by Lisa Grekul
She can’t be Russian. There’s no such thing as a Russian nun. Is there?
“You like Russian music?” she asks.
“Sure. I like Russian music. I like it a lot. Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. Bartók. I’ve always liked Russian music. Well. Of course, Bartók is Hungarian, not Russian.”
I’m rambling now, but there’s no turning back. If I’m lucky, she’ll believe me, and stop her interrogation.
“I like Slavic music in general,” I say. “Like Stravinsky, Dvorák. The Chopin Mazurkas. All of that. I suppose it would be really neat to play music by a Ukrainian composer, if there was such a thing. A Ukrainian composer, I mean. Because I’m Ukrainian myself. I mean, I was born here and everything, but, you know.”
Sister Maria stares at me.
Now why did I go and say that? What’s wrong with me? Ukrainian composers have never once crossed my mind. Never once. And I don’t actually know any Russian music, except for the Rachmaninoff piece that Simone chose for me. I’m so scared of Sister Maria that I’m making things up – lying – blurting out anything that comes to mind. I’m so intimidated that I don’t even know what I’m saying.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me about being Ukrainian.”
I’m not sure what to say. No one has ever asked me what it’s like, or what it means, to be Ukrainian. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know where to begin.
“For starters, I’ve never actually been to the Ukraine.”
“Ukraine,” says Sister Maria.
“Right,” I say. “I wasn’t born in the Ukraine.”
“Just Ukraine. You don’t say ‘the Canada.’ Why would you say ‘the Ukraine’”?
She’s got a point.
“All right,” I continue. “I was born here, and so were my parents. Their parents – I call them –”
“Baba and Gido –”
“Right,” I say. “Baba and Gido. They were born in the – in Ukraine, but they came to Canada when they were very young, just babies, so they don’t remember anything about the Old Country. They were farmers. Actually, my baba and gido on my dad’s side are dead. I just have one baba and one gido left, and they’re too old to –”
“You speak Ukrainian to them?” she asks, cutting in again.
“Not really. Actually, no, I don’t speak Ukrainian to them. I don’t talk to them at all, unless my mom or dad is around to translate. Baba and Gido don’t speak English very well, and I only speak English.”
“Yet your parents, they speak Ukrainian.”
“They do, yes. My mother is the Ukrainian teacher at my school. She teaches me Ukrainian, and my brother and sister. She’s teaching my dad to read and write it at home, too, because he never learned when he was young.”
“So you do speak Ukrainian. All of you.”
I shake my head again. “No. Just my mom and dad. It’s like a secret code for them when they don’t want us kids to know what they’re talking about.”
Sister Maria raises her eyebrows.
“We’re Ukrainian in other ways,” I say.
I want to explain to her that it doesn’t matter if we don’t speak the language.
“Church?” she asks. “You go to church?”
I shake my head. I tell Sister Maria that my parents used to go. “My aunts and uncle go all the time. But we only go once in a while. Like for a wedding or a funeral. My dad doesn’t want us to get brainwashed.”
Sister Maria sits back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. I should have left out the last bit, about brainwashing. She is a nun, after all.
Maybe it’s time for me to ask a few questions of my own. Like why Sister Maria is so interested in my background. I’m starting to think that she’s Ukrainian herself. Though it doesn’t make much sense. A Ukrainian Catholic nun in a French Catholic convent?
The problem is that when I try to ask her questions about herself, Sister Maria doesn’t give very clear answers. I ask her if she’s French, and she says that she speaks French. What kind of answer is that? Then I ask her if she’s Russian, and she says that she speaks Russian.
“So are you one or the other?” I ask. “Or both? Or something else?”
But Sister Maria doesn’t answer. In fact, she pretends that she hasn’t even heard the question. She gets up from her chair, pushing me off the piano bench so that I almost fall to the floor. For such a skinny person, she’s surprisingly strong.
“Hold out your hands,” she says.
Here we go. I’m getting it now. The rosary. On the palms of my hands instead of the knuckles. I’ve said something wrong. I’ve said everything wrong. Well, this will be the first and last time she beats me, that’s for sure. If she lays one finger on me, I won’t come back. I probably won’t come back anyway.
But Sister Maria doesn’t pull out her rosary. Instead, she opens the piano bench and from it she gathers a stack of paper into her arms.
“So you think there’s no such thing as a Ukrainian composer?”
One by one, she plops sheet music into my hands, reciting composers’ names as she goes. Dmytro Bortniansky, Kyrylo Stetsenko, Stanyslav Liudkevych.
“You know these names?” she asks.
I shake my head.
Lev Revutsky, Borys Liatoshynsky. More music drops into my hands. Mykola Lysenko. Maksym Berezovsky. Artemii Vedel. Vasyl Barvinsky.
There is silence between us for a moment and then, while I’m still standing with the stack of sheets in my hands, Sister Maria plays for me, by heart, no music in front of her. She plays a song in a minor key, slow and melancholy, her arms outstretched like wings over the piano. From time to time, she leans over the piano, her fingers kneading the keys, her forehead almost touching her hands, as though she means to kiss the keys; then she arches her back and tilts her face upward, eyes closed. As she plays, her room starts to change. The plaster on the walls is cracked and chipping, I know. There is a dented metal filing cabinet in the corner. A yellowed poster of Beethoven hangs crooked by one nail over the piano. On another wall, a funny-looking, faded drawing of three musicians. Everything is drab and worn. Sister Maria’s sleeves are worn, too, not black so much as grey. But when she plays, everything looks different. As though a window has been opened, bathing her in light, like an angel.
She finishes too soon, I think. I don’t want her to stop. I want to hear more. I want to learn it myself – the piece she just played, and all the music that I hold in my arms.
“Can I learn that song?” I ask. “Can I buy the sheet music in Edmonton?”
“You can’t buy the music anywhere. Nowhere at all. It’s not for sale.”
“How did you get it, then? Where did all this music come from?”
Flipping through the stack of sheet music, I see that it’s all handwritten.
“Your mother is waiting for you, I think,” says Sister Maria, her eyes on the clock above the filing cabinet. “Shall we meet again next week?”
It’s dark outside by the time my lesson ends. Mom is outside the convent at six o’clock sharp, listening to the radio in the car. I come out of Sister Maria’s room with gifts from her, a handful of cookies and several brown sheets of music – her piano adaptations of several pieces of music by Ukrainian composers. Before I get into the car, I shove the cookies into my jean jacket pocket. Then I slip the brown sheets under the cover of my grade nine music book. I don’t want Mom asking any questions about my lesson. I decide that what goes on inside the convent is private, it’s between Sister Maria and me.
“So,” says Mom. “Should we call it quits with Mother Superior?” She laughs at her own joke. “Or is she a nice nun, like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music?”
I hardly hear Mom’s questions. I’m staring through the car window and into Sister Maria’s window – trying to catch a glimpse of her as we drive away. I wonder how Sister Maria found her way here, to St. Paul, Alberta. I wonder who she is, and why she lives here. I think that maybe I’ll bake cookies for her before my next
lesson, and bring her a Tupperware container full of them. Fresh cookies, soft, still warm.
Mom reaches over to squeeze my hand and, as she pulls away from the convent, she sings – “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” But as we drive home, the melody that Sister Maria played is the melody that I hear, over and over again.
Three
After I get home from my piano lesson each week, I like to close myself into my bedroom. Just for an hour or two before supper. The others – Mom, Dad, Sophie, and Wes – think that I’m doing my homework. But I’m not.
Sometimes I’m playing cassettes that Sister Maria has lent to me, recordings of piano concertos played by big orchestras and famous concert pianists. Or I’m flipping through the music magazines that Sister Maria subscribes to, old issues that she has already read, and then passed along to me. I’m learning about all kinds of music, not just the songs for my piano exams, but other songs, and the history behind them. At the end of every lesson, Sister Maria always pulls out something for me to borrow. Video recordings of operas, music history textbooks. Every once in a while, she gives me something to keep – a dog-eared copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier, sheet music for “Malaguena,” an old metronome that she’s long since replaced.
More often than not, though, after my lessons, I lie on my bed and I think about Sister Maria. I think that she must be lonely. She’s not like the other nuns. Lots of them are so old they can hardly walk. For the most part, the convent is deathly quiet. Except, of course, when Sister Maria is giving lessons. She’s too lively for the convent, too loud. She doesn’t fit in.
The truth is, I don’t really know much about Sister Maria. I think that she’s Ukrainian, or has some connection to Ukraine, but I don’t know for sure. She’s never given me the whole story. I think that when she isn’t teaching, she’s transcribing the works of Ukrainian composers so that they won’t be forgotten. But I don’t know where she finds the music in the first place.
I imagine that someone in Europe sends material to her because her desk is covered with envelopes from foreign countries. I imagine that she receives scratchy recordings, old scraps of manuscript paper. The occasional booklet of printed music, and maybe diaries or journals with the odd bit of musical notation. I imagine that she sorts through everything that is sent to her, making sense of it the best she can. And when she thinks that she’s pieced together an entire song, then she transcribes it. At least that’s how I imagine it. Sister Maria has never explained it to me.
I’m learning to play from some of her transcriptions, which seems to make her happy, but I can never really predict how she’ll act at my lessons. What kind of a mood she’ll be in.
After my first lesson, I spent hours at home trying to work out the song that she’d played for me, the sad song in the minor key. She didn’t lend me the music, but I’m good at playing things by ear. I had the melody in my head – most of it anyway – so I made up my own version of it to play for her at my next lesson. Only she didn’t like it. Not one bit. She said that I’d gotten it all wrong. I made it sound simple and cheap, like a folk song. And then she pulled out her sheet music to show me the real thing.
Sometimes, before I learn a new song by a Ukrainian composer, she tells me about the composer’s life, and that’s when she looks the saddest. Artemii Vedel, spent most of his life in prison for political reasons. Vasyl Barvinsky, sentenced to ten years in a Soviet concentration camp. Maksym Berezovsky, committed suicide in the eighteenth century. So many of their deaths were violent and ugly. She talks about composers who were gunned down, murdered, assassinated – composers who starved to death, or froze to death. They all suffered and died because they were Ukrainian, because they wanted to stay Ukrainian when other countries invaded Ukraine. I never know what to say after Sister Maria tells me their stories. I wonder if Sister Maria was like them. If she suffered, too, because of what she believed in.
I’ve given up trying to predict when Sister Maria will talk about her own work. Every once in a while, out of the blue, she’ll mention it, and talk and talk, bringing out sheet music and playing excerpts. Once she held me over, cutting into the next student’s lesson while she explained her latest piece. But when I ask straight out about her progress, she doesn’t answer.
I have so many questions. I want to ask about the person who sends her the material. For all I know, it might be more than one person. Are they other nuns? Priests, maybe, or monks. Family members, old friends? Anything is possible. I want to ask how she knows these people, and how they come across this material, and why they send the music to her and not to somebody else. I want to know what she plans to do with her transcriptions once they’re all finished. I want to know exactly why she does them in the first place.
More than anything, I want to talk to somebody else about Sister Maria – like Sophie. Sophie would be fascinated, like me. I know she would. I wish that I could tell Sophie everything I know about Sister Maria’s music room, her work with the Ukrainian music. Everything about her seems so romantic, so mysterious. My guess is that she’s seventy or seventy-five. Which means that she was born before the First World War, and lived through both World Wars – maybe in Russia, maybe in France, probably in both.
Sophie would help me fill in the details, come up with possible explanations for how Sister Maria wound up in Canada, because Sophie is studying the ussr in her grade eleven Social Studies class. Together, we could make timelines, and sketch out maps of Europe, and trace out Sister Maria’s life story – potential versions of it, at least. We could bounce ideas off one another, like a couple of detectives. If Sister Maria is Ukrainian, then maybe she came to Canada, via France let’s say, to flee from the Communists. Or else she was running from the Nazis. Or Stalin? Stalin is a possibility, too. Of course, I could do the investigation on my own. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.
But I don’t dare talk to Sophie about Sister Maria because Sophie hasn’t forgotten that I’m the lucky one who got to continue with piano lessons, and she won’t let me forget it either.
“How’s our Little Prodigy?” she says, after my lessons. “How’s the Musical Genius?”
How’s the Gifted One, the Golden Child, Our Very Own Virtuoso?
I can’t talk to Sophie about the mystery of Sister Maria. She’d laugh in my face. “You’re the Girl Wonder,” she’d say. “Figure it out for yourself.”
So I keep Sister Maria a secret, hoping that one day she’ll tell me her story.
•••
Maybe I spend too much time daydreaming about Sister Maria, making up tragic versions of her past. Maybe I’m too preoccupied about her composers and how they were persecuted just for being Ukrainian. But when I hear the rumours that the school board is canceling Ukrainian classes in our school, I can’t help thinking that Sister Maria will understand my plight because it’s the same thing, history repeating itself. Persecution all over again.
I hear the news from my best friends Kirsten Paulichuk and Tanya Yuzko, who hear it from Carla Senko, who says that my mom is being fired because she’s a bad teacher. Actually, Carla says that I’m to blame, too. She says the principal found out that Mom has been favouring me – showing me exams at home, giving me marks that I don’t deserve. So he’s cutting the whole Ukrainian program, just like that.
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. They’re canceling Ukrainian because the enrolment is so far down. Because of students like Carla Senko who switched from Ukrainian to French. Mom explains this to me one night over supper during the Christmas holidays. The numbers in her Ukrainian classes have been dropping for the past two years and now there simply aren’t enough students to justify paying a Ukrainian teacher. But Mom isn’t going to be fired. That’s a lie, too. They’re reassigning her to grade three.
After Christmas, according to Mom, when we go back to school, everything will be different. The last remaining Ukrainian students are going to be integrated into French classes. There are only four of us left
in grade nine Ukrainian anyway, and not many more in each of the lower grades. To help us along, Miss Maximchuk, the French teacher, will give us extra French tutorials after school. Until we’re all caught up. And Mom will have a new classroom in the elementary wing of the school.
My mother, I can tell, is relieved. She finally gets to teach normal kids in a normal classroom. No more homemade readers and workbooks, no more bingo games and flashcards.
I, on the other hand, am devastated.
Miss Maximchuk is the problem. While the rest of the family talks at the supper table, about how wonderful it is that Mom will be able to teach grade three, and about how useful it is to learn French in this day and age, I pick at my food and think about Miss Maximchuk and fume. Everything was fine until she showed up and took over the French program from Mr. Poirier. Mr. Poirier was old and strict. But once Miss Maximchuk came along – with her pink miniskirts and her snug, see-through blouses – French class turned into a big party. French crossword puzzles, French fold-out board games, French hangman. She gets her students to move their desks into a circle and read glossy magazines from Quebec. In the wintertime, they make cabane à sucre. They learn how to jig.
Jigging. That’s the main attraction. Miss Maximchuk has enormous breasts, and when she demonstrates the jigging, her breasts bounce and jiggle under her blouse. Most of the guys switched out of Ukrainian because of her boobs. Everyone knows that. They couldn’t care less about French. My mom isn’t full-breasted at all. How could she compete?
I can’t believe that no one else in my family sees the injustice. Our language is being taken from us, and nobody seems to care. Nobody wants to fight it. Mom and Dad talk about French like it’s a good thing, like it’s the only language that counts because anyone who speaks French can get a good government job. They say that, if I want to keep learning Ukrainian, we can speak it at home. But that will never happen. We’ve tried it before – Ukrainian-only meals to practice our Ukrainian. None of us kids said a word.
Over the Christmas holidays, I try to convince Sophie and Wes that we need to protest. I want to get them on my side. I tell them that it’s an outrage – having to join students who have been taking French for years. We’ll look stupid. How will we ever catch up? But Wes doesn’t care much. He’s in grade seven, which means that he’s only been in Ukrainian for three and a half years. It won’t be as hard for him to catch up in French class. And Sophie isn’t affected at all. She’s in grade eleven, and she’s finished all of her second-language requirements. In fact, she says that she wishes she’d learned French all these years instead of Ukrainian. She says that Wes and me are luckier than she was.