8

Baba

MELANIE

Everybody I know is afraid of my father. What they don’t know is that he has a few fears of his own. There are the Communists, who he remains convinced will try to reclaim him at any moment. Then there’s the telephone, which he avoids using because he always bollixes up his English. Driving to new places puts him into a panic, too. My dad has no sense of direction. To compensate, he maps out routes in advance, carefully highlighting directions with a yellow marker.

His greatest fear of all, though, is of his own mother. Up until now, Baba has been mostly a mythical creature in my life, spoken of in hushed tones and in the past tense. You wouldn’t have known she was alive, much less that she lived just a few towns away. She stopped speaking to my dad when I was an infant. She never forgave him for marrying my mother, who is neither Ukrainian nor Catholic—and who, in Baba’s view, made things worse by going out and becoming an invalid, such a shameful burden to my dad.

Baba is a survivor. My father says she saved his life when he was a boy during the war. But whatever strength got her through those ordeals has metastasized into cruelty and hostility toward those closest to her. My step-grandfather is worse. He used to beat my father and, when they arrived in the United States, made him sleep in the spider-infested dirt cellar—then sued him for rent. The last time my mother saw Baba was when I was still in a crib; she showed up at our house while my dad was at work, threatening to tell the press of the lawsuit and ruin my father’s career.

My father has never given up hope of reconciliation. The year I turn ten, my great-uncle dies, and at the funeral, my dad begs Baba for another chance.

The reconciliation has immediate repercussions for Steph and me. Suddenly, we are thrust into Ukrainian boot camp: my dad is determined to show Baba that he can make up for lost time in teaching us our culture.

Our first test comes on Easter, which we are to celebrate at my grandparents’ house, in a tumbledown North Plainfield neighborhood that had been elegant once, a long time ago. “Lock the doors,” my father says as he turns off the highway. I watch out the car window as we roll past old wooden houses, lined up so close that no sky peeks through. As we get closer, the homes get shabbier, with weeds sprouting from the sidewalks and sofas with the springs poking out sitting on peeling porches.

Finally we pull up to my grandparents’ house, a sprawling Victorian with a steep, narrow driveway set far back from the street. Steph and I help set up my mother’s wheelchair and follow my dad as he rolls her up to the crumbling doorstep.

“Now remember, girls, you shake hands and look them straight een the eyes. No slouching, stand up straight. Do you remember what I taught you to say?”

My father has been drilling us on the phrase “Pleased to meet you” in Ukrainian, but Steph is having trouble remembering it.

“Duzhe priemno piznaty,” I pronounce slowly. “Is that right, Daddy?”

“That’s eet.”

Steph is looking pretty green. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

I feel the same way as soon as the front door opens. My grandmother, sour-faced and squeezed into a floral dress edged in bright red rickrack, takes one look at me and pronounces me “homely, but eenteresting.” My step-grandfather, whom we call Doodie, pulls himself up from his chair in front of the TV set, leaving behind a pile of toenail shavings on the floor. The house is three stories tall, but my grandfather has nailed up wallboard to block off the upper floors for what Baba called her “roomers.” My grandparents’ living quarters on the ground floor are dimly lit and violently colored, with Ukrainian embroidery everywhere—pillows, table runners, wall hangings—and religious icons and plates full of garishly colored Ukrainian Easter eggs.

I escape to the bathroom, but the long, skinny space, converted from an old butler’s pantry, isn’t much of a refuge; it has wild red-and-purple carpeting and two swinging doors that don’t lock at either end. The bathtub is filled with cloudy used bath water that my grandmother saves for later to wash the kitchen floor.

I search for my dad and find him in the kitchen, where the radiators are covered with paper towels, left to dry so they can be used again. Baba is bent over a steaming pot, making pyrohy, traditional Ukrainian dumplings filled with potatoes. I try to help with the dishes, but Baba yells at me for using too much water to wash the plates and then for using too much soap. “Vee don’t vaste-it the vater!” she cries, showing me the proper way to wash dishes, with barely any soap and a hasty rinse under a tepid trickle. Later, when my dad is away on business and sends Steph and me to stay with Baba, she will refuse to let us take showers. “Eef you wash hair too much,” she warns darkly, “leetle onions on your head weel dry up and you hair eet weel fall out.”

If I don’t think too much about hygiene, Baba’s cooking is delicious. After a few rounds of vodka for Doodie and my dad, she sets out heaping plates of ham, kielbasa, and an Easter bread she makes called paska on the kitchen table, which is covered with sticky rings left by glasses of Doodie’s favorite homemade cherry brandy. The grown-ups chatter away in Ukrainian that Steph and I can’t follow, until Baba notices that Steph isn’t eating.

“You no like-it thees kielbasa?”

Steph turns pale. “No, it’s not that. It’s just… I’m just… um… I’m… full.” She is a terrible liar.

“Stephka doesn’t eat much,” my dad cuts in. “She has sensitive stomach. But we are working on that. Right, Stephka?” He shoots Steph a warning glare.

Baba looks at Steph appraisingly. “Your tato”—Ukrainian for “daddy”—“ven he was leetle boy, he was beeg trah-ble. He had pepper een hees dupa. Stubborn, too.” Then she launches into a rant about how our father was a dreadful, colicky baby. She used to rub vinegar on his stomach to make him stop crying, she says. But it didn’t work.

“Ay-yi-yi,” she moans at the memory.

“He have-it gazzzz,” she explains. Five decades after the fact she still sounds annoyed. “He was beeg trah-ble.”

After that, we see my grandparents regularly. Every Saturday morning, Doodie shows up at our house to give Ukrainian lessons to Stephanie and me. We gather at our dining room table, the one my mother regrets buying because it’s so poorly constructed that the cheap chairs have collapsed one by one, leaving my father with yet another job on his to-do list. Steph and I exchange a nervous glance as Doodie takes his rickety seat.

“Start veeth—how you call-its?—alphabet,” Doodie commands.

“Ah, beh, veh,” we begin obediently in unison, Steph delaying saying each letter just a fraction of a second so she can hear me say it first.

Mostly, we can’t understand anything Doodie says, his accent is so thick and his syntax so garbled. My American-born uncle, John, once printed up a T-shirt with Doodie’s constant refrain: HOW YOU CALL-ITS? We manage to stumble through the Cyrillic alphabet and a few vocabulary lists. But when he moves on to the language’s complicated grammar, we’re lost.

“Thees means these one and that means those one” is one of his first lessons, which serves only to send us diving under the table pretending we’ve dropped our pencils in order to hide our laughter. Frustrated when we can’t seem to catch on, Doodie shakes his head and mutters “Ayi yi yi!” under his breath, adding a few choice expletives that are not on our vocabulary lists.

It doesn’t seem to matter how hard we work. Under Doodie’s tutelage our progress is glacial, and my grandparents let us know they are terribly disappointed. After a while, our sessions dwindle and eventually stop altogether. Doodie gives up on us.

My dad keeps trying. That summer, he packs Steph and me off to language immersion camp at Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian resort in the Catskill Mountains. Set amid thick woods, Soyuzivka was once a sanitarium for Social Register swells looking for a “nature rest cure”—a nice way of saying it was where rich alcoholics went to dry out or depressed ones went to get away. The doctor who originally built the place was the son of the New York Times editor in chief who broke the Tammany Hall scandal, and his patients supposedly included New Yorker editor Harold Ross and the writers O. Henry, James Thurber, and E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web. During the 1920s, so many literary types swarmed the sanitarium that it was nicknamed “the New Yorker Retreat.”

But by the time the Ukrainians moved in, its society roots were long forgotten. The sanitarium had closed during World War II and had languished until it was converted into a modest resort that catered mostly to shell-shocked Ukrainian immigrants. The newly christened Soyuzivka was modeled on retreats back home in the Carpathian Mountains, right down to the Slavic-village-style buildings with names like “Odessa” and “Kyiv.”

When my dad drops me off at camp and pulls away, all I want is to run after the car and go home with him. I try to hold back my tears. Some of the other girls gather around, attempting to comfort me, but they’re speaking in Ukrainian, and I don’t know what they’re saying. I cry myself to sleep that first night.

Dawn has barely broken when I’m jolted awake by a shrill whistle.

“Mo… Lyt… Va!”

My eyes fly open. I look around the bunk, noticing the sun’s first rays glinting through a window, trying to remember where I am.

“Mo… Lyt… Va!”

The whistle blows again. It’s the pani komandantka, the female commander who runs the camp, shouting, “Stavanya!” Wake up! Time for prayers.

I stumble outside, following the other campers, watching to see what I’m supposed to do. We line up like soldiers. A couple of campers step forward to raise American and Ukrainian flags. The girls start singing “Bozhe Velyki,” a Ukrainian anthem I have never heard before. I mouth nonsense words along with them.

The flag ceremony complete, the pani komandantka turns toward us to lead us in prayer. In Ukrainian. Then makes announcements. Also in Ukrainian. Then, apparently, she dismisses us, because suddenly I’m standing by myself, everyone scattering in different directions and me looking around, still in front of the flagpole, trying to figure out where I belong.

Over the next few days, I scramble after the other girls, trying to figure out how to keep up with the babble of Ukrainian all around. My one reprieve is when the whistle blows and we rush to line up, by height, to march like soldiers to the next activity. At last, I think the first time. Something I’m good at! I can keep a beat with the best of them. But then the chanting starts.

“Ras! Ya ne chuyu. Dva! Holosnishe,” everyone shouts as they march. I move my lips soundlessly, trying hard to memorize the words that are meaningless to me. This is how I’m going to survive the next two weeks.

Almost all of our seventy or so campmates already speak Ukrainian and chatter on fluently during meals and while swimming, marching, and sitting around the campfire. I am lost, finding it impossible to make friends. Somehow Steph, who knows even less Ukrainian than I do, is unfazed by the language barrier. She doesn’t care if she can’t understand directions, perhaps because she doesn’t pay much attention in English, either. Her easy warmth fills in where words can’t as she throws herself into Ukrainian songs, dances, and traditional crafts like embroidery. Soon even the harshest pani komandantka is won over.

“Daddy, let me come home! Please!” I beg when my dad arrives for visiting day. I am sobbing, miserable, as we sit in his parked car with the windows rolled down.

He looks at me, his face betraying equal parts pity and shame.

“You must discipline yourself,” he says finally, ending the conversation. Ignoring my tears, he turns to Steph. “So, Stephka, which of the girls do you like most? Do you haf a best friend?”

“No, Daddy.”

His face falls for just a moment. But by then she has already thrown her arms open wide.

“I love them all!”

The following summer, I get a break. I am to start Ukrainian camp one week late, because I’m preparing for my first full solo recital, which I’ll perform at Soyuzivka. My father takes great pains planning my program. He digs up some Ukrainian music and teaches me his own favorite piece, Massenet’s heartrending “Méditation” from Thaïs, a piece whose emotional depths I am not yet old enough to understand. Afterward, Steph comes onstage to offer me a bouquet—the first time I’ve gotten one for a performance—and the audience laughs and applauds as she trips over the hem of her long dress to give me a hug.

Soon invitations follow to perform at Ukrainian concerts in Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York City. Usually, the occasion is a tribute to a poet, a politician, or a religious figure—often a long-dead priest, pictured on the front of the program in a big black hat and wearing about a thousand crosses and rosaries. The audiences are filled with elderly men whose eyes tear up when I play Ukrainian folk songs and women whose good suits still bear the faint scent of mothballs.

The format is always the same. There are long speeches in Ukrainian, often lasting more than an hour. Sometimes a lot more. Then come the performers: singers, dancers, bandura choirs that perform Ukrainian folk songs on their zitherlike instruments, poetry readings, and me on the violin. Occasionally, my dad includes our quartet on the program and brings Steph, Miriam, and Joanne along, too.

Whenever I give a Ukrainian concert, my dad invites my grandparents to go with us. Predictably, my dad gets lost every time. Doodie ridicules him and shouts out directions in Ukrainian, but that only makes things worse. Which is how, one weekday afternoon, my father ends up turning the wrong way onto Madison Avenue in New York City, directly into oncoming rush-hour traffic.

“Oy, Bozhe!”—Oh, God!—my father shouts as he realizes his mistake.

“Psia crow!”—Dog’s blood!—Doodie screams back as irate drivers careen around us, honking madly.

Baba makes the sign of the cross and starts praying aloud.

Cars whiz by in a blur. Taxi drivers shout at us in languages I don’t understand, shaking their fists and giving us the finger. My dad clutches the steering wheel, white-knuckled, cursing and sweating, while my grandfather waves his arms ineffectually and shouts in Ukrainian. Terrified, I lay down on the backseat and close my eyes so I don’t have to watch us all get killed, until my dad finds his way down a side street.

The next time we venture to New York, my dad sits down the night before with a map and yellow highlighter and painstakingly lays out our route, like a general plotting an invasion. But the following morning, as we head toward the Ukrainian Institute of America on the Upper East Side, something does not look quite right. There are police cars everywhere. Blue wooden barriers line the streets. When we attempt to make one of our carefully planned turns onto Fifth Avenue, we find the road blocked by a policeman on horseback.

“You can’t go this way,” he shouts, as my dad opens the window to ask what’s going on. “Street’s closed for the parade.”

Sure enough, cars are turning down side streets. My father looks longingly at Fifth Avenue, spread out right in front of us, and reluctantly turns into unknown territory while fumbling for the map with one hand. The program will start in just moments, and still we remain mired in traffic, separated from the hall by a wide thoroughfare right now occupied by a marching band. Uniformed trumpet and clarinet players march in unison, clowns juggle, floats slowly roll by, and the sidewalks all around are clogged with onlookers.

Suddenly, I feel a powerful tug: my grandmother, in her floral-print babushka, pulling me from the car with remarkable force. With her hand grasped around my arm like a hawk’s talon, she propels me into the middle of the crowd. As I clutch my violin and try to keep my gown from dragging in the street, Baba shoves past the barricades and a startled policeman, right into the path of the oncoming parade. We weave our way through a marching band, which barely breaks its stride, Baba ignoring the shouting policemen as we run toward the concert hall on the other side. No parade, much less the New York City Police Department, is going to stop Baba.

After the performance, Baba is puffed up with pride. “That’s mine granddaughter, mey vnoochka!” she announces to anyone who will listen, while I shake hands with the old ladies and gentlemen who offer congratulations.

“You played beautifully!” the well-wishers say in Ukrainian, assuming that I speak the language, too.

“Diakoyu,” I am able to reply. Thank you. It’s pretty much the only thing I know how to say, and most of the time it’s enough.

That day, as concertgoers greet me after the performance, I murmur my “Diakoyu” to one after the other, nodding and smiling. An older woman in suit and pearls approaches me, burbling prettily in Ukrainian, and I smile back at her. “Diakoyu!” I say brightly.

The woman looks at me, confused. Apparently she has just asked me “How old are you?”

Mortified, Baba stalks away, shaking her head in disgust, while the kind stranger switches gears and starts speaking to me in English.

Afterward, Baba berates me for humiliating her in front of her countrymen.

“Vhy you no learn-it to speak good? This eez shame. Shame to me!” she wails. “Shame!”

My Ukrainian never does improve enough for me to converse properly, but my frequent solo appearances are great musical training, and my dad never tires of hearing the music that reminds him of his roots. Maybe, I think, it will help him in his endless attempts to win approval from Baba, too.

Unfortunately, that effort proves to be futile. Many years later, she will inform me that she was never as pleased by the performances as she was ashamed of my inability to speak Ukrainian.