by Lisa Grekul
Outside the music room doors, as I play hospode pomylo on the piano, a group of Swazi women gather to sweep out the practice rooms, dust the pianos. They’re the same women who clean the hostels and do the students’ laundry each week. When they work, they sing. I love to hear their voices. One woman always starts with a single line, then another responds, repeating the first woman’s melody an octave higher. Then everyone joins in, singing in perfect, four-part harmony. Kalyna should have music like this at her funeral. Music that makes you want to dance and laugh. Music that makes you feel good.
Not hospody pomylui, or vichnaia pam’iat.
Quickly, before the cleaning ladies finish in the practice rooms, I grab some of the manuscript paper that Mrs. McBain keeps in the piano bench. Then I transcribe parts of the song that they’re singing. It doesn’t take long. I’m good at melodic dictation, we’ve been working on it all year. And it doesn’t matter if I can’t understand their words.
Because I’m going to change them.
I’m going to replace the African words with Father Zubritsky’s words.
In fact, I’m going to change the melody of their song, too. I’ll keep the basic, four-note motif, but I’ll add on to it with parts of folk songs from my Extended Essay and the first few bars of Vichnaia Pam’iat. So that the new song – my song for Kalyna – will sound partly African and partly Ukrainian, with some Ukrainian words, and some English words. All of the minor chords from the Ukrainian music will have to go. I want it to be a song of celebration, not mourning. With an upbeat tempo.
I know that Father Zubritsky will never allow me to sing my song at Kalyna’s funeral. But, then, I couldn’t sing it anyway. The performance of the piece will require two voices, at least. Preferably four. Ideally, a whole choir of singers.
What matters is that I write it.
For now, I’ll call it “Kalyna’s Song,” though I’m not writing it just for her. I’m writing it for Rosa, too, and for Sister Maria, and for me. When I’ve finished, I’ll make it the conclusion to my essay. I can’t think of a better way to complete it. Mrs. McBain will be pleased.
At dinnertime, I’m still writing. The cleaning ladies left the music wing an hour ago, but I still hear their voices in my head. I hear them singing my composition. Lifting it off the page, bringing it to life. And it’s beautiful. Their voices give me shivers.
When Thandiwe comes to find me later in the evening – sent by Katja, to see how I’m doing – the song is almost finished. I want it to end the same way that it begins, with one voice singing a single melody line, a simple phrase – the original four-note motif. I think, though, that the final words should be different from any of the words in the rest of the song.
While I play the four notes for her, Thandiwe stands over my shoulder.
Then she glances through the sheets of manuscript paper that I’ve filled with my writing, making suggestions as she goes. Hospody pomylui. Vichnaia pam’iat. Mnohaia lita. None of them fits. They’ve all got too many syllables. And I need a new phrase, one that I haven’t used before.
Thandiwe smiles. She has an idea.
“Hamba Kahle,” she says, counting the syllables on her fingers. Ham-ba Kah-le.
I like it. It’s perfect. I’ll keep it. Why didn’t I think of it myself?
Hamba Kahle is how Swazi people say goodbye in their language.
Hamba Kahle.
Go well.
Epilogue: St. Paul, 1992
The idea is mine: I choose to go. I want to visit the cemetery again. I want to eat on Kalyna’s grave. Someone from our family should be at Provody this year – it will be the second since Kalyna died, and none of us went to the first. Last spring, I was still in a tailspin, readjusting to living in Canada again. Mom and Dad were busy with school, getting the garden ready for planting. Sophie was moving back to St. Paul for the summer. Wes had graduation on his mind. All of the aunts and uncles gathered at Szypenitz, but we didn’t join them. We didn’t seem to have the time.
This year, when I overhear Mom talking to Auntie Mary on the phone about Provody, I decide that we need to make the time.
Dad says that he can’t come along. He’d like to, sure, but it’s the weekend and it’s spring. There are rocks to be picked, fields to be cultivated and seeded. Sophie says that she would rather pick rocks on her hands and knees. She’d rather seed all of Dad’s eighty acres by hand, churn up the soil with a rake and a hoe. Anything to avoid listening to the priest’s voice for two and a half hours.
“Plus,” says Sophie, “with the warm weather, the church will be like an oven.”
Wes isn’t even around to ask. Two weeks ago, his summer job started, which means that he’s stuck seventy miles north of a university research station near Athabasca, studying frogs. This is a crucial time for his work. Most of the research data for his project is collected during a brief, ten-day period during which all frog eggs are miraculously transformed into living, gill-breathing, sperm-like swimmers. Wes is going to catch them and drop them into cages submerged in ponds; then he’s going to add various species of minnows to the cages. For the rest of the summer, he’s going to watch the effect of the fish on the tadpoles.
Only Mom agrees to come along with me to church. Reluctantly, at first. She hasn’t been to Provody in years. I’ve never been.
The day before church, in the morning, I ask Mom if maybe we should bake babkas and paskas, and roast a ham. How do we prepare for Provody, exactly? If we start now, maybe we could make a few pysanky – simple designs, nothing fancy – or just dye a few eggs in solid colours.
Mom laughs at my suggestions.
“But aren’t we supposed to bring Easter bread and Easter eggs to be blessed by the priest?”
“That’s for Easter. For Provody, we bring whatever we like.”
Mom decides to defrost a ring of moose kolbasa from the freezer, and a kolach left over from Christmas. She’ll boil some eggs.
“Think of it as a picnic,” says Mom.
“A picnic with the dead,” says Sophie, humming the theme music from The Twilight Zone.
Early the next morning, while I get ready to go to church, Sophie hovers around me in the bathroom, asking what in the world has come over me.
“It’s the most morbid tradition,” she says.
I turn on the hair dryer.
“We never go to church,” she says, raising her voice. “Hardly ever. Since when are you such a devout Ukrainian? It’s all those boxes you’re going through, isn’t it?”
I turn off the hair dryer, try to close the bathroom door in Sophie’s face.
“Are you going to become a nun, too?” she says, poking her head through the door.
“No,” I say, gently pushing her away. No, I am not going to become a nun.
Sophie is only teasing me, of course. We’ve had long talks about the work that Sister Maria has done, and the work that remains to be done. For the past three or four months, on our weekends home from university, Sophie has been helping me go through Sister Maria’s material. Sometimes Mom and Dad join in, and Wes, too, if he’s around.
The easy part is sorting through the completed transcripts. We all sit together with a bottle of wine, organizing the music according to its original composers. The more difficult work lies ahead: transcribing the new material, trying to make sense of the bits and pieces that Sister Maria collected, and collecting further material from Europe. From what we can tell, Sister Maria was in contact with half a dozen musicologists and historians, some in France and Germany, some in Ukraine. I’m going to write letters to all of them, explaining that Sister Maria passed away, and that I’m picking up where she left off.
Sophie says that there’s a Master’s thesis for me in all of this. A year ago, she started her Master’s degree – in sociology – so she know what’s required. I’m not sure if I want to follow in her footsteps. I just finished my first year at the university in Edmonton, and I’m trying not to think too far ahead. I have enough on my pl
ate these days.
Next week, I start my summer job at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club in town. I’m going to be help run their Youth Drop-In Centre on main street. It’s a place where kids can hang out during the day, or in the evening – troubled kids, mostly, whose parents can’t afford daycare or babysitting. A lot of the children who go to the Centre are Native. My plan is to bring my guitar with me to work every day. I might even set up guitar lessons for some of the older children.
In my free time, I want to keep working on Sister Maria’s project – not just collecting the Ukrainian composers’ music, but learning how to play it, too. Lately, I’ve been spending hours at the piano, poring over the songs that Sister Maria and I were working on before she died, studying new material that we didn’t have a chance to look at together. Sometimes I have trouble tearing myself away from Sister Maria’s music. It’s like I’m making up for lost time.
On the weekends, I hardly move from the piano. If I get tired of playing, I turn to my own composing. I pick up melodies and harmonic structures from the Ukrainian composers’ pieces – parts of their songs that I can’t get out of my head – and then I incorporate them into my songs. I’m majoring in composition at the university, so a lot of the work that I do will help me in my classes. I don’t have to do any courses in performance or beginner theory anymore. Most of my classes are in composition, and I choose my professors carefully. No more Dr. Kalman, no more Dr. Pohorecky. But university is different this time around because, for the first time in my life, I’m doing something that’s more important than courses and exams. I don’t care what my professors say about my work. It’s what I think – what I feel – that matters.
When I’m sitting at the piano, filling manuscript paper with my ideas, I’m like Thandiwe, singing on the stage of the assembly hall at Waterford. I think that I know her secret now. She doesn’t think about the audience when she sings. She doesn’t worry about impressing anyone. Thandiwe sends her voice like an arrow right back into her own heart so that every time she sings it’s as though she dies and she’s born again, in the same moment.
I think about Thandiwe all the time. I haven’t forgotten her songs. I’ll never forget the sound of her voice.
But when I’m at the piano, composing, I think about Sister Maria, too, and Rosa, and Kalyna.
I’m going to Provody to remember them, the three women I’ve lost.
Sophie doesn’t understand, but I don’t really mind. I’m not sure how to explain to her that Provody isn’t a morbid tradition. That it isn’t morbid at all. Visiting the graves of loved ones, bringing flowers and food. What could be more beautiful? It’s not just a way to remember the dead, either. It’s more than that. It’s sitting, and talking, and eating with them. It’s like saying that they’ve never really left us. Or that they’ve left us, but they aren’t really gone.
•••
Mom and I leave home at nine, which gives us plenty of time to get to Szypenitz. Provody starts at ten. The drive takes forty minutes, more or less. We take a big basket of food along with us, in the back seat, plus an embroidered tablecloth to spread over Kalyna’s grave.
I’ve got a bouquet of roses in my lap. I picked them up in St. Paul yesterday, at the new flower shop – a place called Re-in-Carnations – on the east side of town. Carla Senko arranged the bouquet for me. She’s been working at the shop since it opened, right before Christmas. We had a long talk while she cut the stems of the roses, and fussed with the baby’s breath. I think it’s fitting that Carla works at Re-in-Carnations. She looks good – much better than she did the last time I saw her, at the Rodeo Beerfest after our graduation. Things are looking up for her. She’s got a good job, her own apartment, a new car. Before I left the flower shop, she asked me about Africa – if I liked it there, how long I’ve been back, what I’m up to these days. When I told her about my job at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club, she said that the flower shop could donate some plants to the Youth Drop-In Centre, to add a bit of life to the place. I think the plants are a great idea. I’m going to stop by again in a few weeks to work out the details.
As Mom and I pass through St. Paul, heading west down main street, we talk about all the changes that have taken place in town since I left for Swaziland, and since I left again for Edmonton. A dozen new four-by-fours roar past us. The parking lot at the Co-Op Mall is full of vehicles. Peavey Mart has doubled in size. The oil patch is booming, so there’s lots of activity in the streets. We have a Dairy Queen now, and a Subway restaurant. There’s talk, apparently, of a McDonald’s opening in the fall.
Mom says the town is growing, moving forward. It’s full of new faces. Local businesses are doing well for the first time in years. She thinks that the changes are all for the better.
I’m not sure that I agree.
Near the centre of town, on the convent lawn beside the Catholic church – between the cathedral and the new francophone school, École du Sommet – there’s a Century 21 sign. The convent is closed up, For Sale. When I ask Mom what’s happened to the nuns, she tells me that all of the remaining Sisters of Assumption have moved east to convents in Montreal. The Bishop has erected an enormous sign in front of the church – a billboard, really – with a photograph of a young, pregnant girl and a photograph of a fetus, and the words, Love Them Both. North of town, the Bishop’s new retirement residence is nearly complete, triple-car garage and all.
So much has changed. The Donald Hotel has new owners, and they’ve renovated the building inside and out. They’ve put up new fiberglass siding and new cedar shingles; new paint on the doors; a new sign above the door of the bar. On the new sign, Daisy Duck is lifting a mug of frothy beer to her bill; Donald Duck is passed out at her webbed feet.
The old bingo hall has been given a facelift, its corrugated iron walls painted blue and white. Beside the bingo hall, there’s a posh new spa outlet that sells indoor and outdoor jacuzzi tubs and whirlpool baths. A new rcmp detachment – all brick and glass – is under construction in the empty lot next to the Rec. Centre. The Lebanese Burger Baron has burnt to the ground. Al’s Topline Tackle has become Sunshine Video; since Mr. Wong passed away, the Boston Café has become ufo Pizza.
And, after twenty-five years, the ufo Landing Pad has finally found a ufo. This year, to commemorate Canada’s 125th birthday, the Town of St. Paul has decided to put up a new building next to the Landing Pad. It’s tall and oblong-shaped with an enormous, glowing green dome and hundreds of flashing yellow lights. Rumour has it that there are several rooms inside, and a sort of cockpit inside the dome. The ufo is going to double as a tic. Tourist Information Centre.
A part of me is glad to see that St. Paul is getting bigger and more prosperous. There are new Welcome to St. Paul signs on both sides of town announcing that our population has grown to 6,000; that St. Paul is a “People Kind of Place.” On each new sign, a local artist has painted a red voyageur sash intertwined with the ribbons of a woman’s red-poppied headpiece, all superimposed on a drawing of a teepee perched on the ufo Landing Pad. Words have been painted below the picture. Bienvenue, Tawow, Bitaemo.
Deep down, though – beneath the surface – some things haven’t changed. A group of hitchhikers huddle on the shoulder of the highway just west of town. Three older Native men, looking for a ride to Saddle Lake. As we drive past them, they don’t bother to stick out their thumbs. They can see that we’re white. They know that we won’t stop. A few miles down the road, we pass another hitchhiker. He looks away as we pass by.
Driving through Saddle Lake, I think about the Welcome to St. Paul signs, and the words painted on them. Bienvenue, Tawow, Bitaemo. Tawow must be the Cree word for “welcome.” I didn’t know that. How do you say “hello” in Cree? I lived in Swaziland for one year, and I know how to say “hello” in SiSwati. I lived in St. Paul for eighteen years. What is the Cree word for “hello”?
Maybe I’m still in a tailspin after all – just like I was when I got home from Swaziland – because when Mom asks m
e what I’m thinking about, midway to Szypenitz, as we’re approaching the bridge at Duvernay, I’m not sure how to answer. I’m thinking about how familiar this road is to me, and how strange; about how easy – and how hard – it would be to keep on driving, past Duvernay, past the old Szypenitz Hall, past the church, and into the horizon. There was a time when I wanted to run away from all of this. There are still times when I want to run – back to Africa, or to some other corner of the globe where everything is new, and anything seems possible. But I’m tied to this part of the world. I know it now. My family is here, my history, my roots. My future is here, too. I want to stop at Szypenitz, and stay a while. There are so many things that I don’t know yet about this place, so much that I still have to learn.
I tell Mom that I’m thinking about the countryside. It looks different to me. As different as St. Paul, with its new storefronts, and its new restaurants, and its new ufo. The fields looks greener, somehow. The roads seem wider.
I try to explain how everything has changed, shifted. Grown.
Mom raises her eyebrows.
“I didn’t know that I’d raised such a philosopher,” she says, grinning. Szypenitz church is in view now. “Maybe you should think about taking some courses in –”
She slams on the brake, and gasps.
“Oh dear,” says Mom, slowly pulling up to the gates.
The churchyard is empty.
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
Mom’s face turns red. “It’s been so long – so long – since I’ve been to Provody. Ten o’clock. It always starts at ten. Look at your watch, Colleen. What time is it?”
Ten to ten.
I’ve never seen my mother so flustered. She apologizes a half-dozen times, fumbling through possible explanations of what might have happened. We’ve got the wrong day. The wrong time? There’s a new priest, she’s heard, now that Father Zubritsky has retired. Father Zubritsky always held Provody services the Sunday after Easter at ten o’clock. Maybe the new priest does things differently. Maybe he holds Provody here two Sundays after Easter, or three. She should have double-checked with one of her sisters. Just to make sure. She should have called.