Lesya played with the kistka in her hands. "Baba, don’t prejudge him. You spent time in Germany; you know that they’re not all bad people."
"Lesya, they killed my family. Who knows what else they did to them first? I’ve had fifty years to imagine all kinds of cruelty." I threaded my needle with black thread. "It’s even harder for your Dido. His experiences were more horrible than mine. Talk with him, Lesya. Hear his stories."
"What about your stories, Ma? I’ve been waiting to hear your stories for most of my life. It’s ironic that the woman who gave me my love of storytelling refuses to share any of her own." Katya tried to catch my gaze.
Impatient, Lesya took her egg out of the dye and began to trace her next pattern in wax. Her egg was a pale salmon color, barely there.
I ignored her question. But I knew Katya: Once she started something, she would want to finish it. Snakes wound around Katya’s egg, entwining around the circle. Her hand was so still. She almost didn’t have to look at the egg, she drew with such assurance.
She started again: "What was it like in Germany? I know I was born there, but I don’t remember anything."
I tried to think of something safe to share. Something that would show them that I understood, that I was not too old to be right.
"It was not all horrible," I said. "We had some good times. Did you know that my first assignment in Germany was to work as a housekeeper in the home of an Oberst, a German colonel?
"The Oberst was unmarried and lived with his parents in a beautiful mansion. I had never seen such wealth. Gold and silver. Art on the walls. Fancy furniture. He was even given a medal for bravery. It was a clasp with oak leaves and swords, decorated with fifty diamonds. It was amazing. He kept it locked in a safe when he wasn’t wearing it. The wealth he had amassed was unbelievable, like a dream.
"They gave me a small room. I had never had my own room before. Never since. It had a small bed with white sheets and a white pillow. The sheets were so soft, and the room always smelled like pine. There was a painting of sunflowers on the wall. I would stare at them while lying in bed and dream of my Mama’s garden at home, her sunflowers.
"In return, I would clean the house, bring them their meals if they ate in their rooms, attend to them at the table if they ate in the dining room, mend the commander’s uniforms and wash clothes. I helped the cook and gardener and did many other small tasks.
"The Oberst’s parents were nearly blind, so I would read to them from books written in German. I had learned to read a little German at home, and some more on the trains, but that was where I really began to learn the language.
"The old woman liked me and treated me like a daughter. Her mind was falling apart and she would sometimes confuse me with people from her past: her sister, her mother, her baby girl who died in childbirth. She would sit and talk with me, telling me stories of the time before the war, before the First World War, when Germany was still great. With frail fingers, she would point at portraits on the walls, identifying the men and women who watched me as I washed the floors and dusted. Once I baked her a medivnyk, my Mama’s recipe for honey bread, and she said it was the best bread she had ever tasted."
Katya reached over and placed her egg in the brown dye. She rested her chin in her palms, elbows on the table, watching Lesya.
"But her husband, the Oberst’s father, only grumbled," I continued. "He did not like me, but had no choice but to tolerate me. The old man was ashamed that he couldn’t take care of himself, that I had to clean his bedpan and bathe him. He always avoided my eyes and muttered under his breath in German. Most of the time he was silent, lying in his bed and staring out the window at the gardens. On sleepless nights, when I wandered the halls, I often caught a glimpse of him weeping in forgotten corners of the house.
"The Oberst was kind to me. He was handsome and tall, very strong, and even spoke a little Ukrainian from having been stationed near Rivne for almost a year. He was smart, spoke five languages and had a deep raspy voice that made the German girls swoon. When I would go to the market with the cook, the German maids of other soldiers would curse me out of envy. You see, the Oberst had fallen in love with me."
Both women looked at me, eyes wide with disbelief. I smiled, "He would bring me bouquets of flowers for my room and tried to find me books in Ukrainian or Russian that I could read before I went to sleep. He was kind. He told me how grateful he was for my service, praised me for the kindness I showed his parents, told me how beautiful I was. But I could not forgive him for what his kind had done to my family. When I told him, he begged me on his knees not to blame him. He said he had nothing to do with it. He begged me to stay with him, to marry him after the war was over."
"Wow," said Lesya, shaking her head.
"You see," I continued, "I was once young and beautiful. There have been many men who have fallen in love with me. Not just your Dido. My life could have been so different." I laughed to myself.
"But after I rejected him, I couldn’t stay there much longer. He would come home after being gone for a week or two, and he would stare at me with broken eyes. It hurt my heart, made me uncomfortable to receive his kindness without giving him what he wanted.
"Many Ukrainian girls would have stayed. Many did. Others had a much more difficult time; their soldiers were not as kind. Taking what they wanted, not asking. But after that, I stayed in the work camps. Well, until the Americans came. It was later, at the Displaced Persons Camp, where I met your Dido.
"Lesya, you’re not working on your egg," I said. "That’s enough of the past for now."
"But Baba, I can’t believe it. I never knew—" Lesya said, picking up her egg.
"Well, there is much that you don’t know about your Baba."
I watched as Lesya tried so hard to draw straight lines.
"Don’t be so concerned with perfection, Lesya," Katya said to her niece. "It’s not about the perfect line; it’s about the emotion behind the symbols. Let the egg tell your story."
I stood up. "Does anyone want coffee or tea?"
Both shook their heads. I sat back down again. No use brewing just for one cup.
Katya reached over and took her egg out of the brown dye. Lesya handed hers over, and Katya placed it in the dye.
"Brown is a symbol of the Earth and the harvest," she explained. "After you take out your egg, Lesya, cover in wax everything you want to stay brown."
Lesya looked over at me. "But Baba, you saw that all Germans were not cruel. You know that they are not all the same."
"Lesya, I left him. You see, I could have had it easy, living there with the commander. I would not have had the kind of hard life your Dido and I had here in Chicago when we arrived. Then again, who knows? With the way the war ended? We cannot predict our futures. We also cannot go back to retrace paths we did not choose.
"Sometimes the easy choice is not the right one. You know that. We all have to make hard choices."
I looked toward Katya.
Her kistka gently resting in her hand, Katya began to evoke small waves in wax on the brown egg, surrounding the snakes with swirling waters. Katya saw me watching her and grinned.
"The water is for purity of thought and action. These are the Waters of Life. They are filled with the energy of Creation. When I finish with the brown color and put the egg in the black dye, everything that isn’t covered in wax will turn black. It will form a sort of reverse meander, spirals that shadow the earlier brown ones. Waves of the Waters of Death to match the Waters of Life." With that, she placed the egg in the final dye: the black.
Katya then pulled Lesya’s egg out of the brown dye and handed it to her.
"Don’t rush," she told her. "This isn’t a race. I’ve been doing this for a long time."
I turned back to my embroidery. Katya began to sketch her next pattern on a fresh egg. The silence was too heavy.
"Embroidery has symbolic meaning too," I said while stitching. I’m the grandmother. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one imparting w
isdom? "Red is for vitality and love. Black is for the chornozem, the rich black earth. Sometimes it is also the color of sadness."
More silence, except for the scraping of copper on eggshell, the whirr of thread through cloth, and Khvostyk crunching on his cat food nuggets in the kitchen.
"On pysanky, black is the color of eternity. It represents the past, present and future, where they connect and overlap."
I wanted to tell them it’s true. The past and present and future did overlap. The dead could haunt you even when you tried to keep them buried. I was going to try and forget about this envelope. I was going to pretend it never came. After all, what else could I do? I didn’t know who it was from. Maybe it was a mistake.
"See, it’s the black that unites all the other symbols. They may seem disjointed when you first paint them on one color at a time, one line at a time, a bunch of separate shapes."
Could Pavlo have opened it? Could he have removed the letter? No. He would never have done that. It must have been the post office in Ukraine, always looking for money, always looking for a conspiracy.
"But when you look at them all together, they tell a story. You need all of them to get the entire picture."
Katya pulled her egg out of the black dye and put Lesya’s egg in. This part always amazed me, from the time I was a young girl. The egg always looked so ugly when you took it out of the black dye. Covered in thick layers of discolored wax, you would never think that underneath it all there was a beautiful pysanka.
"Here comes my favorite part of all." Katya peered at her pysanka. "The unveiling." Katya smiled and glanced over at me. She held the egg gently next to her candle flame. "If you put the egg directly above the candle, it will burn, so be careful."
Katya took a soft cloth out of her pocket and gently wiped away the wax that had melted from the heat. A beautiful design began to emerge. "After it dries, I’ll cover it in varnish." She held it up.
"You see: Now the egg is whole. You never really know what it’s going to look like until you melt away the wax. Then all the parts come together, and the story is revealed."
PART TWO
Roots
A tree uses what comes its way to nurture
itself. By sinking its roots deeply into the
earth, by accepting the rain that flows
towards it, by reaching out to the sun,
the tree perfects its character
and becomes great.
. . . Absorb, absorb, absorb.
That is the secret of the tree.
—Deng Ming-Dao
from Everyday Tao
(HarperOne, 1996)
CHAPTER SEVEN
As the months passed, I tried to go on with my life, but there was a heaviness on my heart that I could not shake. Each morning, I took the envelope out of the cedar box and searched for clues. It had grease stains in the corners and a coffee stain on the back. Each day, I scanned the mail for a new letter. Part of me felt like I was dying, and I began to withdraw more and more from my family. I lost weight and didn’t get my hair cut or styled. I had little energy and stopped taking my daily walks.
I kept thinking about my parents, about my sisters. Was it my fault they died? What if I had never gone to see the vorozhka? What if I had stayed home that night? Could I have saved them? Who found me? Why now?
My daughter Zirka believed I was "depressed" and needed medicine. Taras thought I was tired from working so hard and offered to buy us a dishwasher. Katya made me beautiful, brightly colored pysanky, no doubt trying to use her creative magic to effect a positive change.
Only Pavlo didn’t seem to react. As long as I made his meals, washed his clothes, and kept a clean house, his world was secure. He visited with friends, went to church, watched soccer at Slawko’s Bar. I did nothing to interrupt his routine, so he noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Honestly, I was relieved when Pavlo left the house each day. I could then sit on the couch and stare out the window or watch television. Unless interrupted by the phone or guests, I would fall asleep for hours in the afternoon.
On mornings when Pavlo didn’t leave the house, I would escape to the garden. As the weather grew warmer, he spent more time in the air-conditioned house, leaving me to my sanctuary. On the Feast Day of St. Yuri, I went outside with the excuse of tying crimson and gold ribbons around the birch tree in the backyard. I secured the bow and then sat down in the grass, leaning against the garage for shade and support. Flakes of blue-gray paint crumbled under the pressure of my back. Pavlo had been saying he would repaint the garage for the last two years, but still I faced that peeling paint each time I stepped out of the back porch. And what an awful shade of blue. I didn’t know what he was thinking when he chose that color fifteen years ago. It must have been on sale.
But the garden, the garden was Pavlo’s art and passion. Each dusk since spring’s arrival, he was out there whispering Ukrainian love songs to the peas and potatoes. He gently checked each new leaf, each new bud. The tomato plants got more affection than I did. I reached over and plucked off a leaf, brushing it against my lips.
Andriy Polotsky.
Something about the smell of the tomato plant always reminded me of Andriy Polotsky. Not the tomatoes, which were still green but growing larger. No, it was the smell of the leaves. Deep green in color, covered with fine white hairs. A clean smell . . . like lemon rind or fresh-pressed paper or mornings when the rains begin to gently fall just as the sun is rising.
***
Long before I met Andriy, I met his mother. After I left the household of the German Oberst, I was re-assigned to a machinery parts factory. My hands went from healing and household chores to assembling intricate pieces of metal that we were told would be used for automotive parts. One of the girls swore that a German soldier told her we were assembling parts for weapons. The thought that I could somehow be helping the German cause was too much to handle, until I concocted my revenge. I decided that I would curse every piece of metal I touched, so the weapons would all backfire on the soldiers who held them.
As I worked, I would imagine all kinds of violent malfunctions: guns exploding, tanks firing inward, grenades detonating in hands and pockets. I invoked all the spirits of fire to help me in my vengeance. I went so far as to imagine graphic deaths for Hitler and his henchmen. Only these daydreams helped pass the time and made life bearable. Every night when I left the factory, I would try to stop thinking about the soldiers and my revenge. Baba always said that once you uttered a prayer or a curse, you must trust that God will make it so.
When I was placed in the factory, I was also transferred to an all-women’s barracks in a German work camp. The oldest woman in the barracks was Andriy Polotsky’s mama, and she took it upon herself to mother the rest of us, most of whom were half her age. Paraska Polotsky was her name, and she was the shortest woman I had ever seen in my life. I was nearly a head and a half taller than she was, and I had not yet stopped growing. Her long blonde hair was woven into a single braid that she wrapped several times around her head. When she let it down before going to sleep, it reached the floor, a single streak of silver spreading down the center. She wore tiny oval glasses–without which she could not see–and her cheeks were always flushed.
She asked us to call her Mama Paraska, because she had no daughters, and so we did. Many of the girls had lost their mothers in the war, and Mama Paraska filled that void in our lives. If we felt sick, she knew the herbs to prescribe and they always worked–when we were lucky enough to find them around the women’s barracks. When we had nightmares, Mama Paraska made us satchels stuffed with sweet grasses to chase away the demons. Often, one of the girls would cry on her shoulder at night, falling asleep in her strong arms.
I had been lucky enough to get the bed next to hers, so on nights when she had no weeping visitors, she and I would talk in the darkness. Sometimes I would watch her brush her long blond hair with its streak of gray, her cheeks flushed with exhaustion, eyes puffy and tired
. Her hands would shake, knuckles swollen, fingers bruised. I was amazed at how old they looked compared with her beautiful face. Her skin was so smooth, the only deep lines settled in around her eyes and the creases of her smile. From laughter, she told me, because of the joy her son, Andriy, had brought into her life. When I asked her about her husband, she would only furrow her brow and say, “Men are worthless.” Then remembering her son, she would smile. “Except for my son. Andriy is an angel. All other men are worthless.”
Mama Paraska winked her right eye. She always did this to emphasize a point, so her right eyelid permanently drooped a little lower than her left, giving her face a soft and sleepy look.
“Nadya, the only thing certain in life is children,” she said. “Men, they come and go. Friends, they come and go. But babies–“ She took a deep breath and smiled. “–babies are your life, your future. They are the ones who will take care of you when you are old. They are the ones who will tell your stories when you are gone. Your children will keep you alive.”
She stopped and handed me her brush. I moved closer to her, smelling on her skin sweat and garlic from her kitchen duty. As I began to brush her hair, she continued, “Children hold inside themselves a piece of your soul. There is no stronger connection.”
When I brought the brush up to the crown of her head, she sighed. Her shoulders relaxed a little as the tension began to slip away. Sometimes she would hum songs from home under her breath, but this time we sat in silence.
The sound of the brush crept into my memories, tempting the past to rush into the present: my own mama’s hair, thick and brown; the dimples in her cheeks; the sweet, burnt smell of cinnamon; the circle-shaped scar on her left arm that burned white against her tanned skin; the way she tapped her foot when she was angry and clicked her tongue when I disobeyed.
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