Kalyna's Song

by Lisa Grekul

  “It’s not the end of the world,” says Sophie. “It won’t be so bad. And don’t forget, you’ve had Ukrainian for almost six years. You should be thankful. Think about all of the kids in St. Paul who aren’t French or Ukrainian and who never even had one year, not one single year, not one single class, in their languages. Now that isn’t fair, is it? Yet we don’t hear a peep from all of the Norwegian kids, the Germans, the Polish kids, the Italians.”

  For the first time in my life, I raise my voice to Sophie.

  “Easy for you to talk, all high and mighty, in grade eleven. You were never oppressed, your language was never taken from you.”

  I storm into the bedroom, slam the door.

  “And there are no Italians in this town!”

  •••

  Secretly, I want Sister Maria to come to my rescue. I’m not sure how she would help me exactly, but it would make a big difference if I knew that she were on my side. No one else seems to understand.

  Before we go back to school, after the Christmas holidays, I call the other three students in my Ukrainian class who are being persecuted, Tanya Yuzko, Kirsten Paulichuk, and Henry Popowich. I figure if we band together, we can make our voices heard and keep Ukrainian after all.

  “We’re victims,” I say. “Our rights are being taken away. We have to speak out.”

  But the other three victims don’t seem to mind. Henry Popowich speaks Ukrainian at home, so it doesn’t matter to him if Ukrainian classes are cancelled. He’ll keep on speaking Ukrainian at home. Tanya’s mother is French, and she already knows lots of French words, so she’s perfectly happy to take French. And Kirsten has been completely brainwashed. There’s no other explanation. She can’t possibly believe the things that she says. That we need French to get a good job; that French is easier anyway; that there are no Ukrainian classes in high school and we’ll all have to switch sooner or later. I tell Kirsten not to include me in her we. I tell all three of them, Henry, Tanya, and Kirsten, that they’re traitors: traitors, double-crossers, and turncoats. They’re selling us out, selling us right down the river.

  Kirsten says, “What’s a turncoat?”

  My piano lessons are cancelled for the Christmas holidays, but I’m desperate to talk to Sister Maria about the cancellation of Ukrainian. So I visit her on New Year’s Day. When Mom and Dad ask me why I need a ride to town, I tell them that I need to pick up some music from the convent. Actually, I’m going to ask Sister Maria for advice.

  “What would you do,” I say, “if something terrible were happening, something unjust? And you were sure that you couldn’t stand by and let it happen? But you were sort of powerless, and you couldn’t do anything all by yourself?”

  I’m hoping that Sister Maria will ask for details. Then I will tell her about the Ukrainian program.

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Depends,” she says, as she plugs in the kettle to make us tea.

  I glance at her stack of transcriptions, all of her yellowed and dog-eared scraps of manuscript paper. The brown envelopes with foreign stamps and funny, foreign handwriting.

  “What if,” I continue, “your language were being taken from you? Your language and your whole culture?”

  It’s not exactly true that my whole culture is being taken away from me. It’s really just that I won’t be able to take Ukrainian anymore. I need to get across to her the gravity of the situation, though.

  Sister Maria frowns. “This is about –?” She doesn’t finish her question.

  I tell her the whole story, from beginning to end. Everything. Not just about the low enrolment in my mom’s classes, and the competition between Ukrainian and French, and the school board’s decision to cut the Ukrainian program. I go way back to Dauphin, and tell her how the Ukrainian kids keep their dancing a secret at school; how we’re embarrassed to talk about all the Ukrainian things we do. I tell her about Dean and Diana’s wedding, and how there was nothing Ukrainian about their reception. My story gets a bit confused in parts – when I try to explain why I quit Ukrainian dancing after the festival, and why I stopped singing Ukrainian songs, and why I hated listening to Father Zubritsky’s lecture about being Ukrainian at the wedding ceremony. But eventually I come back to my main point.

  “And now, my parents are forcing me to join Miss Maximchuk’s French class, even though I don’t want to do it.”

  For a moment, Sister Maria says nothing. She takes a sip of her tea, and plays with the rosary around her neck.

  “Isn’t it the same as the composers in Ukraine?” I ask her. “Isn’t it?”

  Sister Maria drop her rosary. “No,” she says, quietly. “It’s not the same.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not the same,” she repeats.

  “Just because no one is trying to kill me or put me in a gulag or –”

  “Stay quiet,” says Sister Maria, “about things you know nothing about. Think before you speak.”

  I can feel my face turning red.

  Sister Maria leans over the table to touch my hand.

  “It’s not the same because you don’t know what you want.”

  “I want to keep taking Ukrainian.”

  “But you don’t want to listen to this Father Zubritsky when he tells you to speak your language.”

  My face is as red as a tomato, I’m sure.

  “And you don’t want to sing these songs your mother taught you, or do this secret dancing you just told me about.”

  I can’t respond. I don’t know what to say.

  “No one is stopping you from being who you are, Colleen,” says Sister Maria. “Except you.”

  •••

  I think about my conversation with Sister Maria for a day or two, and I decide that she doesn’t really understand my situation. I mean, she’s right about a few things. I probably shouldn’t have quit dancing. When Mom wanted to teach me “Chaban,” maybe I should have let her. Much as I hate to admit it, Father Zubritsky was partly right when he talked about Ukrainians who don’t speak Ukrainian. But I know injustice when I see it. It’s not my fault that the school board is cancelling Ukrainian. And it’s definitely not fair.

  After school starts again, while the school administration phases out the Ukrainian program, I start a letter-writing campaign. I do it in the school library, which is where the ex-Ukrainian students are supposed to sit together, working through the beginner French textbooks for a few weeks before they officially join the French classes. It’s humiliating, if you ask me, being forced to do grade four exercises. I refuse to participate. It makes me sick to my stomach watching Tanya, Kirsten, and Henry throw themselves into this new language, as though they can’t wait to forget everything they learned in Ukrainian.

  I write one letter to the principal, one to the school board, and one to the St. Paul Journal, protesting our forced migration into the French classroom. My parents think I’m being melodramatic. Sophie and Wes think it’s a big joke.

  The St. Paul Journal doesn’t print my letter to the editor, but I do hear back from the principal and the school board. The news isn’t good. Two copies of the same letter arrive in separate envelopes with a different signature at the bottom of each copy.

  We regret to inform you that your request to have Ukainian reinstated has been denied. Please consider entering Miss Maximchuk’s French program. Alternatively, we are pleased to offer you any one of the following options, designed specifically for our Young Ladies in the junior high school:

  1. Introductory Typing

  2. Introductory Food Preparation

  3. Introductory Beauty Culture

  It’s hard to imagine what would be worse: sitting, ignorant and confused and mute, in a classroom with students who have taken French for five and a half years, who are practically fluent, or sitting through a course for Young Ladies.

  Mrs. Heatherington plays records during her typing classes, old country and western 45s of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Mel Tellis, Conway Twitty, and her students type thei
r exercises in time with the music. She doesn’t care what they type – most of the girls, I’ve heard, write notes to exchange with one another after class – so long as their fingers never stop and they keep to the beat. Food Prep is like home eeconomics without the sewing. I’m not sure what they learn in Beauty Culture. How to cut hair, I suppose, and give perms, and maybe how to wax facial hair.

  I refuse to give up. If the principal and the school board won’t take me seriously, maybe the government will. I write several more letters: to my mla, the Minister of Education, and the Premier. Not one of them responds. Not even to tell me that they disagree with my point of view. I’m sure that when the Edmonton Journal publishes my letter to their editor the whole ugly truth of it will come out – Blatant Discrimination in St. Paul School, Politicians Turn Blind Eye to Social Wrong. Official invitations will follow, invitations to Ukrainian bilingual schools in Edmonton or Calgary or both. But the Edmonton Journal doesn’t publish my letter either.

  In the end, my letter-writing campaign fails. It fails miserably. The conspiracy is bigger than I originally imagined. As far as I’m concerned, the entire universe is against me. Colleen Lutzak versus the Whole World. My parents are in on it. They say that my campaign is nonsense, and they’re forcing me to sit in Miss Maximchuk’s classroom four hours a week. My brother and my friends are in on it, trying to convince me that French is fun. And Miss Maximchuk is definitely in on it, more than anyone else. She’s Ukrainian. Why is she teaching French in the first place?

  As for Sister Maria – I can’t be sure. Maybe she’s on my side after all.

  Out of the blue, at the end of one of my lessons, in the middle of February, she asks me how my French is coming along.

  I tell her that it’s coming along fine. That’s all I say, nothing more.

  While I’m putting on my coat in the foyer of the convent, she says, “You’re a very smart girl, Colleen.”

  I stop zipping my coat, and turn to face her.

  “You’re smart about music, of course,” she says, waving her hand. “I don’t need to tell you. I’ve never had a more gifted pupil. You have enormous talent, and you match it with hard work.”

  I resume zipping.

  “But you’re getting smart about life, too, no? You’re learning that sometimes we have to do unpleasant things. Sometimes we have no choice. So we do these things. We do them on the outside, yes? So that everyone around us believes we have given up.”

  Sister Maria puts her arm around me, and squeezes.

  “On the inside, though, we never forget – who we are, what we believe in. No, we never forget these things. It isn’t easy. Of course it isn’t easy. Sometimes we feel very lonely. But we survive, you see. We do what we must to survive.”

  As Sister Maria talks, I get goosebumps. I’m glad that she understands. I’m relieved. I get the feeling, though, that she isn’t only talking about my problems at school.

  Just what else is she talking about?

  •••

  Learning French, in fact, isn’t that hard. Not nearly as hard as Ukrainian. And once I accept my fate, I’m determined to be the best. To out-French the Frenchest students in my class. From the time I get home from school until the time I go to bed, I work through my French textbooks and cahiers, conjugating verbs, memorizing vocabulary and numbers.

  French is easy because there’s no new alphabet to learn, and a lot of English words are the same in French – especially long words. When I write compositions in French, I use a lot of big English words that end in “ance” and “tude.” After two months, I can hardly believe that Miss Maximchuk hasn’t caught on. I’ve used insouciance, délivrance, and solitude in every French composition I’ve written. Fifteen compositions, fifteen insouciances, délivrances, and solitudes, for a grand total of forty-five red circles. Miss Maximchuk circles each of my big words in red pen and writes, Ton vocabulaire est bon! in the margin.

  By the middle of April, I’m right where I want to be: at the top of the class. I’ve worked hard, and it’s paid off.

  What’s harder, though – harder than learning French – is fighting the feeling that I’ve been carrying with me since I started Miss Maximchuk’s class. The feeling that I’m floating and bobbing in a pool of water and that pieces of me are floating and bobbing away. When I lie in bed at night, I make mental lists of the new French words I’ve learned and I try to match each French word with its Ukrainian equivalent, to keep my Ukrainian memory fresh and strong. I even put my Ukrainian-English dictionary beside my bed.

  At first, the exercise is easy. Je – {. Pomme – {bluko. Numbers, the days of the week. Grenouille – ?aba. But we go through chapters quickly in French class – thirty new nouns per week, five new verbs – and I can’t find words like insouciance, deliverance, and solitude in the Ukrainian-English dictionary. I’m losing words now, daily.

  So when I select my topic for the French final project, it’s a matter of survival, just like Sister Maria said. The ninth grade French projects – Les Thèmes et Les Variations – are infamous in our school; they are Miss Maximchuk’s raison d’être. Each year, she chooses a thème – this year’s is Canada, Le Pays Multiculturel – then she asks her senior French students to pair up and work on variations of the thème. The presentation of Les Thèmes et Les Variations in June is a gala event, like the school Christmas concert, with parents, teachers, and school board members in attendance.

  Peter Eliuk and Greg Pederson are doing Mexican Canadians. There is talk that they’ll make real papier mâché piñatas. Sarah H. and Sarah M. decide on Italian Canadians, and they’re bringing tortellini for the audience to sample. Torn between the Scots and the Irish in Canada, Laurie-Anne and Jessie compromise – they choose the British. Carla Senko and Michael Holowaychuk pick French Canadians. They’re a couple now, boyfriend and girlfriend.

  I plan to work alone, sans partner. I won’t even ask Miss Maximchuk for assistance. My project will be mine all mine. I plan to make maps, models, diagrams, and charts. I might even bring in my guitar and sing, or wear my old Ukrainian costume and dance. The title of my project is Je Me Souviens Aussi: Les Ukrainiens au Canada. My coup de grâce.

  I make three huge maps – one of Canada, one of Alberta, one of the rough triangular area between Vegreville, Smoky Lake, and St. Paul – which show the demographic distribution of Ukrainians settlers in Canada and Alberta. Plus Ukraine, of course. I also make a giant map of Ukraine which shows the cities and the villages from which most of the Ukrainian settlers originally came. My written report is twenty-two pages long; in it, I describe the path that my family followed to Alberta. From Bukovyna to Frankfurt by train, to Halifax by boat, to Winnipeg again by train, and, finally, to Szypenitz on foot. I include recipes and real embroidery patterns. Some discussion of Ukrainian folk music and religion. Photos of Ukrainian dance costumes.

  As the presentation day approaches, I decide to sing “Tsyhanochka” with my guitar – my first performance since Dauphin. I’m also going to bring several pysanky. I will need a table for my pysanky and also for my 3-d miniature replica of a traditional Ukrainian village, with its miniature corrals around its miniature chickens and pigs, its thatch-roofed and white washed miniature house. Around me, I will hang the maps and a poster on which I have printed an excerpt of the Taras Shevchenko poem “The Testament.” Translated from Ukrainian into English, of course, and then into French.

  I translate almost everything into French, except the names of people, like Clifford Sifton, Ivan Pylypow, Wasyl Eleniak, and Taras Shevchenko, and the names of Ukrainian dishes that I can’t bring myself to translate. Les petites crêpes au fromage doesn’t work. Nalysnyky are nalysnyky. Pysanky, too, remain pysanky, not les oeufs de Pâques or les oeufs colorés. For each Ukrainian word, I write two transcriptions, one in the Roman alphabet and one in the Cyrillic. Pysanky, Pisanki.

  Three nights before Les Thèmes et Les Variations, the telephone rings, and my mother talks quietly into the receiver for a long time
before she calls me to the phone. I’m in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches on the three new pysanky I’ve made for my presentation. They’ve already been varnished. Now, one at a time, I hold the eggs over the sink and poke two small holes in each one. When I blow into one hole, my breath pushes the egg yolk and egg white through the other hole, until the insides of the three eggs are one long clot slipping down the drain.

  Mom yells, “Collee-een, pho-one. It’s Miss Maximchuk.”

  Miss Maximchuk is on the phone?

  “Carla Senko is in a bind,” says Miss Maximchuk.

  I can feel the blood drain from my face.

  “Earlier this evening, Carla caught Michael Holowaychuk behind the Red Rooster with a girl from the Catholic school. You can imagine that Carla is very distressed. She’s been at my house with me for the last hour. This was totally unexpected, completely unforeseen. Carla’s heart is positively broken. She feels, well, humiliated, frankly, and vulnerable. Right now she needs our encouragement and our support.”

  “Help, too, don’t forget help!”

  I can hear Carla’s voice in the background.

  Across the room, I see my mother shaking her head.

  “Yes, and our help,” says Miss Maximchuk. “I think that Carla needs our help most of all. We girls need to stick together!”

  While Miss Maximchuk chirps through the phone line, I see Carla Senko, nine years old, pulling a cinnamon bun apart with her hands. It’s the biggest cinnamon bun I’ve ever seen – bigger than both her hands put together – and when she unrolls it, raisins drop out and onto her desk. I have six poppyseed pampushky in my lunch. I offer to trade all six for her cinnamon bun. I will trade anything for a taste of her cinnamon bun. She takes my pampushky and gives me half of the cinnamon bun. Later, toward the end of the day, as I’m tossing away some pencil shavings, I see my pampushky squashed at the bottom of the garbage pail.