Tomorrow is Yesterday: A Novel of Wartime Belarus (1968)

The last chapter of Tomorrow is Yesterday. For the third time, Mary Karaway comes back to life, in the hospital where until yesterday she washed dishes, with a view of the ash-gray waters of Lake Ontario and four other patients who cannot follow a word of the German soon spoken at her bedside.

Her visitors come one after another. First a policeman, the visitor she least wants to see, with questions about that morning on the highway. Then Erna Bergdorf, shaken but composed, who has questions of her own and learns at last who the woman she knew as Alena really is. Mary must decide how much of the truth to tell her, and what she owes to Erna and her children. Mikola comes too, to hear the whole story. Late that night Mary lies awake, going over everything that has happened and what is left for her now. The novel closes on the questions that have followed her since Shuly: justice, conscience, and the hand of Providence.

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The night after the birthday party, Mary sleeps badly. She rises before five for her shift in the hospital kitchen and sets out in a light drizzle for the bus stop two blocks away, without an umbrella, and without giving a thought to the open, empty garage across the street. Her mind is still on the evening before: whether she was right to speak as she did, and what the man who heard her will do now that he knows the danger he is in.

At the corner, where trees and lilacs behind a high fence hide the side street, a maroon Buick pulls away from the curb and stops in front of her. Within moments Mary is in the front seat, and the car is speeding west through the sleeping suburbs and then north on an empty highway, the needle near fifty and the wipers working against the rain. The man at the wheel tells her she won’t need a return ticket. Mary searches desperately for a way out. A short chapter, played out in a few minutes on a wet road at dawn.

Glossary and notes:
Content note: this chapter describes an abduction and physical violence.

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Little Erna Bergdorf is turning five, and both she and her mother insist that Mrs. Alena come to the party. By now Mary has sat with the Bergdorf children twice while their parents went to the theatre, and she is surprised by how attached to them she has grown. That attachment is part of her torment. Within reach of the man she has come so far to find, she feels bound by human and divine law alike, and her nerves begin to fray: she breaks dishes at the hospital, and Mikola’s courtship grows more insistent the cooler she seems.

The party goes well: a birthday song in German and English, a houseful of new dolls, a modest picture book from Mary, roast turkey, and toasts poured by a beaming father. Then, at the table, Erna innocently asks Mary what happened to her own children. Mary decides to answer, and tells the story of a village by a highway, a wounded soldier and a winter night, choosing carefully what to say and what to leave out, while Johan Bergdorf sits across the table and listens.

Glossary and notes:
Schutzpolizei: the German-run auxiliary police in the occupied territories
Content note: in this chapter Mary recounts the wartime killing of her mother and children.

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After her shift Mary pays a lawyer about five dollars for his advice, and it is short: no Canadian court will touch her case. The crime she describes happened in another country, in wartime, among people who were not Canadian citizens, and she has no witnesses. Her uncle’s words come back to her, about courts, money, and the rights of a woman who is not even a citizen.

At dusk she visits Pastor Paval, the priest of her parish: a heavy, slow, bald widower of about sixty, with a wall of books on Belarus and a gift for preaching that reaches even the young. Expecting a tale of love gone wrong, he hears instead the whole of Mary’s story, from the night a wounded soldier knocked at her mother’s door to the newspaper that led her to Toronto. Then she asks him the question she came with: what she herself may do about this man. They talk of the commandment against killing, of a people that has suffered for centuries, and of love, without ever finding the same meaning for the word.

Glossary and notes:
Byelorussiana: books and writings about Belarus
in absentia: Latin, “in their absence”; said of a trial held without the accused present

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Alone in her room, Mary paces and weeps. She likes Mikola far more than she has let him see, yet she will share with no one the burden she has carried across the ocean. Her Christian conscience makes it heavier still: she believes she has the right to judge the man across the street, but he is also a husband and the father of two small children, and she cannot see how to cut him away from them. She thinks of going to a lawyer, or to a priest.

At sunset, walking home from the park by the river, she hears Erna Bergdorf call her by her borrowed name. The family is back from a day at Lake Simcoe, unloading a plastic boat and a picnic basket in the driveway, and Erna wants Mary to meet her husband. The introduction does not go the way Erna expects. Inside, among the redwood panelling and the children’s toys, little Erna shows off her dolls, Johan Bergdorf lights his pipe and asks Mary where she comes from, and glasses of cherry liqueur are poured for a toast to their new acquaintance.

Glossary and notes:
Navahradak (Навагрудак): a town in western Belarus

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After the Sunday service, in the church hall of her Belarusian parish, Mikola Hlak wants to know why Mary moved without leaving a forwarding address. Mikola is an accountant in his mid-thirties, a handsome bachelor with graying temples and a straightforward manner, who helped her find her hospital job, and Mary has suspected for a while that his interest in her is more than friendly. She tries to turn his question into a joke. It doesn’t come out as one.

They walk to a quiet bench under a maple in the park, and Mikola tells her plainly what the last few days without her have meant to him. Mary is moved, but she has what she calls her “mission”, and she cannot afford to be tied to anyone until it is done. She tells him only that there is more in her past than he could imagine, and not the kind of past some girls have. Over an old-country dinner he studies her face for clues, and as he drives away from her new address, Mikola is left wondering why a woman so careful with money would choose to pay such a rent on this street.

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Mary moves into a spacious front room in West Toronto that she can barely afford, rented from two elderly spinster sisters. What matters is the balcony. Beyond the view of the park sloping down to the Humber and the sun on Lake Ontario, it looks straight across the street at a gray bungalow with a double garage and a maroon Buick in the drive: the home of Johan Bergdorf, now in real estate, with a young wife and two small children. For the first time, Mary feels one jump ahead of him.

She watches, and at last the family appears. When the husband drives off and the wife takes the children and their white poodle to the park, Mary is ready: a new hairstyle from the beauty salon, a pink dress bought with her first paycheque, a book from the Belarusian community library, and a borrowed name. A red ball rolling towards her bench gives her an opening, and soon she is chatting in German with Erna Bergdorf, a young mother who spends too many evenings alone and seems glad of a friend.

Glossary and notes:
Hurricane Hazel: the 1954 storm that flooded the Humber River valley in Toronto
Mädchen: German, a girl or young maid

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Three weeks on, Mary washes dishes in a huge hospital kitchen, a job found with the help of the Belarusian Orthodox parish in Toronto. Its members, newcomers themselves, working in sweatshops and saddled with mortgages, have taken her in, and for now it is enough for her to belong somewhere. The chapter pauses on the hard first steps of these post-war immigrants, who arrive with no churches or organisations of their own and find the older Belarusian immigration largely absorbed into Russian and Polish parishes or Communist clubs.

One hot summer evening Mary rides the streetcar to a narrow street in the East End, to house number seventy-three, the address she has carried in her head since she read it in that newspaper. She has come only to find out whether the man named there really lives here, and has no clear idea what she would do if she met him at the door. A friendly, tobacco-chewing neighbour mending a fence, and a plump woman on the verandah scolding her little boy in German, give her the chance to ask her questions, and Mary has to decide on the spot who to say she is.

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The morning after her arrest on her first night in Toronto, a police van carries Mary Karaway to the Magistrate’s Court. Herded with the other women into a wire cage, most of them old hands who yawn and giggle through the proceedings, she waits beneath a portrait of the young Queen, sleepless and frightened, with almost no English. She has never seen the inside of a courtroom, in a Communist country or a democratic one, and Judge Ferguson, briskly dealing with the day’s regulars, looks to her like an automaton.

When her turn comes, the clerk reads the charge: vagrancy, for loitering near Dundas and Jarvis Streets and approaching passers-by, with no fixed address and no means of support. An interpreter, Mr. Sarochka, is called, and Mary, trembling, pleads not guilty and tells the court her own story, from the train from the West and the uncle’s friend who has moved away to the two drunks on the park bench. Everything now depends on what the stranger in the dark robe makes of it.

Glossary and notes:
vagrancy: the old offence of wandering with no fixed address or means of support
Magistrate’s Court: a lower court dealing with minor offences
Salvation Army: a Christian charity known for its shelters and work with the poor
This chapter picks up the story from the novel’s opening chapters, after Mary’s arrest on her first night in Toronto.

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A cloudy Sunday morning on the prairie. Mary stands on the back porch of her uncle’s farmhouse, looking out over the flax and the wheat towards a small town with its grain elevators, while inside Uncle Lavon and his wife Lida argue, as they have argued many times before. A church bell tolls in the distance and carries her back to her childhood: the great old church in the town back home, the pigeons under the blue cupola, the choir that seemed to sing from heaven, and the Sunday the bells fell silent when the godless came to power.

When the quarrel ends, Lavon comes out to the porch with the news Mary has long expected and dreaded. She hears him out with her back turned, staring across the fields, and finds the composure to answer him. He offers what help he can, and the address of an old friend in a city far to the east. For Mary, uprooted once again, the turn of events brings a thought she cannot put aside: that something more than chance may be steering her towards the city named in that newspaper.

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