Tailor of Inverness, The (20 page)

24: Communing with my Ghosts

My grandmother Zofia Zajac, nee Baldys c.1925

Today Taras is our driver once more. Lesia takes me to the registrar’s office in Terebovlia, about 35km to the east. She has arranged an appointment there for us to explore its archive. We are met by the registrar, a garrulous woman in her fifties with a careless glamour, smart and made up, but not worried about creasing her clothes or ruffling her hair as she focusses on her job. She rifles through her records and goes back to 1905, where she finds the record of my grandparents’ marriage, which took place in Mozoliwka. We find out that four years later, in 1909, Andrzej’s mother, Catharina died at the age of 75. She must have been Ukrainian too, to be in these records. Then on through all the Zajac children the registrar can find from 1905 to around 1924. There are around 25 of them from the Gnilowody area, from several Zajac families, but no boys.

These are the Ukrainian registers, so all of the recorded births from mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages are for daughters who would be raised as Ukrainians. My father and his brothers will be in a Polish register somewhere, if it still exists. I’m still getting used to this peculiarity. There is Emilia, born in 1906. And I discover that there were two other daughters born to Zofia and Andrzej, two more sisters, two more aunts of mine: Anna, born in 1910, who died of chickenpox at the age of 12 on the 3
^rd
of September 1922, and Maria, who was born on the 2
^nd
of April 1921, and who died four years later, on the 2
^nd
of June 1925, cause unknown. Anna and Maria were never mentioned by my father. What heartbreak for Zofia, Andrzej and their surviving children. It’s clear from looking through these registers that infant mortality was common then.

I’m determined to visit Gnilowody again under my own steam. I made enquiries earlier in the week about getting hold of a bike. Lesia’s brother Hrihoriy, has a friend, Oleg Cyganovich, who has two bikes. Oleg has agreed to go with me. He’s a boyish 41-year-old, unmarried. For the past few years, he’s made a living by working in Poland for three months
or so then living off the proceeds with his mother in Pidhaitsi for the rest of the year. We’ve agreed to meet at 10.00am outside the Kalba family shop in the centre of the town. I get there ten minutes early and its drizzling. Hrihoriy and a few others are already there, ready to start a day’s labouring.

Though Hrihoriy is only back home from Kyiv for a few days, he seems happy at the prospect of the work in hand. They’re digging the foundations for a new building, a shop with a doctor’s surgery above it. It’s next to the existing shop on a site which was blown up during the war. It’s a dog of a task: there are large blocks of masonry and metal which have been buried just below the surface for 60 years. These must be dug out and removed. They’ve already dug a rectangular trench about 80cm deep.

Oleg arrives, without the bikes and dressed for labouring. He hasn’t expected me to turn up, with the weather looking bad. Hrihoriy tries to dissuade me. ‘It’s cold and wet out in the fields.’ But it’s my last day. We stand around while they joke about the idea. Bogdan has already intimated that he thinks I’m daft. I join in the joke, but I won’t budge. They relent and Oleg nips off to his house. He returns about 20 minutes later, sitting on one bike and pulling the other by his side. By this time, Miroslav has turned up, as amused by the whole venture as everyone else. Wouldn’t I rather ‘trinken schnapps’?

Hrihoriy then decides he’s going to come, or perhaps his father tells him to accompany me, so we go down to his parents’ house, where he changes. His bike is in a bit of a state. It looks like it hasn’t been ridden for months, the gears are dodgy, so there’s a further delay while Oleg fetches a neighbour’s bike. And then they decide this one’s worse so they return it. Hrihoriy has wrapped up in four layers of sporty clothes. He carries a black plastic bag, which I assume contains food. It’s 11 o’clock by the time we get moving. But then we have to go to Oleg’s so Hrihoriy can borrow a pair of his trainers. We cycle the 300 metres back into the centre, by which time Bogdan is out,
chatting on the pavement with his pals and watching the world go by. After a few salutations, we’re finally off.

Going down the steep hill into the river valley to leave the little town, I quickly discover that my brakes are almost
non-existent
and very noisy, but I’m delighted to be out on the road. It’s quite a climb after that and I power on, welcoming the opportunity to exercise after over a week of excessive eating and drinking. I look back. Oleg and Hrihoriy are 300 metres behind me, walking their bikes up the hill. I stop and wait for them. We pass a neglected old Soviet war memorial, an inscribed concrete block on a patch of scrubby grass attended by a couple of foraging chickens. We climb another hill, passing a horse-drawn cart very slowly, and then we leave the road, veering off to the left, by an old collective farm headquarters.

A group of workers are haymaking. Oleg and Hrihoriy ask the way, shouting across the field. We carry on and pass another group digging up beets. We check the way again. We’re on a rutted track. We freewheel down to a T junction and I find I’m miles ahead again. The beet diggers are in the distance and I get my video camera out. Hrihoriy takes this as a cue. ‘Hello from the Ukrainian-Scottish expedition to Hnilowody!’ His shouts attract the attention of an old man who appears out of the wood beside the road. He looks like he lives in there. He’s stocky, with a huge round ruddy face and laugh lines round his eyes so deep you could plant potatoes in them. His hands are encrusted in dirt, pudgy, with fingers as thick as sausages. We ask him the way too. He’s jolly and interested in our trip. Hrihoriy reaches into his plastic bag and produces two copies of a newspaper he works on,
Miska Brama
, a regular publication full of news and historical reminiscences. His company publishes copies specifically for each of the numerous
raions
(small administrative districts) of Western Ukraine. He gives the copies to the old man. Hrihoriy has decided to use our excursion to spread the word. ‘
Miska Brama
is a patriotic nationalist newspaper. In Hnilowody, I know that all the people there are patriotic nationalists.’

‘
Prosto
,
prosto
,
prosto
!’ is the direction we need to follow, which seems simple enough. It is. We maintain a roughly straight line east for seven or eight kilometres. The terrain is rolling arable land, with few trees and little birdsong. Much of it is fallow. In places, the track is strewn with the detritus of harvested maize. We pass another group of workers bent to the beets. We also pass a couple of primitive concrete crosses, one of them cracked and crooked. Hrihoriy alerts us to them, and he and Oleg remove their baseball caps. I’m not wearing a hat, so it’s not an issue.

After half an hour or so, we’re in a shallow valley. A little line of trees becomes visible in the distance and below it, a building or two. This is Gnilowody. We’re approaching from a different direction, the direction my father would have taken from Pidhaitsi on foot, on horseback or on the sleigh. I recall his story about being chased by the wolves. That was on this route. It takes me a few moments to realise that the line of trees is the one I walked through a few days previously, the one leading to the cemetery. The terrain opens out as we reach the village. The track curves to the left over a boggy patch, and round to the right to become the main street. We pause, a couple of hundred metres short of the first house. It’s quiet, save for several groups of ducks and geese waddling about among the haystacks and the grazing cows. An old woman in a headscarf walks hand-in-hand with a child over the hill to our right. A horse and cart, driven by a man in a flat cap, pulls out of the village along a track to our left. It could be any time. Another track comes over the hill on our right to converge with ours, the one we took in the car a few days previously.

We trundle on. There aren’t many people about, it’s Saturday lunchtime. A couple of boys play with a ball. A spunky little girl on a scooter, wearing white with a white ribbon in her
blonde ponytail and dark, wire-frame glasses, asks me who I am. Her mucky little sister toddles about in a T-shirt, nothing else, still amazed at the wonder of walking. We see more children and I’m heartened. This seems to contradict Lesia’s assertion that Gnilowody is moribund, like so many of Ukraine’s villages, populated only by old people and alcoholics. But then it is Saturday. Maybe these are the children of sons and daughters visiting from the city.

Hrihoriy hails a burly, bearded man and explains who we are. We smoke a cigarette and saunter along to the centre of the village and the pretty, wooden, Orthodox church. Its little silver domes look as if they have been wrapped in tin foil. The man fetches a small, lively woman of around 35. She opens up the church for us. Inside, it’s a delightful grotto of colour and sparkling metal. The walls are covered with icons which have the traditional, geometric tapestry cloths hung about them. The altar is festooned with crosses and candles. Metal rings hold banner poles in place at the end of each pew, the banners protected by orange floral sleeves. I turn my video camera in a circle and there, in a corner, is a painted
inscription
, dated 1884.

My understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet has developed sufficiently for me to recognise my own name. The inscription is referring to the earlier Mateusz Zajac, my great-grandfather, the former head man of the village.

Hrihoriy’s English isn’t great, but he tries to translate. ‘It says that Matvi Zajac looked after this church…’ ‘So he was like a caretaker? Like this woman today, making sure it’s kept well, cleaned, that the building is repaired?’ ‘Maybe, maybe no.’ ‘So he was like an elder, a leading member of the church congregation?’ ‘Yes, I think so.’ ‘But why is there this sign with his name on it? There must be a lot of people like him who have looked after the church. And I was told he was a Lutheran.’ ‘He must have been special to the church. Maybe
he gave it a lot of money. Your family was rich here.’ ‘Has this always been an Orthodox church?’ ‘I think so.’

My father only ever mentioned one church, and that Orthodox and Catholic priests would visit on alternate Sundays, so he attended both services. ‘Maybe that’s true.’ Of course, Orthodox to Hrihoriy is Ukrainian or Russian Orthodox, not Greek Catholic, which observes Orthodox ritual but recognises the Pope as head of the church, the Western Ukrainian hybrid which my grandmother followed.

I make a donation to the church, we kiss the altar and thank the woman, who smiles and wishes us well. Hrihoriy wants his picture taken in front of the church for his newspaper, so I oblige. The bearded man leads us along the road then hurries off. Several people with shopping bags are hanging around and then a bus appears. ‘It’s the Ternopil bus.’ The people get on and the bearded man now reappears from a lane. This time he is accompanied by a tall man in his fifties. This is the caretaker of the other church, the grander, stone-built Greek Catholic church. He opens up and we enter. The walls of the nave are painted pale yellow. The tall, narrow windows are stained with squares and triangles of red, blue, green and yellow. Soft afternoon light filters through and becomes sea-green,
dream-like
and submarine. Here too are icons and traditional tapestries, sun-ray crosses and candles, but with more space between them.

‘Before the war, this was the Polish Roman Catholic Church. This was the church your father and his family would have come to. It was built in 1935. Between 1945 and 1989, it was the headquarters of the
kolkhoz
.’

Like the Orthodox church, this one is beautifully kept. Ukrainian exiles in the US sent large sums of money to restore it during the early ‘90s. Its religious artefacts, the icons and crosses, the chalices and banners, are new or imported from other churches. There is little or nothing from the pre-war Polish church other than the building itself, which is unchanged.

As I am told of its pre-war status by the caretaker through Hrihoriy, I picture my father with his father and brothers, his mother and sister standing next to me. Not exactly a picture, more an imagined presence, which is almost tangible, the pale green dream light and the impression of silent figures standing respectfully between the pews, facing forward, eyes open: the strong features of Emilia, who I never met, prominent among them, the portrait of her with Pavlo, which I’d seen in Tekla’s house still strong in my mind; their son Teodosiy, my partisan cousin; the frail grandfather Andrzej, still tall, with his dark head of hair, but with a slight stoop in his shoulders, his head leaning forward; my grandmother Zofia, strong and kind with her handsome, generous, stoical face; the three brothers, Adam, Kazik and Mateusz, the ones who would be scattered; the boy Adam, the wild one who was the natural farmer, the civil servant Kazik, sober and responsible, and my father Mateusz, the young apprentice tailor who dreamed of making it in Warsaw, the one who caused the scandal.