In the morning you think it never happened. It couldn’t have happened. An exodus of such magnitude simply never happens in our part of the world. Nobody is there, but the lawns have impressions in the shapes of men, and a guy whose car won’t go any farther sits alone. He sits, smoking, the ground around him carpeted with wrappers, bottles. Where there were dumpsters the other day, there are now heaps, mountains of trash. The garbage collector hasn’t made it from the city yet. It’s a gutter after the Turkish aerial kingdom left, but it’s always that way. Our knowledge of kingdoms of yore comes from places like this, it comes from their landfills and graves. From their crappers comes our knowledge. It’s only a few hours, but it already feels like something that happened in a different life, or didn’t happen at all. The Turkish cars will soon reach Nišu, from where they will turn east and head home through Bulgaria.
I tried to imagine how it would look with my own family, what a commotion would arise, how cautiously they would dial the phone numbers on their rotary telephones. They didn’t have modern ones, because they refused to acknowledge them. They found buying such novelties to be extravagant and in bad taste. Their kingdom seemed to be truly otherworldly. And so they would dial their phone numbers, make arrangements for years on end to go and visit their old villages, their old neighborhoods. But they never went. With a cup of tea and a random hand of cards, with a little bit of vodka in their glasses, they discussed the beauty of their old country, which has now become a dumpsite and a grave, a treasury of useless knowledge about the past. They made use of this odd wealth willingly, sharing with others, convinced that it’s a gesture of utmost generosity, worthy of praise. They schemed via letters with the family members who stayed, agreed on dates, planned on buying tickets. They polished their shoes and packed whatever they could pack. They went only once.
I embarked on a great journey to Ternopil with them in 1975. It wasn’t like a holiday trip; it was more of a homecoming to a place they’d had to run from thirty years earlier. We set out late in the evening. I shared the same fear, and theirs vibrated in unison with mine. When the train finally rolled into the Opole Główne station, we started to run from one end of the platform to the other, from car to car, finally realizing it was pointless. We stood looking up at the windows, and saw people crammed between the bags and suitcases. Finally, somebody managed to address the mercy of a train conductor and we got a place in a cargo car. There was a cargo car attached to the end of the train, as if only for the members of my clan to return home the same way their exile had been executed, to nourish and nurture the conviction they had deep inside: that travel cannot be pleasurable. It doesn’t bring you closer to anything and there’s nothing decent about it.
Someone grabbed me and pulled me up. The door shut and my eyes took a while to get used to the darkness. At first I sat and later I lay down on the roped stacks of newspapers that filled the entire cargo car. I could smell the ink and it stuck to my face a little. The door would open at every station and a railroad worker would grab some newspapers and unload them, until there were very few left, almost none. Only the grownups’ suitcases and children’s bags were left. Just enough to sit on. The door opened for the last time, the remaining newspapers made an arc in the air and slapped the concrete of the station. They told us to get off.
The border station was crowded. Men in uniforms cruised between passengers and their luggage. It was dawn.
I woke up in Lviv. We exited the train station. I saw a truck loaded with sand going through the gate of the church of St. Elizabeth. It had been turned into a building-supplies depot. In the streets you could see tank-trucks with “beer” and “kvass” written on their sides. They had to read it for me, since I didn’t know the Cyrillic alphabet. Everything was different.
My aunt and her husband waited for us in Ternopil. “He’s not our family,” my grandmother told me about the uncle, “he only married your auntie.” My aunt and the rest of my relatives, which I didn’t take into consideration at that time, were Ukrainian. In the evenings, my uncle sat in the kitchen drinking pure spirits, smelling the wholewheat bread and biting into a stick of butter. He was a pleasant man with glassy eyes visited by men similar to him—quiet and resigned alcoholics. We went to different households filled with different alcoholics, where my cousins lived with their hair braided in one long plait, tied with a bow and dressed in draped suspender skirts. House bathtubs were filled with cold water, bottles submerged, all of that ready for us, vodka for men and champagne and beer for women and children. Aunt Milasia’s ducks were fed with duckweed from the pond and bread from the local store. By every block of flats was a bulletin board with descriptions of despicable crimes and a picture of the criminal, a name, a patronymic and a last name: “Fifteen years old, she smoked cigarettes and skipped classes.” I spent time by the river with one of my younger uncles. We could communicate easily. He told me: “My brother drowned. He drove his car into the river, didn’t see the bridge, it was a dark night and he was drunk.” The wife of my fellow fisherman dried fish on a laundry line. I felt like I was a part of something big and momentous. Fish was a snack for when you drink, so you needed a lot of it. On Saturdays we bathed in the garden, one after another, in a tub by the wooden fence. My aunt heated the water in a large kettle. My grandmother cried openly and my grandfather tried to hide his tears. I didn’t understand that this was what they were telling me about, that this was their paradise lost.
His name was Bednarski, Franciszek Bednarski, I think. They used to call him wujcio—a sweet diminutive for uncle—wujcio Bednarski. That was their speech, full of endearments. He was one of those who died years before I was born, the part of the family I have never met yet was always present. “Oh, wujcio this, oh wujcio that, oh . . . right, you’ve never met him.” And they would keep on going, because the tempest of the past’s description was their native element. Those stories weren’t of great deeds because my family was never involved in greatness or grandeur, maybe except for the war, something they couldn’t control anyway. Butter, for example, I remember clearly; stories about butter back there and then and here and today. Butter, a long time ago and way back when, was yellow and buttery, fat like butter should be, and always fresh. Or sugar. The sugar we have now was a symbol of humanity’s fall and both grandmothers, otherwise cold toward one another, remained disturbingly unanimous. “Sugar is less sweet, it’s bland,” one would say, “you need much more of it than before.” The other one was far more radical in her statements. “They put salt in our sugar,” she would say, and my brother and I would knock on our foreheads. “Salt in sugar,” she would say, “I can taste it!” That was her revenge. Salt in sugar was her slap in the face aimed at those above her, and, of course, a prologue of the upcoming fall—but hers this time. That was certain.
However, wujcio Bednarski. He belonged to this better, older generation. They would show me pictures of a bald elder with a thick mustache, or that’s what I thought back then. I had no idea that mustaches used to be a thing, a fashion, because he wasn’t that old after all. Wujcio was a principal in a local, rural primary school, they would tell me, and a school principal before the war—heavy stress on “before the war”—he was a somebody. “He was a very important person,” my grandmother would say, and everyone nodded approvingly. Besides Bednarski, there was also Grandmother’s cousin, a doctor. When he was in school, all the money went to him because he had certain demands. “Everything,” Grandmother would repeat, “Absolutely everything had to be of the highest quality.” The suit, the boots, the suede gloves. His winter coat—the best. Everything expensive. Once when his father saved up some money and bought a different kind of boots, “a little cheaper, but still very good,” Grandmother assured us. “He took one look, took the shoes, and chopped them up with an ax in complete silence. So he had to get the new ones, there was no choice.” You couldn’t detect any scorn in her voice, even though she’d rather let you cut off her hand than destroy her clothes herself, not to mentio
n shoes. But he was allowed, he was designated to do great things, he was supposed to become a doctor and start a new chapter in the family’s history. He was different, better, a Golem made of a mediocre clay, of us—a Ukrainian of the new era, ambitious and well educated. Nothing came of it, of course. The war started and somebody shot him against a fence, after a mere two years of his medical practice.
Bednarski graduated from a teaching seminar. Ternopil didn’t offer more, and that’s the reason for such an abundance of educators in my family, almost no one managed to break away. There is one class picture left in the album. He’s sitting in a chair under a tree, and you can immediately tell it’s the countryside, thatched roofs all around. The bald dome of his head, as usual, and his mustache handsomely trimmed. There is a kind of, let me think, a kind of austerity in his pose, one leg over the other, hands flat on his thighs, trousers neatly pressed, you could cut steel with their creases. His tie violently seizes his neck and his head faces the camera. There are children on both sides. I count bare feet and shoes and attempt to reach some conclusions from the proportions of one to the other but it’s pointless, since the entire picture is a farce. After all, these clothes aren’t theirs, they were borrowed, or just passed on and will be passed on further—small suits worn for decades. Some lose their hands in sleeves too long, others wear pants too short. Girls are in dresses remade from their mothers’ dresses; these are not children’s patterns and designs. Little suits and bare feet, dirty all the way up above the ankle, and so they sit in the dirt of some backyard or road. Some of the kids wear ribbons and soon they will grow up a little and start killing one another. The ones with ribbons will start, those without them will fight back, if they survive. Among them wujcio, with a face of a god, a just tribune, deliverer of punishment and reward.
I don’t even know what the name of the school was or where the picture was taken. About him and others I know very little; I’ve no idea where they were born or where they lived. All I know is what happened to some of them.
My aunt would come from far away. The Christmas tree was in the corner, and after midnight there was carp in jelly and vodka in small glasses. “Zdrowie,” my grandfather would say, and they would clink glasses ceremoniously. All the ladies would gasp loudly to let everyone know how unused to drinking vodka they were, and Grandmother would even close her eyes and make faces. They would drink vodka and explain it helps digestion; my aunt would drink sitting all stiff in her chair. She barely swallowed and the story would begin and everyone knew that this is how it would be because it’s how it had always been. She had only one story: it was in Gaje Wielkie, the troops of Stepan Bandera came into the house and murdered the entire family. “I was laying in bed, Mom was there, Father was there” she would talk about the rest of the family and I can’t remember exactly what, and why there were so many people in the house. Maybe someone came to visit, like it happens in the countryside, like when there’s a war? “When they came, I jumped behind the bed and lay quietly on the floor, quiet as a mouse, and they kept shooting at Mommy, at Daddy, until they’d murdered them all. Six people, six, all in front of me. And they kept killing our people all through the night. In the morning they dragged everyone out and buried them in a mass grave by the Orthodox Church. Only my family,” she would tell us “was buried by the house, right where the trees were planted the other day.” And she would start weeping, nothing could stop her now. She wept all the time anyway, waving her arms as if drunk, and then going back to peaceful weeping. Her eyes simply got wet, as if she suffered form chronic eye inflammation, and she delivered her story like a poorly trained actor. Bandera’s soldiers, the bed, the floor, killing, running into the night. And again, trembling as if from Parkinson’s disease, every tremble releasing an identical little cloud of history. I hated her. I begged my parents to never invite her again with her bloody story; a story that leads to madness. I didn’t care about Bandera, about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. For them, Bandera was as obvious as dirt, water, or air was for me—they were convinced you don’t need to explain those things. Just like Gaje Wielkie, which was an empty sound, impossible to understand, full of grief over what was long lost. Their national identification cards claimed they were born in the USSR, and I couldn’t understand it. My family used words that nobody knew, nobody used, that had nothing to do with our half of the house and garden in this post-German city. They would say: “ryskal” instead of shovel, “banderowcy” for the Bandera troops, “upowcy” for the Ukranian Insurgent Army, and they would say “taskać” instead of “carry”; I started talking like them and my brother would go berserk. “You talk like a Ukrainian!” he would shout, not sensing that, in part, he was one himself. My father’s family, on the Nowicki side, would speak differently too. For example: “salki”—we didn’t know this word. Salki are the rooms in an attic; they also used “nyże,” for places where you can store your memories and memorabilia right above your head. Just like those stories here, the salki of my memory, which I open for everyone. They would even call to the hens differently, “pul, pul, pul” instead of “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and even my Lithuanian grandparents differed in this regard; a difference according to which history established its own border—my grandfather came from Lithuania, my grandmother from Belarus. They would say “przeżegrać” instead of burn through, and describe a long-legged horse; when the skies were ripped open by a distant storm you could hear the silent małanka—silent lightning. It was where they lived that you could find żagary—brushwood—growing, they were the ones who would go out to get some braha—leftover home brew. Their language was otherworldly, from a beautiful yet grim fairytale that they nurtured within them, even though they seemed cheerful and pleasant. They would contract the disease through foul air, spoil other’s minds, even though during the day you wanted to sit with them forever. Dividing lines went straight through the middle of the family, through the room, the table, the bed. Two brothers would face each other, one a Polish soldier, the other a Lithuanian policeman. Their children live in different countries and know very little about each other; and it can’t be glued back together. On both sides of the border they would curse the enemy and praise the memory of their own people; it’s hardly surprising they didn’t want to remember the others. They were labeled themselves, oppressed, so they labeled and oppressed others, not even realizing that they did.
“I feel better now,” my Aunt would say, still crying. “There’s no more suffering, no more of this constricting pain. It’s been so many years, so many, I’ve cried enough. It’s been going on since March 27, 1945. There’s no more fear about how I’m going to keep on living. Back then, they took away everything, they stole everything with the murders in Gaje Wielkie. I didn’t have a single shirt to put on my back after they murdered my parents. Nothing to wear, nothing to eat, no parents,” she would tell us. “And this helplessness, horror . . . I didn’t know how I was going to make it.”
We had to calm her down because she would talk about everything at once, about her dreams and those of others, about the prophecies from the dreams becoming reality. She dreamt that it was 1942 and she was walking on an asphalt road, nothing around her, only the gray ground, gray ground. She kept walking and every time she reached the horizon there was just more road. But she kept walking because she wasn’t carrying anything and it was an easy walk. She was wearing a dress, shoes, her hands were empty. And after the seventh horizon she reached a cliff: the asphalt ended and dropped into a giant canyon, a river at its bottom, and terrifying waves kept echoing, foaming in rage. On the other side was her family, and others, but she couldn’t cross because the river was as wide as the Styx. And so she kept waiting for decades, she waited for the number of the deceased in her family to match what was foretold, to match the number of those standing on the other side of that dream river.
And afterward, as if fulfilling some calling, she would begin to talk about the place she used to live in. She would say: “My father used to teach in Gaje
Wielkie, next to Ternopil, even though he was already retired. There wasn’t enough money because when the Russians came to Ternopil, we lost everything. Gaje was a village stretched along the road,” she kept describing with passion, and she only had passion for things past. “It was situated almost inside the forest itself. It wasn’t like any other village: house, house, house, garden, orchard.” “We would say that every house was hidden in the bushes” my grandmother would add. “A beautiful village. A beautiful oak park. Before the war, the wealthy would drive in their fiakry—horse carriages—to vacation there, as they say. The school in Gaje was almost inside the forest, too, and my father was afraid to live there, even though they offered him an apartment. ‘It’s so grim out there,’ he would say ‘and those Ukrainians all around do nothing but watch us.’ So we rented a house in the village.” She would stop. And now I don’t know, listening to the recording—because, thank God, my father recorded her for the radio—if they were really scared way back then, or if the fear imposed itself on her memories later.
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