Detachment

by Maurice Mierau

  After spending more than an hour with Vera and Ivan, we went across the street to the site of my great-grandparents’ former house, long since destroyed by fire. The current owner, a skinny woman of indeterminate age with a kerchief covering her head, said there were once four houses on the lot. Her house looked decrepit and she didn’t ask us in. The garden in the front used to be beautiful, she said, though now it overflowed with miscellaneous junk. She could tell us nothing about my family, but was delighted with the gaudy chocolates I gave her.

  We drove out of my father’s village, packed back into the Volga taxi, hoping that Bohdan wouldn’t have another maniacal screaming fit. The taxi driver suggested that we visit the museum on the island of Khortitsa. Betsy volunteered to stay outside with the boys while Sasha and I went inside.

  The island of Khortitsa sits in the middle of the Dnieper River, just past the great hydro dam that first made Zaporozhye an industrial centre in 1932. My Mennonite ancestors farmed on this island and some of them got rich. The land was lush, and the river gave irrigation, transport, fish, life itself. Today the island looked uninhabited, covered by light brush, a convenient spot from which tourists could view the dam. The museum perched on top of the northernmost hill and was devoted almost entirely to Cossacks, with the exception of one scene from World War II, some Scythian armour, and a few pictures of eighteenth-century Zaporozhye, which was called Aleksandrovsk after one of the czars.

  A single glass case housed the history of the German-speaking Mennonites who once lived here. The case held some self-published books from Manitoba with genealogical information, and a few scattered photographs. Nothing about how Mennonites invented the cream separator right in this area, or helped make Odessa a major port with their shipments of grain in the early nineteenth century, or ploughed up ancient Cossack burial grounds with Germanic industry.

  This erasure of the Mennonite past seemed to fit with my mood. My ancestors were only here for 150 years. And in that time most of them didn’t even learn the language, thinking it inferior to Russian and German just like Lil did. And in the end, they abandoned the fertile soil for other plains a world away, their work and their faith detachable from any national feeling, or loyalty to a particular time or place.

  Back outside the museum Sasha and I found the boys playing with Betsy. We all took a walk along the river gorge in the spring sun. A southern breeze came off the fields of black soil that receded to the horizon in every direction. I could smell the earth warming as the season changed.

  In the village Sasha had asked me if I wanted to take some soil as a souvenir. I did not. The black chernozem around Nikolaipol was never my soil. I’d never farmed, nor had my father. This rich black earth meant nothing to me other than a reminder that we all end up worm-eaten, improving the topsoil wherever we die. My ancestors had come for the soil. But they had no roots in it either. They came because their old home in East Prussia was too hot, breathing down their necks with the threat of military service and blood, and Catherine the Great gave them a chance to escape.

  They left when there was too much blood on that black earth, when it began to seem too much like old Europe. Ukraine means “border” or “edge country,” and my family was always on the edge, just like the Ukrainian people they tried to ignore, who lived all around them. Maybe a Canadian city on the plain would be better, a city framed by endless Doric columns of cloud and sky, air that never carried the smell of mass death, and wind that never stopped, blowing like a simoom or a Siberian gale every day.

  X

  In 1945, the border between East and West Germany that my dad and his family had to cross was hazy and open only sometimes, under the right circumstances. The bribery was not well organized. There was no one you could hire to put a fine burnish of legality over everything.

  My dad’s aunt Susan got across the border walking between horses at night with a sack draped over herself, “stiff-scared” according to Lil. In the wagon Maria Wiebe, Lil’s grandmother, huddled under the hay, breathing out of a cardboard tube. Sometimes the border guards stuck pitchforks into carts going across the line, but not that night, at least not into her cart.

  My father, Lil, their mother Helen, her baby Helmut, and her brother Dick and sister Mary all got off the train in the middle of a beet field near the British sector. It was the final darkness just before dawn. The moon lingered behind some cloud cover. Dick laid two bottles of vodka, an electric shaver he’d acquired when he was in the German army, and two wristwatches beside little Helmut in the baby carriage. Helen added her wedding band from Cornelius. Dick gave my father a bucket with a sponge to suck on and a handful of fresh strawberries, which must have been hard to come by.

  Dick wasn’t sure exactly what direction to go in, except that they must move west. Mary, whose brain was garbled by childhood meningitis, lost one of her galoshes in the muddy beet field, and she went down on her knees looking for it. Just then the moon came partly out from behind the clouds. There was gunfire. The Russian border guards had seen them.

  The Russians were boys, barely nineteen. They pointed their rifles at the family and said, over and over, “Uhr, Uhr,” wristwatch. Dick handed them the two watches from the baby carriage. The soldiers still wouldn’t let the family go, so Dick pulled the vodka bottles out of the carriage. Helmut made a low moaning noise since the bottles had held him in place like glass cushions. One of the Russians looked into the carriage and saw Dick’s shaver.

  “What the hell is this? Does it shoot?”

  “Nein,” said Dick, after pretending not to understand their Russian for a minute. “It makes you look good. You can shave your face smooth like this tree bark.” He mimed a shaving motion on his face and then ran his hand over the tree.

  They nodded to each other and one of them pocketed the shaver and said, “OK, you can go. But you leave the girl here with us.” He pointed at Lil, who was thirteen.

  “Take this instead,” Helen said, handing them her wedding ring from the carriage. Little Helmut started to cry the way babies do when they are about to get very loud. Looking nervously back for his commanding officer, the older boy said, “Go fast, all of you.”

  It was still mostly dark even with one edge of the moon showing. They walked quickly away only to be stopped a few minutes later by another group of border guards. These were older.

  “The girl stays here and you can all go,” they said. Helen said, “No. We have nothing for you.” The guards, distracted by another group emerging from the mud, fired their guns into the air. Like a giant in the semi-darkness, Dick ferried them across the stream, first Lil, then Mary, then my father, and finally the baby carriage above his head as Helmut squalled.

  When he put Helen down on the other side he knelt beside the stream, panting, cupping water into his mouth.

  Helen said, “We made it so far — you can’t drink that water — what if you get shot?”

  “Shut up, I’m thirsty,” said Dick. Then some English-speaking soldiers appeared and gave them baloney sandwiches, something new. They had reached the west.

  XI

  On our last Sunday evening before going home to Canada we went to the Kyiv circus, which is permanently housed in a small domed building at Victory Square. We sat near the front. A woman in a tight blue dress descended from a large staircase as lights flashed around her. Peter gasped and exclaimed; he had never seen so many lights. The band played from a balcony while the woman sang some kind of Broadway-disco welcome to the circus song. The performers trouped around the ring in garish costumes, waving and preening at the audience.

  It occurred to me that my dad had never taken me to the circus, nor did I ever take Jeremy. This was my chance to break the mold.

  For Peter the bears were the climax of the show’s first half. His changeable grey-green eyes bulged out of his head like telephoto lenses as the mangy bears rolled in steel cages, rode scooters and motorcycles, danced, turned cartwheels, and — most impressively — drove cars. A man and woman in
flowing velveteen paraded around with them as if they were responsible for the sheer cleverness of these animals. They could well be, I thought, wondering what weird, sadistic training would make bears turn cartwheels and drive vehicles.

  Bohdan’s favourite act was a group of masked acrobats in Spider-Man outfits decorated with ultraviolet lights. At the intermission Sasha said that Bohdan’s fascination with these demonic costumes showed his affinity with the occult. But Sasha still gave the boys almonds to crack, which Peter did with his shoe on the concrete floor. Bohdan handed his to Peter for the same treatment. Then as the second half began Bohdan went crazy — crying and crumpling to the floor.

  Betsy leaned across and said, “Why don’t I get Sasha to take us back to the hotel and you can stay here with Peter.”

  “Sure,” I said, and she nodded.

  Peter and I settled in happily to watch the reptile charmer who had just come to centre stage. He was a bearded man with a feathered hat and an ornately upholstered vest. Young women in harem costumes stood on the edge of the ring and, accompanied by crashing cymbals, he draped cream-coloured snakes over their upturned arms.

  Then six teenage boys ran out into the ring and let loose seven squirming crocodiles in a range of sizes from smaller than a dog to larger than a man. Some were distressingly active, scampering around the ring. Peter’s legs twitched with excitement.

  The charmer walked with great dignity, pointing dramatically at one crocodile after another, magically freezing each into a state of hypnosis. One kept moving around, and the charmer had to return to freeze him a few times. Peter clapped and laughed, repeating “Dihveetsya, dihveetsya,” look, look! as the charmer hung two of the crocs on the edge of the ring within snapping distance of the audience in the front row.

  In his excitement, Peter grabbed my hand, and I had a sudden bizarre image of myself in the parade as the ringmaster, controlling the circus, Sasha and Oleg dressed as clowns, Betsy a showgirl dressed in sheeny fabric, strong and acrobatic, an athlete.

  But then my father entered with his beard and suit, dressed like the crocodile charmer, holding a violin. As he fiddled and changed tunes at lightning speed we all began moving at his command, just as we had when I was a kid. Then he tripped over a crocodile, his playing faltered, and I felt helpless rage at his restless energy, his deliberate amnesia, his aloofness. But then Peter, Bohdan, and Jeremy came on stage in the gaudy vests and white shirts of the charmer’s assistants. And I remembered that I was holding the microphone, that I was the ringmaster. And gratefully, I squeezed Peter’s hand.

  Nikolai drove us to the Kyiv airport just after 4:30 in the morning. We arrived in Toronto on April 12, cranky and exhausted from a fifteen-hour flight during which the boys had not slept at all. We had a ten-hour layover in Toronto.

  Betsy took a much-needed break from the family by reading People magazine. The boys and I sat at a window to watch the airplanes. Peter and Bohdan kept wandering away. I said, “Boys, you have to stay here,” and kept dragging them back when they didn’t. The third time, they shouted at me.

  “Caca! Pisca! Caca! Pisca!” said Peter.

  “Caca! Pisca! Caca! Pisca!” said Bohdan. Something scatological, I assumed. That’s it, I thought, we won’t be talking pidgin-Ukrainian to the boys anymore.

  “From now on, Mom and I will talk English to you.”

  “Nee likey,” said Bohdan, his abbreviation for I don’t like that.

  The boys and I finally fell asleep just minutes before our plane left for Winnipeg. Betsy took a picture of us, me stretched out on the floor using The Fall of Berlin for a pillow, and the boys slumped over the steel armrests of a bench like the hypnotized crocs at the circus. Then when we boarded the plane the boys both screamed without stopping. They refused to wear their seatbelts and fought like rabid dogs while the flight crew helped us pin them to their chairs and secured their belts, all while people filed onto the plane staring at us. They screamed all the way up to 30,000 feet in the air. They woke up and yelled again for the descent into Winnipeg, where spring had miraculously arrived. April 13, 2005: not a speck of snow on the ground. In the early morning darkness we stumbled out of the cab and a warm breeze stirred the budding elm trees on our block.

  DETACHMENT

  I

  On our first day back in Canada, I woke to bangs and giggles from the boys’ bedroom. Betsy’s eyes snapped open. I put my arms around her and pretended not to hear anything. Jet lag rattled through my brain like a tornado. A body thudded onto the floor.

  “We have to get up,” said Betsy, and we both willed ourselves upright and into the boys’ bedroom. Peter lay on the floor as if he’d been transformed into Kafka’s insect, but he was grinning, his absurdly long eyelashes radiating energy. Bohdan jumped on his lower bunk bed trampoline-style, just low enough not to bang his head, looking mischievous and worried at the same time.

  “Good morning, molodets, welcome to Canada,” Betsy said. She smiled and pulled up the blinds. Spring sunshine poured in from the southern exposure. Bohdan yanked open the chest of drawers and began throwing his new clothes over his shoulder until I stopped him. His body burned with energy and, I imagined, fear. But he had no English words to tell me that yet.

  Peter learned the English alphabet in the afternoon of that first day in Canada. Betsy wrote it out and he copied it over and over on a small chalkboard. His failure to learn the Cyrillic alphabet in his orphanage was not the result of a learning disability. We have a picture of him from his second day in our house, holding the chalkboard with his name written three times, smiling through what was left of his baby fat and starch-laden diet, looking almost crazy with happiness.

  Somewhere in those first few days I called my parents in Edmonton. Knowing they would be curious, but unlikely to call me first, I told them how happy the boys were, putting their arms around each other, sitting on our laps when we read to them, pulling string toys in front of the cats — who were indifferent. Mom asked, as she always did, if Betsy was very busy at work; I explained that Betsy was on parental leave for six months to spend time with Peter and Bohdan. Then I put the boys on the telephone. Bohdan didn’t understand that he needed to talk — he just held the receiver at arm’s length and stared. Peter jabbered with enthusiasm for a minute or two, but Dad, even though he remembered some Russian, could not understand Peter’s accent.

  When asked how soon they could come to Winnipeg to see his new grandchildren, my Dad, who has never liked pinning down dates, said maybe they’d drive in June. I was disappointed it couldn’t be sooner, but didn’t say so.

  On the weekend Jeremy came over to meet his brothers. I hadn’t seen much of him for a while — he’d stopped spending the night at my house a few years back. He was skinny and awkward-limbed with a pasty complexion that I assumed came from staying up at night playing his Xbox.

  When the door swung open I could smell the premature spring. We gave Jeremy his souvenir, a T-shirt, and introduced him to the boys. They shook hands solemnly as they’d been taught. He didn’t hug them, which did not surprise me. I hadn’t hugged him since he was eight or nine. My own father hugged me for the first time that I could remember when I was in middle age, and his hugs were stiff and awkward, like a board, just like mine.

  We had asked Jeremy over so we could take a family photograph. Betsy set the camera to self-time and rushed back before the flash. In the photo Peter and Bohdan perch on my lap in the middle, with Betsy to my right and Jeremy left. My sons and I wear our garish Orange Revolution T-shirts and Betsy has a matching orange toque and scarf. All of us smile except Peter and Bohdan, who stare, deadly serious, straight at the camera. They look scared.

  That first month Bohdan entertained us every night at dinner with the same routine. He had to wear a bib because he was still learning about cutlery and how to sit up at a big table. Early in the meal, before the bib was covered with food particles, he’d flip it over his head and grin through his baby-fat cheeks. Then he said babushka, babushk
a, until we would laugh. It was one of the last Ukrainian words he spoke, since both he and Peter had stopped speaking their first language to each other the minute our plane landed in Winnipeg.

  The boys grew almost an inch every thirty days in those first few months. We spent a lot of time watching them eat, at meals and at snacktime. They were continuously hungry and our grocery bills tripled.

  In April on my first expedition to the giant Superstore in the west end, the aisles seemed too wide and the choices obscenely abundant. Part of me remained in the Megamart in Kyiv, cringing from contact with the shoppers who flowed around me like water, wafting the scents of cheap perfume, cigarettes and liquor, musky bodies and cheese, bread and sausage. And so this big box store was a shock: I never came close to anyone, I couldn’t smell anything except cleaning supplies, and everything was arranged as illogically as possible, to drain digits from my bank card along with hours from my day.

  For the most part, Betsy stayed home with the boys. She had a very clear idea of how she wanted to parent and manage the household with its new members. Before we had them, we’d talked about raising kids in general terms, and agreed easily that we would stay organized, continue to have date nights, be egalitarian with the chores and loving with the boys: there would be, for example, no corporal punishment. While Betsy was on leave I would focus on my writing. But I at least had utterly failed to picture how any of this would work out in reality.