencing we’d seen as we’d entered Vernon. “What is that?” asked Ofelia, also in English, perhaps the first I’d heard her speak the language since we arrived.

“An internment camp left over from the war. Enemy aliens, Ukrainians and other Slavs – a precautionary measure, I’m afraid.”

“Well, let’s hope we stay on the right side of the good Canadians!” Leone turned to us and laughed, though neither Ofelia nor I smiled in response. “Of course, I have a fair amount of Slavic blood myself. As does my daughter – you be careful, Sveva!” he called back to her.

Sveva smiled as though she understood the joke, looked wide-eyed and blinking first toward her mother, then me. I reached out for her hand, gave it a squeeze and winked at her as though she and I were in on the same joke. Sveva beamed back at me.

“But the war is over,” Ofelia said to me quietly in Italian.

The war was over, and I knew we should all be relieved. It wasn’t right that I pined for the first years of war, when my role within a household had become as indispensable as sleep. But I’d been wrong about that. I was sent away before peace was declared and now, here I was with another family, touring a tiny town in Western Canada.

As if in answer to Ofelia’s Italian, the man said, “The camp is officially closed. It’s been standing vacant for two years. We do need to dismantle it – it’s getting taken over by vagrants and Indians. They go and set up their own tents in there, build fires. It’s a public danger, I keep telling council.”

Leone turned to the estate agent, then away, clearing his throat. “The Indians, I’m given to understand, don’t live in teepees here.”

The man laughed. “No, not teepees, exactly! Canvas tents or, mostly, shacks. There aren’t many in town, though. They aren’t really supposed to leave the reserve out on Okanagan Lake, need a pass to do so – though some always find a way. Occasionally, their fires get out of control on the hillside by Long Lake, but don’t worry, they won’t bother you. You’ll be living in town.”

“The lakes!” Leone clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “I’ve heard so much about these lakes!” He looked over the seat toward us, raised his eyebrows.

Ofelia and I sat in silence as the men talked. I pictured roaming Indians, the abandoned imprisonment camp, fires out of control. I couldn’t imagine who would choose to live in such a place.

The house the duke and Ofelia chose was a three-storey wooden home on Pleasant Valley Road. “Quite spacious. Stately,” the estate agent said when we first saw it.

I nearly sputtered a laugh.

“You all right then, Miss Jüül?” Leone winked at me.

I looked toward Ofelia, who was using her cane to walk that day. She held her small frame completely straight, as though she didn’t need assistance, but I saw how her thin hand was clenched around the cane, tendons tight against her skin.

Sveva ran circles in the parlour, leaping around the edge of the room through dust motes lit in lines of diluted sunlight. “Second owner was a dance instructor,” the agent said. “He built the addition so that this room could be used for dancing.”

Later, Ofelia said to me, “Imagine, holding a dance in that tiny parlour! This is what they believe is a grand home, Miss Jüül.”

It was much bigger than the one in which I’d grown up on the farm, and that one had been considered a big home in our district. “Think of it as your country retreat.” I repeated what I’d heard the duke say.

“I don’t want a country retreat.” Neither did I, really.