Kalyna's Song

by Lisa Grekul

  As we approach the church, Sophie tries to look on the bright side. She says that this is the first wedding at which we’ll actually be able to enjoy ourselves. Usually, we’re too nervous to eat the wedding supper. I always throw up before going onstage. This time, Sophie won’t have to hold my hair back while I heave into the toilet.

  “The fact is,” says Sophie, “the aunts always complain about having to make wedding meals at every wedding, every single one. This is their long-awaited, well-earned break. Auntie Natalka hasn’t said a word to Steve in six years, ever since he married that divorcee, eight years older than him. What does Auntie Natalka care if Steve’s not invited? Plus no one has ever been impressed with Auntie Pearl’s flower arrangements. She’s cheap with the baby’s breath. And, as for the price tags on drinks – we’re not old enough anyway.”

  “You’re right,” I say, nodding. “Let’s forget all the trouble and concentrate on having a good time.”

  “Let’s party on!”

  Together, Sophie and I invent a secret party-on signal: the right hand curled into a fist, the right arm thrust up in the air.

  In church, of course, it’s difficult to make the party-on signal without drawing attention to ourselves, so Sophie nudges me with her elbow and then makes a little horizontal punch with her right fist. We sit on the women’s side of the church with Mom while Dad and Wes go to the men’s side. I get squeezed into a pew between Sophie and Auntie Rose. Not the best place to be – Auntie Rose’s perfume is so strong that it makes my eyes water. Once the incense starts, I’m going to get nauseous.

  I should be happy that the ceremony is taking place in the Orthodox church. It’s the tradition, after all. It always smells awful, though, in the church, and it’s always gloomy. There is a bit of a draft from the open doors, but not enough of a draft to make the air smell fresh. The church at Szypenitz is so old that it doesn’t have any lights, just hundreds of tiny candles dripping wax everywhere. I feel sorry for the bride. Organs aren’t allowed in the Orthodox church, so she can’t even walk down the aisle to the Wedding March. I’d never want to get married in a place like this.

  The choir in the balcony above us is what gets the service started. They sound creepy as ever. They don’t sing, really, they half-talk and half-cry. If you ask me, the bride looks scared as she walks down the aisle, and I don’t blame her. After the choir has done their cry-singing for a while, Father Zubritsky appears in his long, black gown. He comes through the saloon doors at the front of the church. At least they look like saloon doors, the kind that you see in old Westerns. He carries his usual smoking silver ball that hangs on a silver chain. The more he swings the ball and chain, the more the smoke poofs out and up our noses. It stinks. The incense must be rancid. It’s like old mothballs, dust, honey, all mixed together. The smell makes me sick to my stomach, just like I thought it would.

  Father Zubritsky likes a lot of incense; his ceremonies are always long and mostly in Ukrainian. I’ve been to other weddings where he officiated so I know what I expect. To pass the time, I flip through the Bible stuck into the little bookshelf attached to the pew in front of me. It’s in Ukrainian, but it’s got neat shiny paper. I flip through the Bible, rubbing the pages with my fingers.

  Auntie Mary gives me a dirty look. She’s sitting beside Auntie Rose. It’s Mom, Sophie, me, Auntie Rose, Auntie Mary, Auntie Pearl. In the pew behind us are my grown-up cousins, Orysia and Dalia, plus Rick’s new wife, Darlene. And in the pew in front of us, Auntie Linda, Auntie Jean, Auntie Marika, Auntie Helen, Auntie Natalka. I find it hard to believe that my aunts come here regularly, by choice. My parents never take us to church. To my aunts, the whole place must seem normal.

  My mom has eight sisters, all of whom are much older than she is, and much more old-fashioned. With the exception of Auntie Helen, who lives in Edmonton with her husband, Uncle Dan, the other sisters all live around Two Hills and Hairy Hill. They all married farmers. Besides my mom, Auntie Pearl, who owns the flower shop in Two Hills, is the only sister who isn’t a housewife. But my mom is the only girl in the family who doesn’t go to church anymore.

  After Auntie Mary’s dirty look, I try hard to follow what’s going on during the ceremony. I just don’t understand why Father Zubritsky can’t be more cheerful. Why does he have to act like it’s a funeral? He talks like the choir sings, half-moaning and half-crying. His favourite phrase seems to be hospody pomylui and variations of it – which, Sophie and I joke, must mean stand up and sit down. We go up, pray silently, pray mumbling, pray out loud. Down. Up. Down, up, down. I try to guess when the ups and downs will come but it’s hopeless. I have to watch everyone else for a cue; everyone else seems to watch everyone else.

  Who are we all following? It can’t be Father Zubritsky because he stands the whole time. It’s not the people in front of us. I watch them closely. They follow somebody in front of them. Maybe the ups and downs aren’t so bad. At least I have something to think about for the rest of the ceremony. I want to determine who’s leading us. Someone in the front row, someone who speaks Ukrainian. Someone who goes to church regularly. Someone who must actually like Father Zubritsky.

  I think it’s my cousin Kalyna.

  I watch her carefully. The more I watch, the more convinced I become. It is Kalyna. She’s leading the whole church. She gets up first, she sits down first – as long as I watch her, I keep in time with Father Zubritsky. I don’t know how she can do it, being not mentally normal and all.

  After a while, though, I get a car-sick feeling from the up-down motion and the smoke. Auntie Rose’s perfume isn’t helping either. I lean hard on Sophie to make the church stop spinning. This is the worst I’ve ever felt at a wedding. I put my mouth on her ear to say, “Soph, I’m gonna throw up.” Sophie doesn’t look so well herself. She grabs my hand and holds it, hard.

  For an hour and a half, Father Zubritsky talks and wails and out-and-out yells – all in Ukrainian. At the very end of the service, he finally switches to English. English with a heavy accent, but English nonetheless. The problem is that his English words have nothing to do with the wedding ceremony. He talks in English about young people. Young people who don’t go to church. Father Zubritsky makes church a two-syllable word – char-itch – and he says it over and over again.

  “You young people,” he booms, “you’ve forgotten the char-itch! You don’t come to char-itch. For shame! You go to your discos in your fancy cars and you forget where you come from. Hospode! Too much English. You young people don’t know your mother tongue. For shame!”

  By the end of the ceremony, the bride looks like she’s about to cry, and her parents storm out of the church after the wedding party with frowns on their faces. Auntie Helen and Uncle Dan don’t look too pleased either, but they try their best to smile at the crowd as they walk toward their car.

  The whole thing makes me sick – not just sick, but angry, too. Sophie’s just as mad. And, on the drive from Szypenitz to Edmonton, Mom and Dad talk non-stop about the things that Father Zubritsky said.

  “No wonder we don’t go to church,” says Mom. “What’s wrong with him? Senile old goat, making a fool of himself like that. Making all of us look like a bunch of dumb Ukrainians in front of those English people.”

  We all cross our fingers that the priest won’t show up at the wedding reception to make more speeches – and he doesn’t.

  Which is a good thing. Father Zubritsky would be outraged.

  The Hotel Macdonald is a classy place, there’s no doubt about it. It reminds me of the legislature with its ornate ceilings and marble floors. We’re all directed by bellboys to one huge banquet room with plush carpet, a dozen enormous chandeliers, and a candlelit patio. The guests’ tables are round, with bright white tablecloths and huge arrangements of white roses for centrepieces. The head table is long and rectangular, decorated with big white bows and bunches of white flowers and leaves, all strung together with vines – which are real because, after dinner, I have a look at them up
close. Besides the vines, everything else is white. The tablecloths, the napkins, the flowers, the bows, the cake. The limo, the tuxes, the candles, the centerpieces on the tables, the tables. And the bride’s and bridesmaids’ dresses, of course – all bright white. You’d never guess that they all spent the afternoon in the gloomy little church at Szypenitz.

  Now I’m not sure what to think. The Hotel Macdonald is beautiful. It’s like something right out of the movies. The bride looks happy here, and relaxed. She looks like a movie star bride. But it’s all wrong for a Ukrainian wedding. It’s not the right place for a reception.

  The seating has all been arranged beforehand, something we’ve never seen before. Sophie and I sit together – in our assigned spots, at the very back of the hall, behind two pillars and the bar, with the rest of my mother’s family – sipping our orange pops, and sulking. The whole place makes us nervous. Are we allowed to leave our seats once we sit down? We hardly speak, and when we do, it’s in whispers. We’re afraid that if we move, we’ll touch something white and dirty it.

  I think that the uncles and the aunts don’t like the idea of assigned spots either. They’re all sitting quietly – barely talking, let alone laughing. Sophie says it’s the white washed atmosphere. It’s all too clinical.

  “At a wedding,” says Sophie, “the bride’s gown should be the only all-white thing.”

  I disagree. The food, too, should be white, or nearly white. Pyrohy, nalysnyky, holubtsi, pyrizhky. I point to the food in front of us – green Brussels sprouts, orange carrots, red potatoes – and raise my eyebrows. Who wants to eat this at a wedding?

  For dessert, we’re served something brownish and semi-sweet and coagulated that looks like a poached egg in syrup. I almost gag. At a real wedding, after a real supper, we get up to stretch our legs. Then we help ourselves to real dessert – squares. Twenty different kinds, at least. Auntie Mary’s matrimonial squares, with dates and oatmeal; Auntie Linda’s seven-layer squares with coconut and butterscotch chips; Auntie Rose’s rhubarb delights, Minnesota bars, and rocky road fudge; Mom’s cookie sheet brownies and poppyseed Pampushky.

  At a real wedding, we all sit at long, rectangular tables, wrapped in paper. We sit wherever we please. There are bells, streamers, and balloons, and two big cardboard hearts joined together, with the name of the bride and the name of the groom written in sparkles. Across the head table, we lay a piece of embroidered cloth and, on it, a jar of salt and the korovai, with tiny dough birdies squatting in golden braids of bread. Before the meal, we have a Ukrainian blessing and an English blessing. At a real wedding, Uncle Dave and Uncle Charlie and Uncle Andy take turns going to the bar during the meal, each bringing back to the table a tray of drinks in plastic glasses. From time to time while we eat, we clank our forks against our plates to make the newlyweds kiss. We sing “Mnohaia Lita” for the couple at least two times. And, at a real wedding, as the speeches begin, the men pull hankies from their pockets, so that the women will have something with which to wipe their eyes.

  At Dean and Diana’s wedding, we’re too far from the podium to see who is speaking and the pillars seem to block what is being said. Diana’s family and friends are all seated at the front of the banquet hall and each time someone at the microphone says something funny, we hear them laughing, but it’s like we’re all left out of the joke. We miss the Toast to the Bride completely, and the Toast to the Groom.

  When a little streak of mauve takes her place behind the mike, though, we all know exactly what’s going on. A little girl is about to sing.

  A girl from the bride’s family.

  Not me.

  I would like to make the secret party-on signal in the little girl’s face, to stop her – or slow her down at the very least – from butchering “You Light Up My Life.” As she starts singing, someone turns up the volume on the pa system, so we can all hear every word of the song. She sings it twice as fast as she should. Of course, I would sing it double-time too if my voice were that weak. Because she can’t sustain a note, she holds the microphone right against her lips, which makes her ps and bs explode. Amateur. When she hits her first semi-gutsy note, the mike squeals. Surprise. Any semi-experienced, semi-talented singer would pull the mike away on the loud notes. It seems to me she’s had voice lessons because she’s concentrating too much on rounding her lips and dropping her jaw and rolling her rs. I don’t think about my mouth when I sing, or my lips, or my tongue. Instead, I tell myself that my voice is an arrow and that I’ve got to send it powerfully and precisely. Her voice is a half-dead jackfish, hooked in the gills, drowning in air.

  I should be up there in front of the crowd, not her. I should be singing. I should be singing in Ukrainian. I’m better than her, and I always sing. I want people to look at me. I whisper in Sophie’s ear a hundred times before Mom gives me a poke and a “Shhh.”

  It doesn’t matter, though, if I whisper. It doesn’t matter if I scream at the top of my lungs. Nobody in the hall can see us because we’re behind the pillars, and nobody can hear us over the sound of the little mauve girl’s voice.

  After “You Light Up My Life,” Auntie Helen and Uncle Dan take a turn at the mike, but someone turns down the pa again so we can’t make out anything they say. They start at 9:36 and talk until 10:17. Wes times them. They talk and talk. All we can hear are boom-booms, lower when Uncle Dan takes the mike and a little higher when Auntie Helen speaks. After ten minutes or so, Sophie and I make our way to the front and stand by the wall, promising to report what we hear to the family. Wes tags along.

  Auntie Helen thanks certain people for coming – Uncle Dan’s business colleagues, mostly, who work with him in the industry. The oil industry, she means. Uncle Dan cuts in and makes some jokes about the industry, and some of the people in the front – industry people, I suppose – slap each other’s backs and chuckle. Auntie Helen thanks the world-class florist and the world-class chef and the world-class photographer that they hired for the wedding. In front of the pillars, the ladies wear long gowns and big, gold hoops on their ears. The men don’t wear regular suits like my uncles and my dad. They wear tuxes, like the groomsmen, with real cufflinks. Standing against the wall and staring, Sophie, Wes, and I look like little brown Indian kids, brown from the time we spend outside on the farm. Looking in, from the outside.

  Uncle Dan takes over again, describing the difficulties the bride encountered in selecting her bridal gown. Our jaws drop when we hear that she couldn’t find anything she liked in Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. We’ve never been to any of these places. Uncle Dan says that Auntie Helen had to bring Diana to a designer in London. London, England.

  “And, wouldn’t you know it,” says Auntie Helen, taking over from Uncle Dan, “the silk the designer needed was nowhere to be found in the Western World!”

  The crowd rumbles at the joke.

  “So it was off to the Orient.”

  The Orient.

  Sophie and I simultaneously turn our heads to look at the bride, whose gown is long and white and has sleeves. From looking at the gown, it’s hard to tell the difference between it and every other wedding gown we’ve seen. Unable to stop ourselves, Sophie and I cover our mouths and giggle into our hands. All the heads at the tables closest to us turn and stare. Auntie Helen’s head turns our way as well. She gives us a horrified look, a look of embarrassment, disgust, reprimand. We are out of place, out of our assigned spots, on the wrong side of the pillars. Sophie and I blush and start to move back to our table. We’ve forgotten to party on. We’ve altogether abandoned the secret party-on signal.

  At a real wedding, the band starts with a few old-time waltzes, seven-steps, and foxtrots. After their first break, they play the schottische and the heel-toe, and the bird dance, if it’s requested. Polkas and butterflies just before midnight, when the fiddler and the tsymbaly player are warmed up; the kolomyika just after midnight, before they’re too warmed up with liquor. The uncles take turns on the dance floor with the girl-cousins, hal
f-carrying us as they twirl us around. Once in a while they take their wives for a slow two-step. If the band can manage “In the Mood,” Mom and Dad jive. But mostly the women sit and talk after the meal and the dishes have been done.

  This isn’t a real wedding. Because this isn’t a real band. There is no accordion, no tsymbaly. Nine musicians on stage, and not one of them plays the fiddle. Two play trumpets, one plays the trombone; there is a piano player, an upright bassist, three singers, a drummer. I was hoping for the Melodizers from Mundare in their matching black slacks and light blue velour shirts. This band doesn’t have a name, even, and they wear tuxedos. They play elevator and shopping mall music.

  When the industry people start stepping onto the dance floor, the uncles gather in bunches, leaning on the pillars, talking quietly and shaking their heads. The aunts cross their arms and their legs, press their lips together. They glance at their watches a lot. For us, there is no dancing.

  At exactly midnight, the band stops and there is some commotion on stage.

  “The throwing of the bouquet,” Sophie whispers to me, smiling.

  It’s time for the bride to throw her flowers, and for the groom to throw her garter. We make our way toward the middle of the dance floor. We’re single girls, after all, so we’re eligible to catch the bouquet. The little mauve girl, too, I notice, is walking towards the dance floor. I’m going to stand beside her so that I can push her out of the way when the time comes – push her hard, so that she falls on her little mauve bum and shows the crowd her mauve panties. It will be her best performance of the day.

  Only, she doesn’t stop at the dance floor, she heads straight for the stage, mauve heels clickety-clacking on the hardwood. I don’t think I can bear it. I don’t think I can stand another of her songs. But here it comes, her grand finale, a special song for the special couple.

  It sounds like the other song she sang tonight: weak, flimsy, bloodless, uninspired. Like the singer herself. I am your lady and you are my man. Give me a break. She looks like she’s all of nine years old, ten at the most. She’s got nerve. Whenever you reach for me I’ll do all that I can. I wish that she would reach out to me on the dance floor. I’d smile up at her, and hold her bony little hand in mine. Then I’d squeeze. I’d grip her wrist with one hand and her marbly knuckles in the other; I’d pull her down, nose-first, onto the floor, and the mike would be mine. Nobody would take notice of her bawling her bulgy eyes out, her nose leaking blood and snot all over her mauve party dress, because they’d all be transfixed by my singing. I’d sing “Chaban.”