Kalyna's Song

by Lisa Grekul

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I know what a tsymbaly is. Yeah, sure. Tsymbaly music is okay, I guess.”

  He hands me two tapes.

  “Have a listen,” he says. “Tell me what you think.”

  I take the tapes away, and my twenty dollars. And when I get back to the campground, everyone is waiting to hear what’s happened – Mom and Dad, Sophie and Wes, Kalyna, the Yuzkos. While I’ve been gone, they’ve obviously been talking about the incident. So I wave the twenty-dollar bill as I walk into our campsite, and they all cheer and whistle. They want to hear all about it, what I said, what he said. I promise to tell. But first I lock myself into the motorhome bathroom to look at his tapes.

  His name is Corey Bespalko. On the back of his cassettes, it says that he’s from Brandon, Manitoba, and that he was born in 1967. Which makes him seventeen. Four years older than me. On the cover of the first cassette is an outdated photograph of him. He looks thirteen, fourteen at the most; skinny and pimply, with dark growth on his upper lip. He is sitting behind his tsymbaly with the name of the album arched across his chest in block letters, Corey Bespalko Dulcimer Favourites of Yesterday and Today. All in all, the album looks cheap. When I peer closely under the letters, I can tell that Corey’s shirt is a little short in the sleeves, and it isn’t really embroidered around the collar. Someone’s just sewn on red-and-black tape, the kind of cheap appliqué that’s manufactured to look like embroidery. Cheap cheap cheap.

  Then I tell myself that maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe he has no Baba to cross-stitch a shirt for him. Maybe his mother is a practical woman – why invest in a real embroidered shirt for her son when he’s going to outgrow it in three months? Maybe he has no mother, no one to tell him that his sleeves are too short, that his appliqué collar is tacky. Maybe he’s an orphan, making his living like a gypsy, like an Old Country kobzar, playing music in exchange for bread.

  For his second album, Corey Bespalko Ukrainian Dulcimer Favourites, Corey has gotten hold of a real cross-stitched shirt and he’s shaved his upper lip. Otherwise, though, his second album cover looks just like his first. His face is washed out. The angle of the camera makes him look three feet tall and the tsymbaly ten feet long.

  I keep Corey’s tapes – and Corey himself – a secret from my family. After the incident with my skirt, it would be hard to explain to them that he’s not so bad after all. That he actually seems pretty nice. They’ll tease me if they hear that I’ve had a change of heart. Boy crazy, they’ll say. And anyway, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve changed my mind about him. It’s the tsymbaly playing that bothers me. Old men play the tsymbaly, not young ones. I’ve never seen a tsymbaly player under the age of sixty. Sophie and the Yuzko girls would probably laugh, call him a geek. Cute, maybe, but definitely a geek.

  •••

  On Day Four of the festival, I try my best not to think about Corey. I need to concentrate on competing, and on winning. I spend the morning running through my song in the motorhome. I’m singing “Tsyhanochka,” and accompanying myself on guitar. I need to practise the accompaniment especially because I’m just a beginner on the guitar. I’ve been taking piano lessons for seven years, but I’ve never actually had guitar lessons. I’m teaching myself.

  Kalyna wants to stay behind with me – “Tsyhanochka” is one of her favourite songs – while the others head out to the festival grounds. Wes begs to stay behind, too, but Mom forces both of them to go so that I can get some practising done.

  I don’t blame Kalyna or Wes for not wanting to go. I can hardly stand it myself when, later in the day, I spend some time with the Desna group. Our losing streak has continued, and the dancers are all the same – long faces, no spirit. Onstage, they have no energy. We’re supposed to smile all the time – “Zuby!” Kevin always says, “Teeth!” – but the dancers seem to have forgotten. And the chaperones are no better. They don’t cheer much or whistle. It seems like they’re not even paying attention to what’s happening on stage. Everyone is just going through the motions.

  Late in the afternoon, I decide to take a walk by myself. I have to, otherwise Desna’s gloom will rub off on me. They’ve all lost their competitions, but I still have a chance. The stain, after all, is on the back of my skirt, not the front. Chances are, the judges won’t even notice. Not once I’ve opened my mouth to sing.

  I go to Corey’s tent. Out of curiosity. I want to hear what he can do.

  There are three other girls standing and talking to Corey in the tent. Groupies. They can’t be more than eleven, maybe twelve years old. Skinny, runty groupies. Kids, I think. How pathetic. And they’re throwing themselves at him, too, leaning across his tsymbaly in their tight cut-offs and their tight t-shirts. Bras, too. At least one of them has the nerve to wear a bra, as if she needs a bra for her little washboard chest. Corey is letting them all touch his tsymbaly hammers, explaining to them how he made his albums. If he sees me, he pretends I’m not there. I wait a few minutes to hear him play, but he keeps chatting with the groupies. After fifteen minutes, I turn to walk out, wondering why I even bothered to come.

  As I’m leaving, though, Corey starts to play his tsymbaly, and the sound makes me stop. It knocks the wind out of me, as though someone has thrown a punch into my stomach, swung hard and hit me under the ribs. I hear him playing, and then I can’t move. He plays as if in slow motion, lifting his hammers over the tsymbaly, letting the hammers drop.

  I didn’t expect this. I only looked at the front of his albums – at his pictures – I didn’t pay any attention to his song selections and I didn’t even listen to his cassettes. I didn’t have to listen. The names of his albums said it all – Ukrainian Dulcimer Favourites, Dulcimer Favourites of Yesterday and Today. I expected the old standards – polka music, old time waltzes – the stuff played by all musicians in all Ukrainian bands. The stuff they play on cfcw’s Ukrainian Hour. “Nasha Butterfly,” “Spring-time Seven Step,” “Stay All Nite Polka,” “Red Shawl Tango.” I thought I’d feel sorry for him. I thought he wouldn’t be very good. I didn’t expect this.

  He’s playing “Tsyhanochka,” the song I’ve chosen to sing in the competition.

  He’s playing my song.

  But he isn’t playing it like the tsymbaly players on cfcw. Their playing is boring and mechanical and old-fashioned. All of their songs sound the same, even if the time signatures vary, or the tempo. Corey’s style is different. He takes the basic melody of “Tsyhanochka” and changes it by adding broken chords and arpeggios. Anyone who has ever played “Tsyhanochka” knows that it’s a three-chord song. Midway through his version of it, though, Corey alters the structure of the song, throwing in complicated chords I’ve never heard before – not sevenths, major or minor. I’d recognize sevenths. Maybe ninths or thirteenths? The kinds of chords that jazz players use. He’s playing a song that I’ve heard a hundred times before. Yet I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time. I’m amazed. Not just by what he plays, either. The way he plays is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He plays with more than his wrists, his hands, his arms. Corey closes his eyes and sways his body over the strings of his tsymbaly. As though he’s hypnotized by his own music. He presses and unpresses his lips, and turns his head periodically from side to side. The audience doesn’t exist for him, I can tell. In the whole world, while he’s playing, there’s just him and his instrument. Watching him gives me butterflies in my stomach, goosebumps on my arms. I have to look away. I want to cry.

  The groupies stay for “Tsyhanochka” but they talk non-stop through the performance. Of course. They don’t know the meaning of the words to the song. They probably don’t know that there are words to the song. I do. I know there are words. I know all of the Ukrainian words and I even know their English translations. It’s a love song. A man, a kozak, sings it to his love, his little gypsy. Of all the things Corey could have chosen to play. I’ll bet he speaks Ukrainian. I’ll bet he knows the words and their meanings.

  Over and over again, in the ref
rain, the kozak sings, “Tsyhanochko moia, morhanochko moia, tsyhanochko morhanochko, chy liubysh ty mene?” My little gypsy, my girl with the twinkling eyes, gypsy girl, seductive girl, do you love me?

  Near the end of the song, she answers, “Shcho to za bandura, shcho ne khoche hrat? Shcho to za divchyna, shcho ne vmiie kokhat?” What is a bandura that doesn’t want to play? What is a girl who cannot love?

  Corey must know that I’m watching. I move closer to him and his tsymbaly, close enough that I can see the moisture on his nose and above his lips. It’s hot in the tent. The hair along the back of his neck is wet, there are wet spots on his shirt, under his arms. He plays and sweats, and I sweat, too, just watching, and I fall in love, right there and then. First with his fingers, the white half-moons rising under his fingernails, then with the white-blond hair on the back of his hands. I fall in love with his wrists, tanned brown, and thin, and with the thick, blue-green veins that run from his knuckles, up his forearms, to his elbows.

  After he has played for me, Corey asks me to play for him.

  The groupies stop talking.

  “I don’t know how,” I say. “I haven’t got a clue. Too many strings. I’ve never touched a tsymbaly before.”

  As I’m making excuses, Corey takes my hand and seats me behind his tsymbaly. The groupies file out of the tent, one by one. I let him slip the hammers into my hands, and then I let him wrap his hands around my hands. Holding my hands in his, we play. Behind me, I can hear Corey breathing and I can feel the rise and fall of his chest. We play a medley of songs. “I Shumyt,” “U horakh karpatakh,” “Nasha maty.” “Chorni ochky.” “Ivanku Ivanku.”

  We play and play until Corey takes his hands away and I let the hammers drop onto the tsymbaly strings. Neither of us says a word. As I get up to go, sticky behind the knees from sitting so long in this heat, Corey reaches for my hand and pulls me toward him. Over the tsymbaly, he kisses me on the lips, just barely, wet and soft. Coming from the other side of the tent, now that our tsymbaly music has stopped, I can hear sounds of a bandura, soft and slow, plucked like a harp.

  Later, lying awake in the dark, in the motorhome beside Sophie, I relive the kiss. My first kiss. I analyze it. I plan for the next kiss, promising myself that I’ll do better the second time, be more adventurous. I’ll move my lips more, close my eyes, experiment a little with my tongue. Turn my head sideways – first one way, then the other – touch his face with my hands from time to time, like in the movies.

  I want to tell Sophie about Corey. In the worst way, I want to tell her. It’s not like me to keep secrets from Sophie, I tell her everything. I’d like to wake her up and describe the whole scene – the groupies, me planning to leave the tent, the song. The kiss. I’d like to take her to his tent, to hear him play. Then she’d see first-hand that he’s not at all a geek. When he plays, he’s anything but a geek. I’d take Tammy and Tanya to the tent, too. All of them. They would understand immediately.

  Only I can’t do it to them. It wouldn’t be fair. Not after they’ve lost every competition. Not with me about to sing, about to win. They’d be so jealous. I get a gold medal and boyfriend to boot. They get nothing.

  So I don’t tell.

  On Day Five of the festival, I sneak away from the group periodically to watch Corey play. He gives me lessons whenever he can, when the tent isn’t too busy. And every once in a while, he steals kisses. I carry mascara and lipstick in my purse to touch up my makeup throughout the day, and I suck on breath mints all day long, just in case. On his breaks, we sit together behind his tsymbaly, talking and holding hands. Corey is really Ukrainian, there’s no doubt about that. He went to bilingual school and everything. He talks a lot about famous Ukrainian authors, Ukrainian art, Ukrainian music. When we’re not together, I plan for the future. Our future.

  Next summer, we’re dancing in Vegreville at the Pysanka Festival, and Corey will be there, too. He’ll be playing, instructing, and selling his tapes in a tent – just like he is now. I daydream about Corey moving to Alberta – to Edmonton – one day and about the two of us studying music together. I haven’t told him about my plans yet. But I will. I imagine us living together. I decorate the walls of our apartment.

  In our bookshelf, we’ll keep copies of Ukrainian books like The Kobza-Player, Sons of the Soil, Men In Sheepskin Coats. One wall we’ll cover with his grandmother’s long Bukovynian tapestry – a kylym, dark green, rust, and gold; underneath it, we’ll place Corey’s tsymbaly, and beside the tsymbaly, a bandura, which he says that he’s going to learn to play eventually. All along our windowsills, we’ll put up framed pictures of paintings by William Kurelek. Children playing fox and geese, chasing after a chicken in the snow. Boys playing hockey on a frozen slough. And we’ll hang gold Greek Orthodox icons of baby Jesuses and Virgin Marys. Corey is religious and I’m not, but it doesn’t matter. Icons are very Ukrainian. We’ve got to have icons.

  On the evening of Day Five, I invite Corey to come hear me sing: tomorrow, two o’clock in the afternoon. Then it will be official. He will officially fall in love with me while I sing “Tsyhanochka,” like I fell in love with him when he played it. I’ll sing it for him and him alone, with passion in my voice, and longing. “Tsyhanochko moia, morhanochko moia, tsyhanochko morhanochko, chy liubysh ty mene?” My little gypsy, my girl with the twinkling eyes, gypsy girl, seductive girl, do you love me?

  Yes.

  •••

  The night before the sixth and final day of the festival, I hardly sleep. I’ve got too much on my mind. When I perform tomorrow afternoon, Corey will be in the audience. Desna will be in there, too. The dancers and the chaperones, plus the Yuzkos, and my family. Afterwards, right after I sing, we’re all heading home together, like a wagon train. The Greyhound bus, followed by the two motorhomes. When I think about leaving, I get a lump in my throat. Saying goodbye to Corey is going to be awful.

  In the morning, Dad prepares breakfast over the campfire – his famous Saskatchewan Paella. But I have butterflies in my stomach and I can’t eat. While the others collect around the picnic table with their paper plates and plastic forks and plastic knives, I’m kneeling at the motorhome toilet. Saskatchewan Paella is just chopped potatoes and onions fried and then topped with fried bacon and fried eggs – all fried a second time and served with toast. The smell of bacon grease wafts into the motorhome through the open windows.

  I throw up three times in total. First during breakfast, then again while I’m doing my hair and makeup, and once more as I’m putting on my costume. The third time, my mother catches me lying by the toilet, half-dressed. She wonders if it’s a flu. Or maybe it’s something that I ate. Sophie intervenes as Mom fishes in her purse for a Gravol to take my nausea away.

  “She’s just nervous,” says Sophie, rubbing my back. “Dry heaves, right? Like always. She’ll be fine after she sings. Won’t you, Colleen? You’ll be fine.”

  I nod, miserably, my head still in the toilet. I always puke before I sing.

  What I’d like to do is spend the morning in Corey’s tent, listening to him play once more before I sing, and before we leave Dauphin. Only I’m tired and hungry and hot – it’s got to be the hottest day yet – and I don’t dare stray far from the motorhome toilet. I spend the morning under the motorhome awning, in the shade, sipping ginger ale while I run through my song. I could sit inside the motorhome, ask Dad to turn on the air conditioning. Only Mom is folding the bedding, and Sophie and Kalyna are washing the dishes. I can’t stand to watch what they’re doing. Packing up, that is. Preparing to go.

  I can’t believe that the end of the festival is here. Six days, come and gone, just like that. Corey must be feeling it, too. He’s probably downright depressed, playing slow, sad songs on his tsymbaly, all in melancholy, minor keys.

  Of course, Sophie and the Yuzko girls aren’t at all sad to be leaving. They can’t wait to get home. Everyone in Desna is glad to be leaving, dancers and chaperones alike. The closest we’ve come to the gold is
a silver medal for the Senior Boys’ Poltavsky Sword Dance. The silver doesn’t count for much, though, as there were only two groups competing in that category. So our boys didn’t come in second, really. They came in last.

  I’m Desna’s final hope. Without a shadow of a doubt. I’m the last of the group to compete, and our last chance at gold. If I win anything less than gold, then I will have failed them all. My parents will wonder why they bothered with this trip to Manitoba. If I win, though – if I win the gold – then Desna will save face, and Mom and Dad will see that the trip was all worthwhile.

  My legs tremble as I wait in the audience for the competition to begin. Everyone from our group is in the bleachers, ready to applaud when it’s my turn to sing. For the first time in days, they seem energetic and excited. The Babiuk twins are holding up the Desna banner.

  By a quarter to two, the bleachers are filled. Standing room only. The Women’s Vocal Solo Category is one of the last competitions before the afternoon Grandstand Show. Everyone has turned out early to watch the singing before they head over to the Grandstand. The front rows are filled with old people – all grey-or white-haired or balding. Little kids run around in front of the stage, mothers run after them. Dads change the film in their cameras. There aren’t many dancers left in costume, since most of the competition is over now. They’ve all changed into street clothes, though some of them leave their medals around their necks. At ten to two, I look into the crowd, searching for Corey. It’s early yet. He’s still got ten minutes.

  I’m the last to sing in my category so I see what I’m up against, my competition. As the other girls perform, my stomach settles a little. One at a time, three girls in black slacks and embroidered blouses go to the mike. All three of them have bad skin and long blonde hair. Stringy blonde hair with brown roots. They look so similar that I think they must be sisters. While they sing, I periodically glance around the crowd looking for Corey. The place is packed. It’s possible that I can’t see him. Or maybe he’s checked the festival program, and he knows that I sing last.