THAT NIGHT, KAT tossed and turned. She kept on dreaming about what was going to happen to her grandfather. Were the RCMP going to show up at their door and handcuff Dido? Where would they take him? If they deported him back to Ukraine, where would he live? Kat knew that no family had survived in Orelets.
Kat still hadn't slept a wink when she heard the squeak of the front door opening and the thunk of a newspaper being dropped in. She shivered slightly as she got out of bed so she grabbed a sweatshirt and pulled it over her nightgown for warmth and then padded down the stairs. It was still dark out, but already, both the Globe & Mail and the Toronto Star were sitting between the doors. She grabbed them both and sat down on the living room sofa. A headline on the bottom of the front page of the Globe caught her eye, "Ex-Nazi set for deportation."
The judge had found that her grandfather was not a Nazi, but they weren't going to let that fact get in the way of a good headline, she thought cynically. Kat didn't even have the heart to read the article. The newspaper slid from her lap and landed on the floor.
The front page of the Star was even more sensational, "Ex-Nazi lied to live here." Kat felt her face redden in anger. Where did this "ex-Nazi" stuff come from? As she scanned the article, anger turned to a feeling of hopelessness. There was no mention of the fact that her grandfather had worked with the Ukrainian resistance. The implication was that her grandfather had joined the auxiliary police in order to avoid farm labour in Germany. And to kill Jews. Kat threw the paper down onto the floor. How could this sort of thing happen in a country like Canada?
She walked across the living room, into the kitchen, and opened the basement door. She was so angry and distressed that only one thing could settle her, and that was her art. She didn't even bother turning on the light, but instead, relied on the glimmers of sunrise that were peeking through the basement windows. On her TV tray sat several of the pysanky she had worked on so carefully during the hearing. They had brought her comfort and hope each evening as she had a chance to sit by herself and understand what each witness had been trying to convey. What was the point, anyway, she thought now. Who had been listening? The judge had heard all the same points that she had, yet he had managed to come to a completely different conclusion.
Kat picked up her favourite egg. It was the one, that for her, embodied life and hope. It was the first one she had made during her grandfather's hearing: the one with forty triangles. Legend had it that far away, a monster was chained to a cliff. Once a year, the monster's servants would travel the world and count how many new pysanky had been made. Each year that there were fewer than the year before, the chains were loosened, and there was more evil let loose in the world. Making pysanky was Kat's pleasant chore to keep evil at bay.
But after reading those newspaper accounts of her grandfather, all Kat could think of was that evil had been let loose. She reached into her shoe box of dyes and implements, and pulled out the huge chemo syringe that reminded her of Baba, but in an ugly, deathly way. She took a deep breath and plunged it into the fortieth triangle at the bottom of the egg. With cold precision, Kat drew out the yolk and the white of her favourite egg. By doing so, she killed it, but she also saved it from bursting from rot in years to come.
When she was finished, she held up the empty shell about 6 inches from her face. It was beautiful, but empty: no longer a symbol of hope and love. Just an empty shell. With anger born of despair, she took that beautiful egg and smashed it on the TV tray. And then she walked back upstairs.
She stood in the living room and stared out the window, watching the sun slowly rise. One sob escaped her throat, then another, and another.
From behind the closed door of his bedroom, Danylo could hear his zolota zhabka weeping. It broke his heart to hear it. What did she think of him now that the judge had ruled against him, he wondered. Did she still love him? And did she understand the truth? He could only hope.
He took his terry cloth robe down from the hook on the back of the door and put it on over his pyjamas. He opened the door and looked out. There she was, his golden frog, his zolota zhabka, with a broken heart. It was his fault. Perhaps he should have packed his bags and left when the deportation order had first come. Perhaps then, she would have been saved this sorrow?
He stepped out of the bedroom and approached Kat. She looked up and quickly wiped her tears. When he sat down beside her, she showed him the ugly words from the newspapers. Tears began to form in his eyes too. It was bad enough that they were stripping his citizenship, but to call him a Nazi — that was too much. Perhaps he should leave this country. He had obviously overestimated the Canadian sense of justice.
The two sat together on the sofa without exchanging words. Moments and minutes and hours passed. The sun rose.
Genya came down the stairs and walked into the living room, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. "What's the matter?" she asked, glancing from her sister to her grandfather.
Kat looked up. "Read this," she said, gathering up the papers at her feet and handing them to her sister. She watched Genya's expression change from bored sleepiness, to incomprehension, to anger.
"This is crap," said Genya. Danylo looked up and met his older granddaughter's eyes. He felt a glimmer of gratitude. Of all people, he felt that Genya would be the first to abandon him. "You are innocent, Dido," she said vehemently. "We've got to fight this."
Kat looked up at her sister with hope.
Genya wasn't alone in her fighting spirit. A group of concerned citizens called a meeting at the church hall that very evening, and Kat was thrilled when hundreds of supporters gathered. In addition to people from the congregation, there were a number of students from St. Paul's and from Cawthra. There was a large contingent from the Vietnamese community, and even a number of complete strangers. Kat spied Ian's shaved and stitched head at the back of the hall, and so she darted down the aisle before the meeting started to greet her friend. He was not alone. Both Lisa and Michael were with him.
"Michael called me this morning when he read the newspapers," explained Ian. "We knew we had to do something."
"You guys called this meeting?" asked Kat in surprise, regarding her three true friends.
Lisa hooked her arm through Ian's and Michael clasped Kat's hand in his own. "We wouldn't exactly let you down," said Michael. "Whatever it takes, we're in this together."
That evening, after everyone else had gone to sleep, Kat went back downstairs to her beloved shattered pysanka.It was too late to put it back together, but perhaps it wasn't too late to make something out of the ruins. Slowly and painstakingly, she began to take the broken shards, one by one and glue them onto a canvas in an intricate mosaic.