Konstantin's Place

Konstantin's farm was bought at auction by Natural Ethics, a Chicago-based hedge fund whose largest acquisition to date was Archer Daniels Midland. For the last several years, Natural Ethics had been buying up huge tracts of farmland in southern Manitoba and it now owned roughly 15 percent of the arable land in the province. The new Conservative Government in Ottawa—kept out of power for 14 years by the Trudeau Liberals—was shamelessly soliciting bids for Canadian natural resources, mostly from south of the border, as it positioned Canada to integrate more seamlessly with the U.S.

Farmers like Konstantin, whose family had farmed the land in the Assiniboine Basin since emigrating from the USSR in the late 1920s, had been gradually driven off the land by crop failures attributable to the increasing frequency of floods and droughts, and Natural Ethics had been there to buy up their farms and convert them into mega-farms. Some of the farmers, like Konstantin, a widower whose two sons were in computers—one in Silicon Valley and the other in Toronto—had no place else to go, and so they stayed on the land ... as farm employees. Konstantin had become a hired hand.

Over the past 25 years, Konstantin's family farm had shrunk from its original 5,500-plus acres to 250 acres, and the last two summer droughts brought the downsizing to an end with the liquidation of the very plot of land originally purchased by his grandfather to grow wheat just like in the Old Country. This year, Konstantin works the land but only as per the directions from Chicago as filtered down through its Brandon office. None of the families from the neighbouring farms remain, not that Konstantin was particularly amiable with any of them. But now, he has even less in common with the other Natural Ethics' staff, and seems to have cultivated a reputation for being arrogant and generally disagreeable with 'outsiders,' to a degree that keeps his job at risk.

In his ever increasing hours of leisure—spent entirely in his own and only his own company—Konstantin has taken to recording his family's history in Canada with plans to publish it as a personal sequel to The Sons of the Soil—the book that his parents and siblings had read over and over in their farmhouse living room on those long, sub-zero Winter nights, when the deep snow absorbed the sounds of nature and, on clear nights, reflected the light from the star-filled heavens. This was the big sky country of the sweeping Canadian Prairies.

You're an idiot, Konstantin. No one wants to read your melancholia. Go live with Don. He's invited you, and besides he says there's a Ukrainian enclave in Toronto where at least you'll have the company of other old fools like yourself.

That may be true, but, you know, there are no stars in the sky in Toronto. They're all at ground level, and that the world famous view of that sprawling megalopolis from that railroad monument can in no way compete with the Prairie view of the galaxies. This is where I'd rather be.