Then Sings My Soul

by Amy Sorrells

  But not everything she read held such darkness. She learned about missionaries like Stuart Hine from Britain, who in the early 1900s preached the gospel to villages all across the Carpathian Mountains, the beauty of which inspired him to translate and set to music “How Great Thou Art”; about Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the head of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, who saved thousands of lives of Jewish refugees during the turn of the century and up until World War II, when he was murdered by the Nazis. And as she flipped through pictorial accounts and glossy travel guides of the region, she had a hard time fathoming how such horrific events took place in such a breathtakingly beautiful land. No wonder missionaries were inspired to write hymns when they were there. No wonder, as many accounts described, the people they ministered to soaked up the gospel so willingly. What else besides faith in Someone bigger, Someone above and beyond all that pain, could have given them hope in the middle of all that death?

  Nel pushed the history and geography books aside and turned to the books on jewelers and artisans from the region. Some of the greatest designers and faceters had lived in the Russian Empire as it advanced and ebbed across Eastern Europe over the centuries. One book in particular, Gemstones of the Tsars, consumed her. Page after page detailed the stones and faceting designs of artisans who’d worked on the imperial collections creating fabulous and intricate designs for stones inlaid in scepters and orbs, crowns and sabers, and Fabergé eggs. She lingered over pages full of items adorned with tens and hundreds of diamonds and emeralds, tourmalines and sapphires, rubies and pearls, and every precious gem and mineral in between. She was so caught up in the brilliance of all she read that she almost forgot why she’d come to the library … until she got to the appendixes. There, faceting designs and explanations and origins of many of the larger imperial stones were described in detail, including diagrams and measurements—triangles and round cuts, cushion and navette, marquis and recoupe-rose, baguette and heart, star brilliant and briolettes. She stopped when she got to the section featuring aquamarines. She ran her finger across the columns of the names of artisans who’d perfected or contributed to imperial gem designs, and there it was.

  Maevski.

  Josef Maevski.

  From Chudniv, Zhytomyr Oblast.

  Could this be a relative? The chances were minuscule, so she couldn’t let herself get too worked up about the possibility. Her dad might not be able—or willing—to recall enough of this to confirm or deny anything about this Josef fellow. Although Jakob was getting better, stronger and more lucid each day, she still hesitated to bring up anything that might upset him. Seeing him in a state of acute delirium or worsening dementia was hard enough without drawing attention to something he couldn’t remember, or didn’t want to remember. But again, she considered that maybe there was a good reason her mom had been doing the research. Catherine loved Jakob, so she wouldn’t have started researching and delving into Jakob’s ancestry if she hadn’t either been really interested in it or onto some bit of history that was important enough to pursue. Anyway, what harm could come from investigating?

  The copy machine clicked and whirred into action as she laid the page with the Maevski name on the glass. She tucked the photocopy into the front of one of the dozen or so books she checked out and hurried out to her car. She had told David she’d be at the house that afternoon so he could look at the eaves and roof and other exterior parts of the house to figure out what needed renovations.

  Already parked out front, David waved as she pulled into the driveway. She regretted how unaware she’d been of how hard it had become for Mom and Dad to keep up with maintaining the house. Even at her advancing age, Mattie managed to keep her pale-pink stucco home freshly painted and looking alive by comparison. The bird feeders Jakob so loved to keep full dangled crooked and empty, and corncobs sat bare on feeding posts he’d crafted especially for the black squirrels. She made a mental note to fill them later.

  Nel pulled into the garage, grateful (again) she hadn’t scraped the sides of the giant car on her mom’s old bicycle with the basket on the front. She intended to fix it up so she could ride in to town on warmer spring days.

  “Thanks for coming, David.”

  He ambled up the driveway toward her and eyeballed the stack of books she lugged out of the backseat. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah. I was there at the library all morning. I had no idea of the horrible history of Eastern Europe.”

  “Learn somethin’ new every day, right?”

  She rolled her eyes at him, trying to veil the flush she felt rise to her cheeks every time he came around. “You are still such a dork.”

  “Some things never change.”

  “And full of clichés, too, I see.”

  “Here, let me help you.” He grinned, then gathered a half-dozen books that had fallen onto the floorboards and carried them into the house behind her.

  “Would you like a soda or something? There’s a bunch in the fridge by the back door. Take what you’d like.” She grabbed one of Catherine’s old windbreakers off a hook by the back door and pulled it over the thick, cable-knit, wool fisherman’s sweater she wore, which she’d had since high school.

  Out front, Nel looked at the black stains along the eaves, the gutters bent and hanging in places from the weight of leaves, and the roof, which sagged where the edges of the gables met. David stuck a finger between a window casing and the siding, and with barely any effort, he displaced a long, rotted piece of wood that tumbled to the ground. His eyes drooped with apology.

  “I have a feeling this might end up being a big project.” She sighed.

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before. Doesn’t take long for these homes to get worn down. Even if they’d kept it up until a couple years ago, a couple years is all it might take for the lake to get at it.”

  Did he sense the guilt she felt about not being around? Even if he didn’t, she appreciated his reassurance. The lake was hard on homes.

  “I can do some things if the weather cooperates,” he continued. “Some of the window casings, siding, and such. But the roof … that might have to wait until late spring, once the threat of snow is gone. No telling how much of that needs replaced until we get started, and if there’s a lot of problems, snow would make them impossible to get to.”

  “One thing I know I need are ramps to all the doorways.”

  “Are you bringing your dad home soon?”

  “The doctors say just a few more weeks. He still has times when he’s pretty loony, but overall, he’s improving.”

  “Can’t be easy for a guy his age.”

  She thought about the things she’d seen and learned at the library earlier. “I’m beginning to realize life’s not easy at any age.”

  After David left, Nel settled down with the piles of library books and compared the stone specifications in Gemstones of the Tsars with the one on the handwritten piece of parchment and was stunned to see they matched exactly. That they were the same could not be a coincidence. She scoured through the books to find as much as she could about the village of Chudniv, the village where Peter and Jakob and the gem artist were from. Details were sketchy, even in the well-researched books, most likely because of the Iron Curtain. Current information about the region was either sketchy or glossy and ad-like because of the decades of Soviet communications lockdown.

  One book, however, listed the name of the Orthodox church in the town, and Nel figured that’d be as reliable a place to start as any. She hoped the post office could help her verify an exact mailing address, and she knew what she was going to send. If this Josef Maevski was as well respected as the book indicated, perhaps the town would have some record of him. And if they had some record of him, maybe they’d have some record of Peter and Jakob. She’d send the church a photocopy of the page from Gemstones of the Tsars, a photocopy of the diagram and dimensions she and David had found inside t
he silver cup, a photocopy of the ship manifest and the photograph of the two boys, and a photograph of the aquamarine.

  Then she would have to wait.

  She might hear nothing, she realized that. But if she heard something, it could prove to be well worth the time.

  Nel climbed the creaky, worn, walnut stairs to her room but stopped outside her parents’ bedroom. The same queen-size bed with a scrolled, black-iron frame was set against the same wall it’d been on since she was a child, and the sun had faded a permanent outline of the bed’s scrollwork onto the wall. Between the two pillows at the head of the bed, Dad had neatly placed a needlepoint throw pillow with fishing bobbers and the phrase “I’m not old, my bobbers just don’t float like they used to.” On either side of the bed were matching bedside tables and white carnival-glass lamps. Above the bed hung a painting of seagulls flying toward the sun, which hung low in the sky over a grassy beach. It looked like the view of the lake from the house, and she wondered if they’d asked someone to paint it at some point over the years. The same wedding-ring quilt was folded at the end of the bed, neatly made with a candle-wicked bedspread smoothed over the top, neither of which could hide the two parallel sunken spots in the mattress where her parents had lain side by side. She ran her hand across the pieces and threads of the quilt as if to bring back the life that had placed each stitch. Mom had let her help make that quilt and many others on lazy afternoons on the upstairs sleeping porch.

  Nel grabbed a quilt from her room and headed to the upstairs sleeping porch, which faced the lake. She sat for as long as she could bear the cold and listened to the soft barks of the black squirrels as they no doubt vied for sections of the new corncobs she’d set out. She thought she’d been so sure of her life in Santa Fe and the life and business she’d established among the other artists. But now that she was home, she wondered if this was where she might need to stay.

  CHAPTER 22

  The staff always had an activity of some kind lined up for residents to do each day, and those healthy enough were required to attend as part of their rehabilitation program. This morning featured “Rockin’ and Rollin’ with Debbie,” a bubbly instructor who led residents in wheelchair exercises set to either Big Band or early rock-and-roll music, depending on her mood. The exercises weren’t so bad, and Jakob knew moving around would help him get out of the place sooner.

  Besides, Debbie wasn’t so bad to look at either, blessed with bleach-blonde hair and a pretty decent figure. Jakob couldn’t figure out if she thought all the old men like him were blind, or if she liked dressing in a way that caused them all to gawk at her. If one of them drooled, she chalked that up to the aftereffects of a stroke or Parkinson’s. At any rate, she was awfully cute, dressed in her Jane Fonda, formfitting exercise clothes, which made exercise time a fabulous distraction from the death and dying all around them.

  “You all are in for a treat! I brought my collection of best swing music today. Everybody ready?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “Okay, let’s go. We’re starting with hand swirls.”

  The jungle-beat drums of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” rose from the speakers, and Debbie stuck her hands straight out in front of her, making circular motions in opposite directions with her hands. Never mind that none of the residents could move their hips. She moved hers plenty enough for all of them.

  After a couple minutes of that, she switched things up. “Okay, everyone, we’re reaching to the stars. Reaching. Reaching. Grab those stars!” She raised both her arms, then grabbed at invisible stars somewhere above her stiff blonde hair, one arm at a time, up and down and up and down as the trumpets and trombones of Goodman’s band continued to wail from her CD player.

  “Let’s do ‘the drummer,’ everyone!”

  Jakob’s upper arms burned with the acid of inactivity as she pushed the class along in the exercise routine. He lifted his arms and struggled to keep up with the whine of muffled trumpets and the jangle of the tambourine in Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out with My Baby.”

  “And let’s see everyone’s dazzle hands before we slow it down a bit!” Her energy level alone exhausted Jakob, as he brought his hands close to his chest, then stuck them out in front of him, stretching his fingers and waving at the air.

  Ridiculous that my life has come down to exercises fit for a bunch of kindergartners, he thought.

  “Good job, everyone! Time for ‘the simple sway.’ It’s a slow one, so y’all can catch your breath.” The shrill, woody sound of Glenn Miller’s clarinets, cornet trumpets, and saxophones playing “Moonlight Serenade” floated through the room, and at once Jakob was back at his wedding reception, his hands cupped against the small of Catherine’s back. Her dress, a champagne-colored silk, draped gracefully over her bodice, and whispers of chiffon had played in the wind against her creamy neck and shoulders. It’d been an outdoor wedding, she’d insisted on it, at her parents’ stately Chicago waterfront home on Lake Shore Drive. At the time, neither of them cared so much about having a church wedding. Who needed religion when they had each other, a perfect June night, and the moon shining like a spotlight on them alone?

  “Mr. Stewart, are you okay?” Debbie had moved closer to him and looked ready to check for a pulse in his neck before he answered her.

  “Fine, I’m fine.” Jakob craned his neck to see if Nyesha was around. “I’d like to go back to my room, please.”

  They’d danced on her parents’ veranda to the song “Moonlight Serenade.” Catherine was everything Jakob wasn’t, everything he’d never experienced. Her soft edges consumed his hard ones, and in her eyes Jakob found liberation from the pain that had always enervated him. They’d spent their courtship on back roads sipping bootlegged, homemade strawberry wine and tasting each other. The curve of her neck, tendrils of her hair falling against it in the moonlight, enraptured him, and he couldn’t get enough of her. She was educated. Established. High society. She was everything warm and satin, velvet and sweet in his otherwise cold, bitter, and caustic world.

  As much as Catherine enamored Jakob, she frustrated him as well, always wanting to know what he was thinking. What was the matter. Why he looked as if he was brooding. What had happened to Peter and him. How they’d come to America. What life was like back in Ukraine. Jakob supposed he was a sort of novelty to her—she knew precisely who she was, after all. Relatives kept precise records of the Bessinger family tree, which traced back to Boston and the American Revolution. She came from old family money made first in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, and then in the newer ones in Chicago. Marrying an immigrant orphan like Jakob was way outside the realm of normal for her family. She couldn’t help her curiosity.

  One evening shortly after their marriage, they were halfway through dinner when she set the tarnished silver cup on the table. Jakob’s head spun from the effects of the Chianti, and he had been hoping for a little living-room dancing, maybe a walk in the moonlight.

  “Tell me about it, baby, won’t you, please? What happened that’s so awful you can’t tell me?” She’d stroked Jakob’s hand, and for the first time ever, her touch felt like a knife searing his skin. He rose from the table too quickly. Grabbed the cup and threw it. Smashed the dining-room window. Papa’s tzitzit, which he’d kept since Peter died, flew into the air along with the aquamarine, which rolled out of the cheesecloth and bounced along the wooden floor with the rest of the shattered glass. A couple of neighborhood dogs barked, and the only other sound was the muffled cry of Catherine.

  She retreated to their bedroom and shut the door behind her, and Jakob had obligingly slept on the couch that night, half sickened by his reaction, the other half sickened by memories and the fact that Catherine wouldn’t leave his past alone. He drank the rest of the bottle of Chianti and at some point, long after midnight, fell into a cramped and hard slumber. He awoke the next morning to the glass in the dining room all cleaned up,
the kitchen sparkling, coffee brewing, and a note that read,

  My dearest Jake,

  I’m sorry I pushed you to talk about your past. I won’t mention it again. I’ve gone for a walk on the beach.

  Yours,

  Catherine

  For a week or so thereafter, conversations between them felt stilted. Polite. But like many things in marriage, they learned to let things go for the sake of having and holding. Catherine was true to her word, and neither of them talked about that night, or his past, again. Soon, Eleanor was on the way, and they were back to their overall joyful social and work-related routines.

  Even so, if someone asked Catherine if that night changed things between the two, she might have said yes. Jakob would have too. Since then, Jakob carried an additional weight of regret, along with all the others, that he did not bare his soul to his one and only love, the one person who could have listened and encouraged and understood—not because she had felt the same sorts of pain, but because she loved him that much. Instead, Jakob had carried the weight of what happened in Chudniv for nearly a century.

  None of it mattered anymore, as close to the grave as he was.

  Solomon was right.

  Everything eventually turns to dust.

  CHAPTER 23

  “I’ll be right back with your drinks.” The waitress, Julie, smiled.

  Nel sat with Mattie in a booth at Clementine’s, grateful for a break in her lapidary work and the monotony of driving to and from Lakeview visiting her dad.