by Lisa Grekul
“Both. I’m both, actually. Ukrainian Canadian.”
“Dual citizenship, two passports,” says Hannah.
I shake my head. “No, I’ve just got one passport. But my grandparents immigrated to Canada from Ukraine. So –”
“So you’re not Ukrainian, then,” says Katja. “Your grandparents are Ukrainian. You are Canadian.”
I feel my face turn bright red. My ears start to burn.
“I’m both. It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.” Katja drinks from her cup, her eyes focused on me.
I clear my throat.
“Come on,” says Katja. “Explain it to us. Explain it to me. Please. I’m wondering what it feels like to be Ukrainian.”
“Well, it feels just like – well, I’m sure it doesn’t feel any different than –”
“Any different than what?” says Katja, interrupting me. “Come on. How does it feel? You said you were Ukrainian. How does it feel?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your people are cowards. Cowards and traitors. They have no conscience. They murder innocent people without a second thought. Tell me. How does it feel to be one of them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
But I do. She’s talking about the war. She’s talking about Sister Maria.
“I’m talking about Kiev, 1941. Do you read your own history? Maybe not. It happened a long time ago. When your people were still – how would you say it? – Ukrainian Ukrainian. Before they came to the – what was your phrase? – the new world. To sing songs.”
Katja chuckles.
“What the hell are you on about, Katja?” says Shelagh. “Spit it out, for Christ’s sake.”
“Thirty thousand Jews systematically murdered by the Nazi regime in Kiev,” says Katja, “that’s what I’m on about, and countless Ukrainians who turned their backs on their own people to collaborate with the Nazis. They hunted Jews out of hiding in Ukraine. They did it all over Poland, too. Ukrainian soldiers hunted Ukrainian Jews and Polish Jews, and then they stood by to watch them die.”
“It wasn’t me,” I say, my voice trembling. “I wasn’t there. My grandparents weren’t there. They never lived in Kiev. They were farmers. They moved to Canada before the war, years before. In 1899.”
“Right,” Katja says, nodding her head. “Right. Brave settlers taming the wild west. Stealing land from the –”
“Enough!” Shelagh glares at Katja. “What is up with you?”
“Just as many Polish people settled in Canada,” I say. “Maybe more.”
“No one I know.” Katja shakes her head. “No one from my family. My grandparents didn’t run from the Communists. They stayed. They committed themselves to the –”
“All right, Katja!” Shelagh breaks in. “Jesus Christ, could you shut your bloody trap already and let us talk about something else? Christ.”
But I’m already halfway out the cubie door. Katja pours herself another drink as I go. The other girls – Hannah, Maria, Nikola – keep their eyes on the floor.
“Don’t go, Colleen!” Shelagh follows me up the corridor.
As I fumble with the keys to my cubie door, my eyes blurred with tears, Shelagh places her hand on my shoulder. I shake it away.
“I’m sorry. Really, I am. Katja was way out of line. You didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that. She just had too much to drink. Give her the night to sober up, and tomorrow morning she’ll be apologizing. I’ll make sure of it.”
I close the door of my cubie quickly, and stand for a moment with my back to it before I slide down to the floor, and press my knees to my chest, my head down, crying.
A week passes. Two weeks.
Katja doesn’t apologize. In history class, she won’t even look at me. We don’t say a word to each other in the music room. Shelagh sits with me at breakfast sometimes. She says that Katja is too proud to say she’s sorry. Every so often, two or three of the other girls drop by to visit me. We talk about the weather, our history assignments. No one mentions the incident in Katja’s cubie.
I can’t forget it, though, can’t put it out of my mind. I think about Katja all the time, and the things that she said to me. I think about my grandparents, about Baba and Gido sitting at their old kitchen table in their house in Vegreville, eating their Meals-on-Wheels suppers with shaky hands. I think about Sister Maria. Her music room. The boxes and boxes of unfinished manuscripts stacked in my old bedroom at home.
Finally, after study period one evening, I slip into the college library, diary in hand.
There aren’t many books to choose from. Nearly all of the college history books are devoted to South African history. They’re organized under tiny cardboard headings. Archeology: Rock Paintings. Early History to 1500. Arrival of the Europeans. British Conquest. The Mfecane. The Difaqane. The Great Trek. The Anglo-Boer War. The Establishment of South Africa. Apartheid. The African National Congress. The Anti-Pass Campaign and the Sharpeville Massacre. Black Consciousness and the Soweto Massacre.
Under the World History heading, I find two Polish books. One skinny paperback about the history of Polish aviation and a hardcover biography of Jozef Poniatowski, some eighteenth-century Polish hero. I come across three or four World War II history books, too, and I run my finger down each table of contents, each index, looking for the word Poland or the word Ukraine. I find Auschwitz. Gdansk. Majdanek, Treblinka. Warsaw Uprising. Nothing about Polish people committing injustice. But nothing about Ukrainians committing injustice, either, in 1941, in Kiev. Nothing at all about Ukrainians.
This is stupid, I think, slipping the World War II books back into the shelf. It’s juvenile. Playing into Katja’s hand, stooping to her level. It’s childish. What do I care about events that took place fifty years ago? Nothing. What does any of it have to do with me? Nothing.
That’s when I find something – a book tucked into the bottom of the shelf marked Agriculture and Forestry. Somebody made an error with the book; some librarian miscategorized it. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all, in fact, except that the book is enormous – four inches thick, at least – and there is a drawing of embroidery on its spine. With two hands, I lift it from the shelf, lug it across the library to a carrel. Ukraine: A History. The book is brand new. I must be the first person to open it.
No, not the first. Someone has written on the title page. A donation from E. Shabalala to the students of Waterford Kamhlaba.
Ukraine: A History is a reference book, which means that I’m not permitted to take it out of the library. Three nights in a row, then, during free time before check-in, I sit in the library, leafing through the pages of the book, scribbling notes on the pages of my diary. Some sentences – some entire paragraphs – I take down word for word; some I paraphrase. I record all of the corresponding page numbers, the author’s name, the copyright information – everything. For Katja. So that she can double-check, if she chooses. So that she knows every word is true.
There is more information in Ukraine: A History than I ever dreamed I’d find. When I’ve finished, twelve pages of my diary are covered in my handwriting. I write down dates, facts, names. In my cubie, on loose-leaf paper, I recopy the best parts, neatly, organizing the information chronologically, underlining the words Poland, Polish, and Poles.
History of Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine: marked by centuries of domination by Tsarist Russia; by Austro-Hungarian Empire; by White Russians; by Bolsheviks; by Germany’s Nazi Regime; by Poland.
1340-1366. Polish King Casimir the Great leads Polish forces in the occupation of Galicia and Volhyna.
1500’s. Ukrainian nobles assimilated to Polish culture and religion. Ukrainian language and customs, as well as Orthodox religion, therefore increasingly associated with the lower classes of Ukraine.
1600’s. Five major Cossack/peasant revolts against Polish aristocracy. All revolts brutally suppressed.
November, 1918 - July, 1919. Polish-Ukrainian War. Polish troops
(experienced in wwi battle) easily defeat Ukrainian army of volunteers (teenaged boys, mostly, and peasants, without arms, without food, without shoes).
1920. Poland declares that it will protect the rights of Ukrainians and other minority groups living within its borders.
1924. Entente Powers, through League of Nations, declare Poland’s right to Galicia in Western Ukraine. Ethnically “pure” Polish settlers given Ukrainian land. Ukrainian language periodicals abolished. Ukrainian cultural organizations banned. Ukrainian language schools shut down. Laws passed to ban use of Ukrainian language in government agencies
Autumn, 1930. Poland’s “Pacification” or “Pasifikatsia” campaign against Ukrainians in Galicia. Ukrainian buildings and monuments demolished. Ukrainians arrested, beaten, tortured, denied medical care. Hundreds die, hundreds more suffer permanent, debilitating injuries.
1934. Polish government takes back promise made to League of Nations to protect rights of minority groups in Poland. Polish officials establish concentration camp at Bereza Kartazka for Ukrainian nationalists.
It’s past midnight when I make my way to Katja’s cubie, stack of papers in hand, heart beating fast. The corridor is dark and quiet, for the most part. Outside Katja’s room, I can hear hushed voices and smell cigarette smoke. The scholarship girls, like clockwork, have gathered again. For a few minutes, I stand outside Katja’s door, unsure of how to proceed. I could leave the pages outside her door, or slip them under her door, or tack them to her door. I could barge in, making a dramatic, impromptu speech about Katja’s ignorance and her people’s cruelty.
In the end, I settle on knocking. A second later, the cubie door opens and Katja appears. Behind her, I see the other girls – some sitting, some lying – around the room, their eyes wide.
“Katja.”
“Yes?”
“You didn’t do your homework.”
Katja looks puzzled. Katja the brain, the straight-A student. The head of the class. When has Katja ever been caught with her homework not done?
“Tell you what,” I say, handing her the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting.
“You can copy mine.”
Three
Monday. February 12. Mondej. Februerì tvelvt. 1990. The day starts like any other. Five-forty-three and water is running in the bathroom down the hall. A half-dozen girls – always the same half-dozen African girls – are singing their hearts out in the shower. Led by Thandiwe, the girl I met at the ironing board, they sing African songs. At the top of their lungs.
Every morning I hear them – the same songs, the same voices, the same harmonies – and every morning I tell myself that this is the day I’ll join them. I’ve heard the songs so often now that I know all the words, even if I don’t know their meanings. I know which parts I’d sing. A few times, I grab my towel and make for the shower room, determined to push my way into Thandiwe’s little choir. I never get past the ironing board. Halfway to the bathroom, I lose my resolve. It’s not the showering that bothers me. Not anymore. I’m getting used to being naked around the other girls – I’ve had to. It’s that I’m afraid of the African girls – afraid they’ll stop singing if I try to sing with them. So I hum along softly, instead, in my cubie, where no one can see me, and no one can hear.
Six-fifteen and I’m out of bed. The girls have finished singing. By six-thirty I’m dressed, but I have nothing to do until seven, when the dining hall opens for breakfast. So I fix myself a cup of instant coffee. From under a pile of books on my desk, I grab my diary, and the latest issue of Maclean’s magazine. I bring my guitar, too, in case I’m struck with the inspiration to write a song. Then I make my way to the hill behind the hostel.
The senior hostel, the dining hall, and the junior hostel are one long building connected by a corridor. At the midpoint of the corridor, two sets of doors open onto opposite sides of the building. On one side, there is the quadrangular courtyard, where students gather between meals and classes; on the other side, a hill overlooking the maintenance area.
Students stay away from the maintenance area. They don’t go near the laundry building, where we send our dirty clothes once a week to be cleaned and dried and pressed by Swazi women with babies tied to their backs. Nobody hangs around the gardeners’ building, where the grass-cutters and hedge-trimmers keep their equipment, take their meals. There are never any students outside the dining-hall kitchen, where our food is brought and where our food is prepared and where our dishes are washed.
In the mornings, though, I like to sit here, above the maintenance area, away from the rest of the students. I like the sounds here. Water drumming against the sides of galvanized steel washtubs, forks and spoons clattering against plates and cups. Lawnmower engines sputtering, roaring, sputtering, dying.
I get Maclean’s second-hand, from home, in care packages. It’s almost embarrassing, how much mail I get. In the senior hostel, only three people have received letters. No one else has yet to receive a package. I’ve gotten two.
My packages aren’t small, either. Each one contains fourteen letters – seven each from Mom and Dad, written daily – plus Hallmark greeting cards from Sophie, and postcards from Wes. There are photos and fresh film for my camera. More Mars bars, jars of peanut butter, soda crackers, bags of Oreo cookies. Copies of the St. Paul Journal to keep me up-to-date on the local news, and Maclean’s magazines, for Canadian current events.
On the hill behind the hostel, I open the latest issue of Maclean’s. Which isn’t, in fact, the latest issue at all. Packages from home take some time to arrive in Swaziland. Today, February 12, I’m reading the February 2 issue.
The commotion begins as I am reading about recent developments in South Africa. The unbanning of several political parties. The African National Congress, the Pan African Congress. The South African Communist Party.
From behind me, from within the senior hostel, comes the shrieking of voices, male and female. There is hardly time to close the magazine before girls start spilling out of the hostel doors onto the hill – onto my hill – overlooking the maintenance area. Some of the girls are crying – wailing, really – and all of the senior boys are chanting as they fill the quad, lifting their knees to their chests and stamping their feet to the ground. From the kitchen there is cheering and singing. The kitchen workers rattle spoons inside pots. Gardeners and laundry women rush out of their respective buildings to find out what has happened.
I follow the crowd too, diary and magazine and guitar in hand, watching the other students, and listening. I’m afraid to stop someone. I’m afraid that I’ll look stupid. Everybody seems to know what’s going on. All of the students, the workers. I should know, too. February 12. Is it a national holiday? Siya never talked about national holidays. Maybe everyone just heard the news about the unbanning of the political parties. Maybe it’s bigger news than I think.
Around the courtyard and in the assembly hall, a few senior South African boys are setting out stereos and microphones and loudspeakers. Within minutes, African music is blaring throughout the campus. I can feel the bass drum and the bass guitar thumping under my feet. Several groups of African girls are spreading long sheets of paper across the lawn in the quad, using wide brushes to paint banners of yellow, green, and black. anc colours. From time to time, one of the South African guys presses a microphone to his lips. Over the music, he calls out, “Amandla!” The girls stop painting, drop their brushes. They thrust their right fists into the air. “Awetu!”
By the time the assembly starts, at eight o’clock sharp, I’ve figured it out. Actually, the African girls’ banners spell it out.
NELSON MANDELA! FREE AT LAST!
I’m excited – as excited as everyone else at the college – to bear witness to this historic event, to history. With my guitar at my feet, my books in my lap, I watch the assembly hall come alive with laughter and spontaneous singing. Students dance in the aisles, up on the benches, in front of the stage. Mr. Harrington tries for five full minutes to br
ing the student body to order, and when he has finally succeeded in settling the crowd, he has only a few seconds to declare that all classes are cancelled before the auditorium roars again with cheering and whistling and applause. The energy – the elation – is contagious.
After Mr. Harrington’s announcement, the students take over the assembly. The microphone is open for anyone to use. Theo, a senior South African student, starts by talking about the history of apartheid in South Africa. The assembly hall falls silent as Theo speaks. He talks about the first white government formed by the National Party in 1948; the 1960 Anti-Pass Campaign, which resulted in the Sharpeville Massacre – sixty-nine people killed by the white regime – and the banning of black political parties like the anc and the pac. He talks about the rise of Black Consciousness, the banning of poets and novelists and musicians and political leaders.
Theo’s speech gives me the shivers. I’m familiar with the names and the dates that he mentions – 1961, 1963, Rivonia, 1976, Soweto Uprising, Biko, SiSulu, Thambo, 1985. Mr. Kaushal taught us all about the history of South Africa in his social studies class. But none if it seemed real before. Not really. It does now. This is Theo’s history – a real person’s history. A real person who is my age.
When Theo has finished speaking, Nhlanhla, another senior student, steps up to the microphone to recite several poems he’s written about growing up black in South Africa, in Soweto. His poems are more like stories – about sitting in an unheated classroom in winter with forty-five other students, twenty textbooks to share between them; about being forced to learn Afrikaans; about the older sister he never knew who was shot and killed during the Soweto Uprising in 1976.
I think about Sophie. What if I’d never known her? What if she were murdered like Nhlanhla’s sister? I can’t even imagine it.
Then there is Robert, a boy in Form One. He’s brave, I think. The only junior student to address the assembly. He reads a short story whose main character is a little coloured boy named Bobby. Bobby receives an invitation to a friend’s birthday party – a white friend’s birthday party. Bobby buys a special gift for his friend. Dressed in his Sunday best, Bobby goes to the birthday party in the white area of town. Only, when the white friend’s mother discovers that Robert is coloured, she won’t let him into the house. Robert’s hand – the hand that holds the paper – trembles as he reads, his voice quivers. It’s a true story. I’m sure of it. Bobby, the boy in the story, is Robert.