The Silence of Trees (26 page)

"I have to go," he said to me. "It’s my destiny. I’m going to help people, and I’ll be back soon."

But he never came back.

Mama Paraska told me, "There is balance in the Universe." But how was this balance? I kept losing people that I cared about; that was not balance. I wish I could let it go. Just let go of all this heartache and be happy. I wished I could be free like when I was a young girl. But I had lost that too.

I asked aloud: "Why don’t you give me any answers? How do I let go?"

Then I sat down in a pew, rested my head in my hands, and cried.

"Mama?"

Katya startled me, putting her hand on my shoulder.

"Shh," I said, wiping my eyes.

"You okay?"

She walked around and sat down next to me.

"I’m fine," I said. "I just needed to cry. All better. Are you okay?"

"Sure. I’m fine." But her eyes were red too.

"Any news?" I asked her, looking in my purse for a handkerchief.

"No." She stared at the candles. "Mama, what are you doing here?"

"I don’t know. I just ended up here somehow."

"But who were you talking to?" she said, not looking at me.

"Mykola. God. I don’t know."

"But you’re crying," she said and turned to look at me.

"It’s okay. I cry sometimes."

"But my dream—" she began, but I interrupted her.

"Don’t worry about your dream," I said.

"You know it was an omen, you said so yourself." She looked past me at the wall. "Ma, why can’t we talk?"

"We talk all the time. I see you more than any of my other children. We talk almost three times a week."

"That’s not what I mean." Katya stared behind me. "Why can’t we talk like women? Like adults? We always carry on these general conversations, these snappy remarks, this defensive posturing—"

"I don’t understand."

"Always skirting around the real conversation."

"No, I mean you’re using words that I don’t understand. Remember, I am not a Ph.D."

"See, you’re finding ways to change the subject."

I saw she was getting upset because she started rubbing her hands together, "I’m not changing the subject. I’m just not sure that I know what you mean."

"It makes me sad, Mama. So sad that you don’t know me—"

"Of course, I know you. You’re my daughter."

"—and I don’t know you. You are such a mystery to me, all locked up with so many secrets. From you, I learned that some things are best kept to oneself. That we need to protect the ones we love from truths that will hurt them. From you, I learned that silence is an acceptable alternative." She was sobbing through her words, as if each one was growing more difficult for her to say. "But it’s not okay, Mama. It’s not okay. I want to know you, the real you. Before you die."

I moved closer to her and put my arm around her.

"What do you want to know?" My words terrified me, because I was afraid of what she would ask. "What is there left to know about an old woman, a Baba?"

"Everything."

Everything. There was too much.

"Tell me about the girl you once were. The one you lost."

So, she’d listened to me pray, but I didn’t have the energy to get angry.

Katya pulled away from my embrace and continued, "Tell me about your Mama, about your life and why you left home. Tell me about the war, about your dreams, about your secrets."

"This is not the time or place—"

"Don’t!" she said, her eyes bright. "Don’t put it off any more."

"But what if there is news?"

"Zirka will find us. She knows where I am. Please, Mama."

I sighed and sat there for a moment. How could I find the words? Could I really tell my daughter this?

Part of me wanted to be rid of the weight on my heart, to allow someone else to carry it with me, but another part was so afraid to let it go.

"What for, Katya?" I asked her. "What is the point? It won’t change the past. It can’t bring back the dead."

Katya looked at me and said, "But it can change things, Ma. It can teach me something about you, and it can help you to let go of some of that pain you carry around."

Of course, she was right. I buried my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes and my cheeks. It would change things. It would change how my daughter saw me, and I was afraid of what she would think of her mama. I had worked hard to create a life for myself, for my family. I was supposed to be a strong and wise old woman. Like my Baba. Like my Mama.

"Katya, what do you see . . . what do you see when you look at your mama?" I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying.

She stared at me for a moment and said, "I see a woman who has lived her whole life trying to be strong, trying to carry the world around so life will be easier for her family. Mama, what are you so afraid of?"

My intuitive daughter asked the right question. I was afraid.

"I’m afraid of being found out," I said with a sob. "I am a phony, Katya. I am living the wrong life. I left them all, my family. I should have been there. I should have been dead. I should have never left, but I did, and it’s all my fault!" The tears were hot on my cheeks, and I was ashamed of crying in front of my child. I couldn’t look at her, but I continued. "This isn’t the life I was supposed to live, and so I have to be someone else. That’s my secret. That’s what I carry around." And I told her about the stone and the river and going to see the vorozhka and finding the barn on fire ". . . the cries of the sheep, like children, the sound of the flames like raging, angry winds rushing through the barn."

I hadn’t told her about Stephan yet. Through my tears I saw Zirka walk into the chapel.

"The doctors are there with an update," she said, stepping towards us. Then she changed her mind, turned around, and left.

Katya looked me in the eye. "Thank you, Mama." She stood up and offered me her hand. "I would really like to hear more."

She hugged me, and we walked together. I was terrified to hear what the doctors would say. We walked up to the waiting room, where the doctors were explaining things to Anna and Taras. The others were standing nearby, listening. Why hadn’t they waited for me? I was Pavlo’s wife. I’m sure they figured I could not understand. My sons would explain it to me later. The doctors said that the surgery had gone well, and Pavlo was in the ICU. They needed to monitor him, but he seemed to be doing well. Because of his age, they had to watch him carefully.

"I recommend that you go home and get some rest," the young doctor said. "You can see him in the morning."

"I want to see my husband." I said stubbornly. "I will wait."

Everyone went home, except for Katya, who stayed with me. We dozed on each other’s shoulders in the waiting room. When Pavlo finally came out of the anesthesia, a nurse came to get me.

Pavlo was connected to so many machines that he didn’t look like himself at all. He looked so weak, so bruised, so old. I wanted to cry when I saw him, but I smiled at him instead and took his hand.

"You’re going to be all right," I said to him. "Rest now. I love you."

He looked me in the eye and nodded. Then he squeezed my hand lightly and closed his eyes.

Pavlo fell asleep and Katya drove me home, promising to pick me up in a few hours. It was already morning. I sat on the back steps to watch shades of plum and salmon reach beyond the horizon, crawl up the sky behind the birch, toward the moon.

I almost lost Pavlo.

I looked at the birch tree, and I couldn’t believe that she was thirty years old. Pavlo and I planted her in the backyard after I started to come to terms with Mykola’s death. She kept me rooted to this place. I would never leave our house, our yard. Never move away because I was tied to that land, like I was once tied to the land of my birth.

The birch was so young, so different from the ancient trees back home and the trees in the DP camp. The trees at home taught me to find strength in my roots, to rely on my foundation. From the trees in camp I learned about peace and healing. Those trees echoed the lessons of my Baba, that we are all connected.

Back home, these lessons were taught in songs and stories passed along by grandmothers, wise women who held a cherished place in the circle of community. I thought someday to take my place among them. But the war had broken the cycle and torn millions of people away from the bosoms of their mothers. We were forever searching to recapture all that we had lost . . . connections to blood, to bones, to earth.

And connections resurface . . . refuse to be denied.

Soon it would be Halloween, the night when American children ran around with bags of candy and faces that are not their own. The night when spirits walked on the Earth to deliver messages and remind the living. My dead were no exception. Even buried so far away they had found me. What messages would they bring me this year?

Pavlo.

I couldn’t bring myself to go to sleep; I felt unsettled, so I sat for a while longer, just listening to the birds begin their songs. Pavlo always hated their early cries. He swore they sang outside our window just to torment him. How he could hear them through all his snoring I would never know.

I heard the phone ringing and ran inside.

"Mama . . . Tato’s dead," Katya said. "He died a few minutes ago. His heart just stopped."

Crawling in the sheets, I fear

burying you in my dreams where

your tears drop as water

trickling from the sky, and I am

an instant of devastating white.

—Fiona Sze-Lorrain, "Fragile"

from
Water the Moon

(Marick Press, 2009)

The first few weeks after Pavlo died, the business of death kept me calm and focused. I was so busy with the particulars that I didn’t have time to think. I had to notify his friends and acquaintances, pick out his burial clothes, and buy his tombstone. There was the wake and the burial. I was touched by the little details attended to by family and friends, details I couldn’t remember.

Taras placed a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of Pavlo’s burial suit, and Zirka brought a beautiful framed photo of the entire family, taken at the last family wedding, which was placed in his hands. Ivanka hid her first wood carving—a tiny wooden dove—in the coffin beside him. Pavlo’s friend Yuri Radchenko brought a handful of soil carried from Ukraine to toss on the coffin as we watched it being lowered into the ground. It would have made Pavlo happy to be buried with a little earth from home. Katya prepared a large batch of kutia, the ancient porridge of wheat and honey, to be served at the meal in the cultural center following the burial.

At the cultural center, friends and family reminisced about Pavlo, sharing stories and laughing at his pranks. They applauded his garden and tomatoes; they praised his large, beautiful family; and during solemn moments, they broke into several, spontaneous chants of "Vichnaya Pamyat," Eternal Memory. I sat in a fog, smiling and nodding but not really participating.

The phone kept ringing every day for weeks, as friends and family expressed their sympathy and offered comfort. Sorting through Pavlo’s clothes, I gave things away to our children and grandchildren. It was the details, the busy work, that initially kept me from grieving.

Then one morning, I woke up early and prepared to get out of bed before I heard Pavlo’s snoring. That was when it hit me. There would be no more snoring. I didn’t have to get out of bed. What did I have to get up for? I didn’t need to make Pavlo’s breakfast or wash his clothes. The house was clean because there was no one around to dirty it up. I was alone. I wept because I would never hear Pavlo snore again.

I stayed in bed all day. I couldn’t eat. I wouldn’t answer the phone. Mark let himself in that afternoon because he worried when I didn’t answer the phone. He found me in bed and panicked.

"What’s wrong, Mama? Are you hurt? Sick?"

"I’m fine. Just leave me alone. Go away."

Eventually, he fed Khvostyk and left, but he must have told his brother and sisters what he had seen because one of them came by to check on me every day for the next several weeks. Some days, I made it out of bed; other days, I didn’t. Poor Khvostyk was grateful for the automatic feeders Katya brought to the house. When I did eat, it was mostly tea and bread with butter. The kids kept my fridge well stocked, but so much went to waste. I lost a lot of weight, and I think I was preparing myself to die, to join Pavlo, Mykola, and the rest of my late family members.

On one of her visits, Katya asked me to make her a new scarf: black with red embroidery. She bought material—so soft to the touch—and ruby red thread, and she left them on my nightstand. When I woke the next morning, I saw Ana sitting at the foot of my bed. She looked young, like she when I met her on the boat.

It’s not your time, darling. You have to get out of bed.

"I’m not ready," I said. "What am I supposed to do? The kids all have their lives, their families. No one needs me anymore. I am alone. What am I supposed to do with my time?"