by Lisa Grekul
“My cousin,” I say, correcting her. “She’s my cousin, not my aunt. And she has a name.”
Sister Maria has never spoken to me this way. Why is she picking on Kalyna?
Sister Maria crumples up the lyric sheet and throws it in my face.
“You’re better than this. If no one else can see it, if your mother and your father can’t see it –”
“Quit picking on my family,” I say, fighting back tears. “They haven’t done anything wrong.”
Sister Maria turns her back to me, walks away from the piano.
“And I haven’t done anything wrong either.” I speak up, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
“But you haven’t done anything right,” says Sister Maria. “Not for weeks now. Your playing isn’t getting any better because your mind is somewhere else. It’s miles away in some fairy-tale land that doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think it’s fun to be Ukrainian? You think it’s so easy?”
“I never said –”
“You put on a costume, paint an egg. It means nothing to you.”
Sister Maria spits her words at me. I don’t understand why she’s so angry. I thought she liked Ukrainian things. The music that she transcribes is by Ukrainian composers.
“It does mean something to me,” I say. “It means everything to –”
“Make-believe nonsense. Throwing away your talent on foolishness. Singing about Ykraina. What do you know about Ukraine?”
Before I can answer her question, Sister Maria tells me that my lesson is over. That it’s time for me to go home. She doesn’t stop there, though. As I gather up my music books, she says that I need to take a break from seeing her.
I stop packing my knapsack.
Sister Maria says that I’m not to come back until I’m ready to get serious about my music. She’s not going to continue teaching me if I keep wasting my time on Kalyna’s songs. I’m supposed to make a choice.
I feel my chest tighten as I try to argue with her. I tell her that she’s not being fair. What’s wrong with Kalyna’s songs? I like to sing them. They make me feel proud to be Ukrainian.
Again, Sister Maria tells me to leave. She says that I don’t know anything.
She’s wrong. I’m sobbing now, tears are streaming down my cheeks. But I won’t go until I make her see that she’s wrong.
“At least I’m not ashamed of who I am.”
Sister Maria turns her head sharply to face me.
“You pretend to be French,” I say, standing my ground. “But you’re Ukrainian, too. I know you are. Otherwise you wouldn’t be writing down all of that Ukrainian music. Only you won’t admit it. You won’t talk about your life. It’s all a big secret because you’re ashamed.”
Sister Maria shakes her head, tries to interrupt me. I keep talking, though, shouting my words at Sister Maria, and trembling from head to foot.
“What do you know about Ukraine? What do you know about what it means to be Ukrainian? You wear a costume, too. You’re the one who plays make-believe.”
Wiping the tears from my face, I pick up my knapsack, make my way out of her music room. I’m in the hallway of the convent, halfway to the convent doors, when Sister Maria grabs me by the arm.
“You want to know what it means to be Ukrainian?” she says. “I’ll show you.”
•••
I cry for a week, maybe more, on and off. Mostly on. I skip three days of school because I can’t pull myself together. I keep seeing Sister Maria in the convent foyer, pushing up her left sleeve.
I can’t tell Mom and Dad why I’m crying. I’m not even sure myself. I know what the numbers on Sister Maria’s arm mean; I just don’t understand why she has them. The Nazis put Jews in concentration camps, and she’s not Jewish, she’s Catholic. So they must have put Catholics in the camps too. But why is she so angry at Ukrainians? She’s Ukrainian herself. It doesn’t add up. And why is she angry at me? I haven’t done anything wrong. None of it makes any sense.
My parents can’t find the words to console me. Mom sits with me for hours in my bedroom, rubbing my back, stroking my hair. Dad wants to give Sister Maria a piece of his mind. He thinks she’s done something unspeakable to me. I beg him not to call her. I tell him that I had a bad lesson, that’s all.
Wes is scared by the whole ordeal. He wants to know why I’m crying so much. Am I in pain? I hear Sophie whispering to him outside my bedroom door, telling him that everything is all right. She doesn’t sound too convinced or too convincing, so I yell through the door that I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about. I just had a bad lesson.
Kalyna, though, is the most concerned about what’s going on. If Mom or Dad is with me, she stands in the doorway of my bedroom, peering in as though she wants to come in but she isn’t sure if she should. While I lie on my bed, she drifts in and out of the room, asking me if I want a glass of juice or a cookie. One afternoon, I cry myself to sleep, and when I wake up Kalyna is sitting at the edge of the bed, like a little girl, staring at me. She’s brought me an apple.
“I washed it for you,” she says, setting it down next to my head on the pillow.
As long as I stay home from school, there’s no reason for Kalyna to go to her daycare, so we’re alone together for three days. Most of the time, she’s normal. She puts all her energy into making meals for me, and then cleaning up afterward. She must think that eating is going to make me feel better somehow because she makes so much food – too much food for a single day, really. Too many meals. Or maybe she just can’t keep track of the time. In her world, it’s lunchtime every couple of hours. But cooking keeps her busy, and keeps her out of my hair. We end up eating her lunches for supper. For Mom, it’s a nice break.
I cry for Sister Maria. Because she went through something so terrible that I can’t even imagine it. On my days home from school, I search through my social studies textbook to find out what happened to Sister Maria but the book only has three paragraphs on the Holocaust, and it doesn’t say anything about Ukrainians – what happened to them during the war, what happened to them after.
I cry for me, too. I don’t think that I’ll be having lessons with Sister Maria anymore. After she showed me her arm, she didn’t say a word. She didn’t even look at me. Maybe I should have said something. Followed her back to her music room. But I couldn’t move. Mom waited for ten minutes in the car outside the convent while I stood in the foyer, stunned.
I spend the third day at home moping around, plunking a bit on the piano. I’m all cried out. Now I’m just depressed, and sort of sick to my stomach. I read the encyclopedia entry on the Second World War a half-dozen times, and the entry on Nazis. The encyclopedia doesn’t make things any clearer than my social studies textbook. It doesn’t say anything about Ukrainian Catholic nuns being put in concentration camps. I feel like I’ll never find out the whole story. I’ll never put all the pieces together.
And I don’t think that I’ll try to find another piano teacher. I’ll just quit altogether.
Kalyna comes up behind me as I sit on the piano bench, my elbows on the keys, my head in my hands.
“The best thing to do,” she says, putting her hands on my shoulders, “is sing.”
As I shake her hands away, I don’t even look up. Everything is so simple for her, so easy. I wish she would leave me alone for once. Go away.
“When I went to the hospital, I used to put my hands over my ears like this, so I couldn’t hear anything except the music.”
Slowly, I lift my head. Kalyna has never talked about a hospital before. She’s never talked about anything from her past.
“What hospital?” I ask.
“The nurses told me that I have a beautiful voice,” says Kalyna. “I don’t know. Do you like my voice?”
“Yes, I do. I like it very much.”
I feel my heart racing. I never thought of asking her to tell me – tell me herself – what happened to her. I didn’t think
she could remember.
“What hospital?” I ask, again.
Kalyna frowns.
“What happened at the hospital?”
Kalyna scratches her head. She looks confused. She must have forgotten the rest. The hospital was a fleeting memory, and now it’s gone.
“First you have to tell the children to go outside,” she says, walking away from the piano. “Michael can take the girls to the park. They like the park.”
“All right,” I say, playing along. “Take them to the park.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Not you!” says Kalyna, raising her voice, shaking her head. “You can’t go with them. You can’t leave the house.”
Why not? I wonder.
“Why can’t you leave the house?” I’m too curious to stop myself.
Too stupid to see that Kalyna is working herself up into a frenzy.
“Because he’ll follow you! He’ll hurt the children!”
And then she loses control.
There isn’t much warning. All of a sudden, she stops talking, and starts doing weird things with her hands – clenching and unclenching her fists, rubbing them up and down her thighs. Then she paces back and forth across the living room, wringing her hands. By the time I start singing, to grab her attention and calm her down, it’s too late. She can’t hear me. She’s listening to someone else. Someone else is in the room with us, someone I can’t see, and he’s hurting her. One minute she’s standing next to the piano, begging him to stop, the next minute she’s crouched in the corner behind the rocking chair, sweating and shivering.
She tries to push him away, then she tries to protect her face with her hands. She pleads with him in a voice that makes my skin crawl. She howls, like a wounded animal. Over and over again, she says his name. “No, John, no. Please, no. John. Stop. John. John.”
I panic. I don’t know what to do. Auntie Mary never told us what to do if something like this happened. I try to sing a few different songs – her favourite Ukrainian ones, “Snowbird” by Anne Murray, happy tunes from The Sound of Music – but it’s useless. It’s absurd. Kalyna, lying on the floor in pain, and me singing “Do a deer, a female deer, re a drop of golden sun.” I start to cry because I don’t know what else to do. When I try to go near her, she howls even louder. She thinks that I’m going to hurt her too.
I wonder if I should call Mom and Dad, and tell them to come home. It’s an emergency. They can leave school for emergencies. Or maybe I should call the hospital, call for an ambulance.
Flipping through the phonebook in the kitchen, I can’t stop my hands from shaking. Where is the number for the ambulance? Isn’t it supposed to be on the back cover of the phone book? Somewhere easy to spot?
While I fumble with the buttons on the phone, Kalyna keeps trying to defend herself from John in the other room. I’m crying so hard that I’m not sure how I’ll talk to the dispatcher. Tears drop onto the open page of the phone book before I can wipe them away.
And then –
She stops.
As suddenly as she started, she stops.
I hold my breath, my hand suspended over the keypad on the phone.
Do I wait? Or do I call, in case she relapses? My heart is beating so fast I think it’s going to burst. I don’t know what to do.
I hear whispering and humming in the living room, so Kalyna must be calming herself down by singing. She must be talking to herself, saying that everything is all right again. Everything is fine.
I’m afraid to step into the living room, in case she thinks that I’m John, coming at her again. But I need to know if she’s really going back to her normal self. Or if I have to call someone for help.
When I finally get up the courage to peep around the corner, I have to look twice at what I see. I think, for a moment, that maybe I’m losing my mind – seeing things that aren’t really there.
Sister Maria is sitting on the floor of the living room. Kalyna is lying on the floor with her knees curled up to her chest, her head resting on Sister Maria’s lap.
When I open my mouth to ask what she is doing here, Sister Maria presses her index finger to her lips as if to say, “Shhhhh.” She points to the window in the living room. I glance outside, and see a car parked in the yard. The little green Honda that the nuns use to get groceries once a week.
“I tried to find you at your school,” Sister Maria whispers. “Your father told me that you were at home. He suggested that I visit you here.”
Sister Maria looks down at Kalyna, stroking her hair.
“I wanted to have a talk with you,” she says.
I open my mouth to tell her that I’m sorry. That I know what the numbers on her arm mean. That I have so many questions. She’s talking to Kalyna, though, in Ukrainian. I can’t understand everything she says, but some of it makes sense to me.
She says, “Tykho, malanko, tykho. Mama tut. Mama tut.” Quiet, little one, quiet. Mother is here. Mother is here.
•••
By the time Mom and Dad get home from school with Sophie and Wes, Kalyna is asleep in my room, and Sister Maria and I are finishing our second cups of tea. We’ve decided that she’s not going home until we both talk to my parents. They need to know what happened to Kalyna this afternoon. And they need to know what happened at my piano lesson, a week ago. Everyone sits at the kitchen table, Sophie and Wes included, and the conversation goes on well into the evening. When Mom gets up to make supper, Sophie motions for her to sit down again. While we continue talking, Sophie warms up some of Kalyna’s leftover lunches.
As I tell Mom and Dad about Kalyna, they do a lot of sighing. They keep looking at each other, and shaking their heads. At first, they try to pretend that they don’t understand exactly what happened to Kalyna, what she was remembering. But I can’t believe them, and I won’t. Kalyna has a husband, a man named John, and she has children, a boy named Michael and at least two girls. Why won’t they tell the truth? He beat her, and he put her in the hospital. She went crazy because of it.
Dad says that it’s not so simple. He says Kalyna was never really right in her head. John was a good man. A hard worker.
Mom says that it’s just that simple. John beat her, and put her down, and convinced her kids that she was a lousy wife and mother, and eventually she cracked up. She just couldn’t take it anymore.
That’s why they don’t talk about it. Because they can’t agree on how to tell the story. When John put Kalyna in the mental hospital outside of Edmonton, and moved with the kids to Toronto, half the family called him a bastard. The other half called him a saviour. No one has seen him or the kids in twenty years, maybe more. No one really wants to. It’s easier that way. Easier to forget that the whole thing ever happened.
“Nobody ever tried to help her?” Sophie asks. “Auntie Mary or Uncle Andy? Nobody knew what was going on?”
“They knew,” says Mom. “Of course they knew. We all knew. I was very close to her. We’re almost the same age, you know. We were married the same year. I knew it was bad. She used to come to me when Michael was a baby.”
“She left him a few times,” Dad says. “Mary and Andy wanted to take her and the kids, help them find a place of their own in the city.”
“But she always went back,” I say. “Right?”
Mom shrugs. “John used to make promises.”
“Maybe she’ll go back to normal again,” says Wes. “If she tries hard enough to forget what happened. Can’t the doctors give her pills or something?”
Sister Maria smiles at Wes. Dad shakes his head. Mom says that there is no medicine to fix Kalyna. Sometimes people who are sick just don’t get better.
Sophie asks me if I sang to Kalyna. When she was remembering John, did I sing to her to calm her down? I explain that I tried, but my singing didn’t work.
“I was going to call the ambulance, when Sister Maria showed up. She did something to help Kalyna.”
“You sang?” Mom asks, turning to S
ister Maria.
Sister Maria smiles. “I spoke to her in Ukrainian.”
Mom and Dad look surprised. They think that Sister Maria is French, like the other nuns in the convent.
“In Ukrainian?” says Dad.
Sister Maria nods.
“You’re not French?” Mom asks.
Sister Maria shakes her head.
Then she goes back in time, back in space, to her childhood in Ukraine, and finally I hear her story. Not all of it but enough to see that Sister Maria was a daughter once, and a wife, and a mother. I can’t take my eyes off her as she speaks. I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. Before she became a nun, she was a normal person. She had a family, like everyone else, and a house of her own. Before the war, she was a different person altogether.
My parents want to know how Sister Maria found her way from Ukraine to Canada – from Ukraine to a French Catholic convent in St. Paul. It seems impossible. Do the other nuns know that she’s not French?
Sister Maria sighs. They know, yes. After the war, she lived for a while in Paris, then moved to Montreal. She changed her name when she entered the convent in Quebec.
I still can’t get over the fact that Sister Maria used to be married. That she had a husband, and children.
“But why not a Ukrainian convent?” says Dad. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Is there such a thing?” Sophie asks.
“Yes,” says Sister Maria, laughing. “There is such a thing.”
“So why join a French one?” says Sophie.
Sister Maria becomes serious again.
“I didn’t want to live among Ukrainians after the war.”
I can see that Mom and Dad look uncomfortable now. Mom looks down at her plate. Dad gets up to make a pot of tea. We’re Ukrainians. What’s wrong with us?
“But all your work,” I say. “The music you write down. It’s all by Ukrainian composers.”
Sister Maria says that it’s complicated.
My parents look confused. Sophie and Wes look at me for an explanation.
“Sister Maria,” I explain, “is writing down songs by composers from Ukraine. There’s no one else to write them down because they were killed before they could publish them. They were killed for being Ukrainian. Lots of their music was destroyed, too.”