And after that, with her unbearably high-pitched voice, a voice that was fast and rambling, she would tell the story of a murder—the most important moment of her life. For Easter the whole village took up a collection and every teacher was supposed to get some flour. “My father took the horse cart,” she would tell us, “and went around to deliver this flour and when he came back it was already dark, maybe around eight at night. He was tired, he ate his dinner and went to bed.” She would add that they must’ve sent him around with the flour on purpose, to wear him down, because otherwise he would never go by himself, he was lazy by nature. “We women, we stay up talking for a little longer,” she’d report for the nth time. “We ate dinner,” and she told us about the dinner because there were no parts to the story that were irrelevant, all of it had to be told, “and only then did we go to bed. We slept for maybe an hour, it was eleven at night when Bandera’s men started knocking, waking everybody up, and we knew it was them, my father knew they were out there. A local farmer brought them to us. He told us they were coming, but he said we shouldn’t be afraid, that they just wanted to talk.”
“I had a friend named Jańcia,” my aunt would digress again, “and half a year earlier she told me on the road in Gaje”—today I remember that road in Gaje Wielkie, I stood in the middle of it not so long ago, your average asphalt street in the middle of today’s Ternopil, full of potholes and surrounded by uninteresting buildings—“so Jańcia, a friend whose parents were well off because they went to America once, she told me that Bandera’s men came to them dressed in Polish uniforms. They came and asked for some hay for their horses, and spoke beautiful Polish.” But my aunt, clever from the crib, would ask Jańcia: “And how did you know they were Bandera’s?” “Because,” Jańcia would answer, “at the end they asked us: ‘Don’t we speak beautiful Polish?’” And after forty something years my aunt would keep quoting them with the same spite in her voice. “Do you like us as Poles?” And Jańcia, this friend from Gaje, would reply, “Well, I like you as men,” because she already knew what was going to happen. “Her father, Mr. Wagner, gave Bandera’s men some hay, and about a half a year later,” she would tell us, forgetting for a second about her own family’s fate, “when this big murder happened they killed Jańcia’s parents too, and they ripped open her belly, like that, into four flaps, and nestled her brother’s head in her entrails.”
“The killing itself was quick,” she continued matter-of-factly about her own family.
“Three men came in, all very tall. All with long beards and machine guns. ‘Documents!’ Two of them came into the room and went straight to Tońcio’s bed. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m a Pole.’ Tońcio was very sick and pale. Later they came to me, I was in bed with little Zdzisio. ‘And you?’ So I told them ‘ya dochka’ because I didn’t want to anger them. And they responded ‘nie boysia, tiebia nitchevo nie budiet’—‘don’t worry, you’ll be all right.’ When he said that, I felt a rush of panic, I didn’t know what to do.” She would say this, and her voice, already nauseating with its high pitch, would start drilling through the ceiling, trying to escape outside. “Then they went back to the kitchen. I stood on my bed and I didn’t know what to do,” she would recollect, breathing heavily. “At first, I wanted to climb the wardrobe, but I couldn’t—it was too high. I looked at Tońcio and he had our mother’s big black eyes, I looked at him and quickly, quickly jumped behind the bed. Then they shot Miecio, he was the son of our aunt from Canada, a cripple. They didn’t let him into Canada with his mother, so he stayed in Gaje. He would help in the field, he would plow by hand, he was strong. They shot Miecio. When they came back into the room, I was already behind the bed, I couldn’t see who went first, I only counted the shots. Father, Mother, Mrs. Skowrońska, or Mrs. Skowrońska and then my mother. Three. Footsteps to Tońcio’s bed. A burst of shots. Later, footsteps to Zdzisio’s bed, the one I was hiding behind. Another burst. Right by my ear, because his little head was right by mine, only on the other side of the board. And I was all tense, ready for them to pull me out because they can see there’s no way for me to run. The door to the kitchen, the winter windows locked for good, where would I run? So I clutched the bed, my fingernails deep in the wood,” and I see my own fingers clutching the table when she tells this story, I can’t listen anymore; a story that I have erased from my memory completely and now have to recreate from the recording. “I thought,” my aunt continued, “that if they started to pull me out by my hair, I would beg them to kill me right then and there, then and there! I would curse them, call them pigs and bandits to make them angry, so they’d kill me right there, behind the bed. Finally I heard, and the lights were out, how they opened and rummaged through all the wardrobes, how they ripped the old Singer sewing machine off its little wooden table. There was nothing else to steal, only my parents’ furs, Genio’s clothes and coat, and Tońcio’s things, completely worn out. Right in the middle was my coat, and I kept praying because I had a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in one of the pockets, I prayed for her sanctity to be safe, because the picture was sanctified in Rome by the Pope. I prayed so that they wouldn’t take the picture and taint it with their murderous hands. Let them take the coat,” she would say, “just let the picture fall out of the pocket.” And I couldn’t stand that nonsense about the holy picture and their coats, I thought she had no right, and I wanted her to stop.
“They took everything outside to the horse cart and then there was silence. Only the cows mooed. I went outside, through the barn into the field, and started to run. I kept losing my shoes. I saw something bright flash in the air, and only after I heard it whizzing by my ear did I realize that they were shooting at me. I fell down a few times. Past the tracks, I started walking against the plow pattern in the field, slowly, slowly toward our people. Right outside Gaje, behind the statue, I heard a horse approaching. And it was a full moon, bright as day. It was one of Bandera’s men. We stood there, staring at each other, and he finally turned around and left. And I got to my aunt on 17 Ogrodowa Street, to my grandmother I mean, it was her Ternopil address,” because they all had two addresses after all, one current—the bad one—and one from their paradise lost. “And I knocked. I thought I was knocking . . .” “But she banged on the door like crazy,” Grandmother Kopiec adds from beyond the grave, recorded on the tape, “It almost fell out of the frame!”
And my aunt kept screaming like crazy, “Gaje! Gaje! Blood, Mrs. Skowrońska too, Mrs. Skowrońska too!” And Mrs. Skowrońska, it’s about time to explain, was my great-grandmother, Grandmother Kopiec’s mother. She was Ukrainian, and she had gone there to warn the other six; she was a relative of all those who remained citizens of Ukraine to this day, members of my family. “And Aunt Emma asked: ‘And what about my Zdzisio?’ and the same from Aunt Paulisia.” Some of them I knew, and I didn’t realize they’d all lost children in that mass murder because they never said a word. They all kept asking, terrified, and finally Aunt Walercia told them “Stop, don’t ask her, can’t you see she’s gone crazy?”
“The next day we went to Gaje Wielkie, the four of us, down the road running through the middle of the village. We got there, everyone was on the ground and the sight was horrific. The bodies stiff, blood coagulated. No clothes to dress them in. Nothing to dress them in, none. We had to bury them the way they were. Aunt Aniela washed a little bit of blood off their faces because I couldn’t,” said my aunt. “Some Ukrainian women came and stood there for a while, said a little prayer, then one said, ‘At least they decided to shoot, spared them suffering.’ There were corpses on the floor and I asked the women: What did they shoot them for? What?”
This was Christmas with my aunt.
Another member of my family, Władysław Kopiec, also lamented over his paradise lost. He wrote: “Czahary! Village of my birth and of my youth! Village of beekeepers, flowing with milk and honey, rich with orchards. Village free of neighborly disputes because all the neighbors lived away from one another.” I’m curious about
this last sentence in particular because there’s not a single word in there about people of Czahary being better, only about the world being better organized. People didn’t fight because they were far away from each other.
Uncle continues in his How it Used to Be in Podolia, which came into existence only as a manuscript: “In all of Zbarski district, there was no other village as rich with fruit orchards and with apiaries so well tended. In conditions like that, the youth were happy growing up, full of life and eager to play pranks. Everyone talked about them, plotting their own benign pranks in return.”
When I listen to them now, years after they’ve passed away, I can tell there is one voice speaking through all of them. They were dispersed all over the world, but it was as if they conspired to tell the same story, to add new verses to the same psalm. And when one psalm would end, another one would commence: “In order to be free, every other nation in the world went to the trenches with rifles ready to fire. Ukrainians were awful cowards in this regard. They would march at night and go wherever they thought there would be no resistance. They would outnumber the enemy ten to one. They would murder old men, toddlers, women. They would be cruel,” Uncle Władysław would write, but it could’ve been written by Janka, or Grandfather, or Aunt Walercia just as well.
“They call themselves Ukrainians,” we read, “but in their veins flows Tartar blood, too. That is where this drive to murder, burn, and destroy comes from. No other nation in Europe has this craving. The Ukrainians were Hitler’s right hand in murdering, in torturing the prisoners of concentration camps as capos, in prisons. Their crimes were horrifying. There was no act of barbarity, no act of cruelty that Bandera’s men wouldn’t perform. They would terrify even Ukrainians themselves, the ones with a humane side.”
My uncle’s lecture on Ukrainians was conceived years before the Balkan massacre, but I don’t believe that Serbian or Croatian blood thirst, or their ethnic cleansing, would impress him. His story, the story of my kin, had only two endings: paradise lost, butchered by the Ukrainian butchers; and a perpetual sadness and longing afterward. They couldn’t see much beyond that, and not because they were evil or indifferent, but because their eyes had been gouged out and their bodies were burned out hollow.
When my grandmother was dying, I used to go and visit her on occasion. She was resting in bed, her marital bed under the painting of the Holy Family, usually silent. I preferred when she was silent anyway. The end was tough. With her clarity still intact, she told me: “You know I’m Ukrainian?” Just like her mother, Skowrońska, killed in Gaje, like her sister, like her cousin Kernyczny, the doctor killed right by the fence, just like her entire family. And since they killed her mother, she never spoke of Ukrainians other than as dogs, murderers, huncwoty—scamps—Russian scum. She hated her nation and put a curse on it, but at the very end she decided to take the burden on her back once again, the burden of her origin. After that she fell silent. If she ever spoke at all, she was usually delirious and rarely recognized the person visiting. In moments of lucidity she would call for my grandfather, long dead by then, and I recalled one Christmas after his passing when she sat quiet, stubborn, until she suddenly screamed—she, who never screamed and spent her entire life quiet, screamed: “I don’t want to live, I have nothing to live for, take me away already!” So I would visit and she’d be resting in bed. I took a picture of her once, close to the end, but I never developed it because I felt like a thief. The white sheets, her dark face—she looked like an Arabian elder, like a Gypsy, like a Sephardic Jew. Her pantry was almost empty, only a stoneware bowl in which she used to keep butter was still there. Behind the cabinet was a pastry board, once perfectly flat and now full of hills and valleys—marks from years of kneading dough—with yellow rubber gloves hanging from it, tools of the trade of one of the nurses taking care of her. Her bathroom felt suddenly forsaken, as if nobody had entered it in decades. The smell of her apartment grew stronger and more hostile. It was obvious nothing would change there. In the smaller room, as usual, pears were ripening on some newspapers, spreading their sweet scent in the general fug of the apartment. It was quiet, all so quiet. The painting of the Holy Family was still hanging over the bed, Mary Magdalene exposing her milk-white breast inside the cave. The eagle on the wardrobe was still getting ready to take off.
“Hey gypsy, you fuckin’ thief !” a beefed-up guy in a white tracksuit kept shouting at me on the train. “Whatcha lookin’ at? Want me to fuck you up? Fuckin’ Arab, dirty piece of shit, where did you crawl out from? No shame to walk among the whites? Get the fuck off the train, you cocksucker! Out! Piece of shit! They should’ve burned you, you fuckin’ Jew, what you lookin’ at? You never seen a Pole?”
This is my inheritance from Grandmother Kopiec. But she had it easy; she had her Yardley’s face powder, scented flour to pretend she’s local. I have nothing, I’m powerless, my skin color reveals my identity. That’s her heritage. I keep bumming around the world carrying her basket, and in this basket there is something all too obvious for others: me, always darker than the rest, smiling awkwardly, always a little off.
For no apparent reason, my grandmother ripped out pictures from the family album. I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it was because back then she was full of anger and easily enraged. She must’ve been haunted by the past, too. Although, on the other hand, I’m not sure if she knew that it was her past that she was mad about. In this incomplete album there’s a picture—a small one retouched in a country style, exaggerated, more of an original creation of the retoucher than a photo print. She’s on the left, and on the right some man with a wide face and a single smug ringlet hanging on his forehead, probably curled with an iron. There’s a gentle circle encompassing the photograph and a comment in the margin, written in the one-of-a-kind handwriting of my mother (interesting, by the way—where did she learn to write like that?). “Grandmother only.” The commandment was for me—to scan only Grandmother and erase the simple-faced man from our family’s history, this penultimate choice of my grandmother, a man from Ternopil who did not become my grandfather. But since he was already in the album, since he was pasted in and Grandfather didn’t cut him out in all those years, since Grandmother didn’t rip him out when the torpor fogged her world—let him stay. I won’t sugar coat it. It’s more interesting that way.
Another album—this one devoted to the family on my mother’s side. I don’t recognize too many faces. Places keep repeating. Mostly a house, a family room or a living room, at first not used that often, saved for guests, just like the best room in a country house. They would sit together, mostly in the kitchen, with this canary of theirs, they would sit in the garden, mostly eager to take pictures on the stairs leading to the house. The only pictures taken while traveling are of my grandfather on top of Mount Śnieżka, surrounded by a group of people unknown to me, probably friends from work, taken in 1949. My grandfather always traveled without his wife. In their older days they would go for holidays to the lake, but it wasn’t the holidays—it was work. He was overseeing a campground with several summerhouses. For the whole summer they would stay in a damp house and go to the forest, picking whatever there was to pick. They didn’t know how to swim, so they organized their time according to their routines and recreated their own home as best they could in this little box-house. They worked because to be right next to their house, to sit and work: that was their idea of a perfect life. The history of their travels is a history of failed excursions, or ones that never came to happen. I go through this ransacked album, page after page, and try to find pictures from their trips, but there are none. That’s how they were. A few pictures, a short story.
They had this canary in a cage in the kitchen, I remember my grandmother lined it with fresh newspapers every day, changed the water, made sure there were plenty of fresh seeds, provided lime, which the canary pecked with a passion worthy of a greater cause. Grandma was, one could say, a breeder. The canary was not only company throughout her hours spent in the kit
chen, or vacuuming; the canary was a responsibility. Just like everything was a responsibility: the garden, free time, news on the TV. She knew how to laugh, but life she approached with diligence, even if it was the life of a canary. She would let the canary out of the cage after the furnace plate cooled off. And it would fly out from his cage, yellow lightning, and circle the lamp, fly by the clock, which had the figure of a woman to indicate good weather and a male one for bad, or the other way around. But the clock was broken and showed whatever it wanted, regardless of air pressure or rainfall, and the canary flew by the window and sometimes it even tried to peck its way to freedom. It kept flying, resting on the dishes drying by the sink, resting on my head, where its little talons would scratch my scalp because they were always long and I kept laughing and she, this grandmother of mine, always so solemn and sullen all her life, would laugh her head off too.
Bedlam: Your Salvation Is the Reason for My Journey
It was seventeen degrees below zero Celsius and the streets were empty. Water as green as tropical algae dripped across the street. It was coming from the gate of a house that had been rebuilt after the war, including its overall sense of narrowness required three or four hundred years earlier by property prices in this prosperous port city. The city was rebuilt to restore its previous look, sometimes down to exact details, following a naive belief that that would turn it back into what it used to be before the war. It was an exercise in fidelity without purpose, an empty gesture of men in love with history. The water kept flowing through the gate from this tenement house, from the laundry room, and froze in the square, creating a puddle the color of shower gel that smells of bergamot and verbena—or that was what it brought to mind because it was odorless. Women were evacuating the laundry room, grabbing whatever was at hand, some papers, packages. Nobody paid attention to the artificial Gardens of Eden congealing in the freezing cold, as if the parrot-green slick was an everyday occurrence in these parts. “The cold burst the pipes again,” a woman who saw my amazement told me. “They color the water used in the central heating here like that.”
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