Kalyna's Song

by Lisa Grekul

  We wait half an hour for the priest to drive up to the church yard, for other cars to arrive.

  “Why didn’t I call?” says Mom. “What does it take to pick up the phone and call?” She shakes her head, tears come to her eyes. “You were looking forward to this, I know. I know you were, Colleen. This was important.”

  That’s when I grab Mom’s hand, and I squeeze.

  “We don’t need a priest. We don’t need other people. We can have our own Provody.”

  Mom doesn’t look convinced. She keeps searching the road for signs of other cars, other people.

  “Come on. We didn’t come all this way just to turn around and go home again. Let’s eat! Just the three of us, you and me and Kalyna.”

  But there are others with us in the cemetery as Mom and I spread the embroidered cloth over Kalyna’s grave. As we set out the bread, the meat, and the eggs, as we lean the roses against her gravestone, I feel their presence, as real as if they were sitting beside us.

  I’m not mourning for them, though. I’m lifting my glass with them, and laughing with them. I’m telling them that spring has arrived here, at home, in the most remarkable way, touching everything in its wake. The snow has all receded and melted, the ice is gone from the lakes. The days are long now, and getting longer. Of course, some of the back roads are dotted with potholes and lined with deep, muddy ruts. But the roads will dry, and the ditches will be green again, soon – green, gold, bright pink, deep red. There will be sweetgrass, and brown-eyed Susans, and highbush cranberry, and wild, wild roses.

  Rosa, I think, could see this all for herself, if she wanted to, only she’s pretending that she doesn’t hear me as she peels the shell of her boiled egg.

  Sister Maria sees it all, of course. She takes everything in, and smiles. But this place isn’t her home. She’s never really been at home here.

  And Kalyna is humming to herself, rocking back and forth with her knees pulled up to her chest. She’s cocking her head sideways, squinting to keep the sun out of her eyes, and she hears everything I say about the arrival of spring. She just doesn’t care to talk about it. Kalyna wants to know my name, instead, and she wants me to sing for her.

  Mom and I talk over lunch about how relieved we are, really, to have missed the long church service – the up down, up down; the incense; the hospody pomylui from the choir loft. We say that it’s just as well we came early. And we decide that we should do this again next year, the same way, skipping the service altogether.

  The rain starts to fall as Mom and I are finishing our lunch. A few random sprinkles at first, then big, wet droplets. We quickly wrap up our food in the embroidered cloth – the shards of eggshell, the half-ring of kolbasa. The roses we leave on Kalyna’s grave and the braided bread, the kolach, we leave for the birds. By the time we reach the car, the rain is coming down in sheets. One long, heavy downpour. We decide to wait awhile in the car – for the rain to peter out a bit – and then we’ll head for home.

  “It rains like this in Swaziland,” I say, watching water collect in puddles on the shoulder of the road in front of us. “They get terrible electrical storms, thunder, lightning.”

  “When you were there?” Mom turns up the heat in the car. “I don’t remember you writing about storms, in your letters.”

  I explain that, because of the drought, I never experienced a big storm in Swaziland. We hardly had any rain.

  “Would you have told me if you had?”

  I don’t know what she means.

  “I was such a basket case before you left. I always wondered if you were on guard in your letters. If you were – I don’t know. Careful not to tell me anything bad, so that I wouldn’t worry. You never wrote about feeling homesick or lonely.”

  Mom pauses.

  “I was too hard on you before you left. I didn’t do things right. All that business with Baba and Gido. I’m sorry.”

  In the year and a half since I’ve been home, Mom and I have talked a lot about Swaziland. We’ve talked about my school work and my teachers; about my friends. She’s seen photos of Rosa and Siya, and she knows what happened at the end of the year. But neither of us has ever talked about my decision to go to Swaziland. How hard she tried to convince me not to go.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” she says, shaking her head.

  The rain makes the sound of a drum against the hood of the car.

  “Will you forgive me?” I ask.

  Mom turns to face me. There are tears in her eyes.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to. Maybe I should have done things differently. If I’d explained why I wanted to go – why I needed to go – or if I’d spent more time with you before I left.”

  “I was scared.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought that I’d lose you.”

  “You haven’t.”

  The rain keeps falling, and the windows of the car are fogged up now. I wipe the inside of the windshield with the edge of my sleeve so that we can look out onto the churchyard and the highway.

  “The problem is that I couldn’t have put it into words then why I had to leave. Even now, I’m not sure if I can. I didn’t feel like I belonged here. I thought that if I went away – if I went far away, to some other part of the world – I’d become a different person, and I’d finally fit in. I never realized how hard it would be to live in a new place. How hard it would be to make new friends. Of course I was homesick. Lots of nights I wanted to pack up and go home. Especially in the beginning. But I needed to feel lonely. I needed to know what it’s like to be on my own. I changed a lot in Swaziland. In some ways, I did become a different person. The important thing, though, is that I came home. Because I figured out, in the end, that this is the place where I belong. Here. In this part of the world.”

  I take a deep breath after I’ve finished talking. Slowly, the rain begins to subside. Mom and I stare out the window. Neither of us says a word.

  And then, as she puts the car in gear, Mom says, “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  We ease out of the churchyard and onto the highway heading east.

  “Yes, I forgive you.”

  Mom smiles. She turns on the windshield wipers, I turn on the radio.

  I forgive her too. She knows. I don’t even need to say it.

  •••

  On the way home, we listen to the radio and to the steady beat of the rain against the windshield of the car. Mom is thinking about what she’ll make for supper, maybe, or her lesson plans for the next school day. I’m thinking about the new instrumental piece that I’ve been working on, two pianos, four hands.

  When a commercial comes onto the radio, though, ten minutes outside of St. Paul, Mom turns down the volume, then smacks the heel of her hand against the steering wheel of the car.

  “Sing for me,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Sing for me. I haven’t heard you sing in so long. Sing something for me. Anything.”

  I pause for a moment, thinking back to all of the songs that I’ve performed over the years. “Ave Maria,” the song that I tried to sing at Sister Maria’s funeral, but couldn’t get through. “Grandpa.” The song that I should never have sung at the Rodeo Beerfest after my high school graduation. And “Tsyhanochka.” How many times have I sung “Tsyhanochka”? Too many to count. My little gypsy, my girl with the twinkling eyes: it’s time to retire you once and for all.

  I settle on the song that I wrote in Africa, the day before I left.

  But I can’t sing it alone.

  “You have to sing with me,” I say, stopping after the first few bars.

  “I don’t know it. It’s not a Ukrainian song, is it?”

  “In a way.”

  Slowly, line by line, I teach her the song. I sing a phrase, and she repeats it. Then we sing the phrase together. We go through each line and each phrase until we can sing the entire song in harmony from beginning to end. It occurs to me that I sound a lot l
ike Mom when I sing. In fact, we have the same voice.

  And so, on the last stretch of road to St. Paul, we sing to each other, and for each other, in time with the windshield wipers, to the rhythm of the falling rain. All the way home we sing, until our voices are hoarse, and the sky is blue again.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank the following people who read and commented on early drafts of this book: Jodie Sinnema, Kate Baer, Colleen Greer, Colleen and Darren Caharel, Steve Doak, Wendy Foster, and, especially, Tobi Kozakewich. Michael Baer helped me remember details about Swaziland that I had forgotten, and portions of the narrative were inspired by Barbie Wright’s art. Special thanks to Greg Hollingshead, Geoffrey Ursell, and Barbara Sapergia who gave me invaluable editorial advice along the way.

  I could not have written this novel without the love and support of my family, Gloria, Marshall, Jana, and Chad Grekul, and Jacqueline Pollard. My husband Patrick was, and is, a saint for putting up with my characters and me, and for never giving up on any of us. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

  About the Author

  Originally from St. Paul, Alberta, Lisa Grekul has lived in Swaziland, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). A professor of Canadian literature at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) in Kelowna, she is the author of Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians. Kalyna’s Song is her first novel.