Under This Unbroken Sky (6 page)

BILYI BORSHCH (WHITE BORSHCH)

3–4 beets with tops

1 carrot, thinly sliced

1 celery stalk, chopped

7 cups chicken broth, vegetable stock, or water

4 fresh mushrooms

2 tablespoons lard or chicken fat

2 medium onions, chopped

2 cloves garlic (crushed)

2 tablespoons flour

2 cups shredded cabbage

1 tablespoon fresh parsley

2 tablespoons fresh chopped dill

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup sour cream

2 small new potatoes per person

Peel and shred vegetables. Wash beets and tops well, then shred beets and chop greens. Place beets, carrot, and celery in large pot with 4 cups broth. Boil until soft. Wipe mushrooms with a damp towel, slice thin and cook in lard. Add onion and garlic to mushrooms. Stir in flour to make a paste, add a little broth, bring to a boil, then add to soup. Add cabbage, parsley, dill, salt, and remaining stock. Simmer until vegetables are soft. Mix buttermilk and sour cream, add to soup. Do not boil; the borshch may curdle. Taste. Sprinkle with dill and garlic mashed with salt. Cook and serve potatoes separately.

T
HE FIRST MEAL FROM THE GARDEN IS ON TUESDAY, June 14. Maria is up at five. The fire is stoked and hot before Teodor and Myron leave for the fields. The door of the shack is opened wide to vent the heat. Ivan, Petro, and Katya are told to stay outside and after their chores are free to play. They are given strict orders to be back at least an hour before supper so they can wash up and dress for the meal. The children are certain it isn’t a holiday but feel they need to be on their best behavior just in case. Once their chores are finished, they stay close to home, spying on the activities. Dania and Sofia are recruited for kitchen staff.

Anna and Lesya are next door preparing the house for guests. The house hasn’t been cleaned in six months, but Anna insists that everyone sit at her table tonight. She now frenziedly attacks the corners, walls, and shelves. Bedding and clothing are hung outside to air. The straw mattresses are shoved through the doorway and beaten with a willow stick, fluffed and shaken, before being hauled back inside. The table, chairs, and stove are scrubbed. Every plate, mug, spoon, and knife washed. The window wiped. The floor swept.

Lesya, who can’t remember her mama ever cleaning, hops around the house feeling such joy she thinks her heart might burst. In the last few weeks, Anna hasn’t been staying in bed all day. She gets up early and walks the properties, skirting the bush, her eyes scanning the ground as though she is looking for something. Sometimes she disappears into the bush and Lesya’s stomach gets
tight, but she always returns. Often her path takes her along the low stone wall where she sits watching the woods. When she returns from these walks, her eyes are bright and she seems happy.

Anna opens the pine trunk and extracts an embroidered tablecloth and the porcelain pitcher adorned with painted roses—Anna’s own mother’s pitcher—and entrusts Lesya to carry it to the table. Lesya clutches it to her chest as if holding her own beating heart and tries to walk tall and gracefully with hardly a limp, so her mother will see there is nothing wrong with her after all.

Petro hides his excitement, plays the game, knowing the surprise. He knows what great event is upon them. He knows his father must be coming home.

MARIA HAS PLANNED THE MENU: WHITE BORSHCH, THE last jar of jellied chicken, three potatoes per person, a pickled cabbage salad, and, for dessert, halushky with wild strawberries and syrup. By noon, the temperature outside is seventy-three degrees; inside the shack is at least ten degrees warmer.

The morning is set aside for making the dumplings. The flour is sifted with the last few precious grains of salt. Dania stirs as Maria adds milk and water to create a light dough. Maria forms the soft elastic mixture into a ball and covers it to rise. Sofia returns with a pail of wild strawberries. Taking her mother’s warning seriously, she has guiltily only eaten half a dozen in the field. When she finishes hulling them, Maria sprinkles them with sugar. Sofia covertly dips her finger into the bowl, stealing a taste of the precious sweetness. The risen dough is placed on the floured table, cut in half and rolled into a rectangle. Then, using a small Mason jar as a cookie cutter, Maria carefully punches out round disks.

Dania heats the sugared strawberries on the stove, her fingertips light on the wooden spoon: to sense the thickening sauce. Maria
supervises the final consistency and pulls them just as they begin to boil. Once cooled, she drops dollops of fruit in the center of the cutouts and shapes them into balls. The girls plop the halushky into rolling water, ten at a time, and wait for them to float back to the top, perfectly cooked. Maria sets them on her best plate. She sacrifices one halushka to be sampled between the three, then sets the plate on the highest shelf to prevent temptation.

By midday, Maria is in the garden selecting vegetables. Sofia and Dania follow behind, ready to carry the prized bounty. Each vegetable has its own distinctive greenery, still pert and fresh from the early summer rains, vibrant from the rich feed, not yet battered and bruised by summer storms. The rows contain successive generations, each a few weeks older than the next. Small plants, just learning to stand, look up to the larger ones whose stems and leaves are already maturing. Some burst with blossoms, others fan luxuriantly, others climb trellises twisting and spiraling around themselves, some sprawl lazily, basking in the sun.

Maria pulls the carrot first. She feels along the base of the tops, gauging the thickness of the root below. Finding the right one, she wraps her fingers around the greens and gently tugs. The earth loosens its hold and out comes a straight, vivid orange root startling against the brown earth. Still young, it barely spans her palm. Not a single insect mark tarnishes its beauty. She brings the carrot to her nose and inhales the newborn scent. She fights the urge to take a bite, swallows down the saliva that fills her mouth. She hands the carrot to Dania and proceeds down the row. She checks the ingredients off in her head. As she plucks each one from the earth, she whispers, “Diakuiu.”

Back in the kitchen, the girls are restricted to peeling and shredding duties. Maria is in charge of the borshch. She adds the vegetables to the simmering chicken stock, monitors them so they won’t
become too soft, lifts them from the heat if the fire is too hot. She fries the mushrooms Dania gathered down by the well, adds just enough flour to create a paste but not so much that it would mask their delicate taste. She spoons the mushrooms into the borshch. The most crucial part is adding the buttermilk and sour cream. The girls gather around as Maria drops in thick dollops. The fire, now a low glow, emits a gentle heat. The cream smooths and blends beautifully into the stock.

Maria adds another clove of garlic and a last pinch of salt. Only then does she feel the wetness of her dress clinging to her body, her hair limp around her face, the crick in her back and the ache in her legs. She wonders if her face is as flushed as her daughters’ faces. She fills the spoon with the rich broth, blows on it, and holds it out to Dania, who takes a sip, then to Sofia, who does the same, and then Maria brings it to her own lips. She holds the broth in her mouth, assessing the complexity of the flavors before swallowing. Her tongue runs across her lips. She looks to her girls and nods, and they nod back.

JUST BEFORE HER GUESTS ARRIVE, ANNA DRESSES. LESYA tightens Anna’s corset. “Tighter,” she says. Lesya pulls the strings more but can see they are already cutting into her mother’s flesh. “Tighter.” Lesya wraps the strings around her fists and pulls. Anna exhales as the corset constricts around her belly and cuts into her ribs. “Tighter,” she gasps and Lesya pulls harder. Anna presses her hand to her flattened belly. “Enough.”

ANNA MEETS HER GUESTS AT THE DOOR, LIKE A LADY. She ushers the family to the table. Maria is relieved to see the room tidy and clean. Even the window has been washed. She notices that every trace of Stefan has been removed. Anna looks radiant as she
caters to her brother, insisting that he sit at the head of the table. She keeps up a constant chatter, making everyone laugh, until they have eased into the comfortable role of guests.

The two families sit around Anna’s table dressed in their best clothes, hair combed, fingernails scrubbed, blooming wolf willow in a Mason jar vase, the delicate porcelain pitcher glistening with condensation, and the table laden with glorious food—they could be mistaken for a well-to-do English family. Anna squeezes Teodor’s hand: “This is for you.”

Maria bows her head. The children follow, placing their hands together in prayer. “Dorohyi Bozhe
…”
Maria gives thanks and asks that her family, both her families, be watched over and protected, and given the strength and courage needed to build this new life. She asks for this food to be blessed, and for the garden to be blessed, and the cow and the horse and the fields and this house.

Teodor and Anna do not bow their heads. Teodor stares at the heaping bowl of steaming potatoes. Anna watches a fat housefly traverse the lip of her mother’s pitcher. She leans into the corset rib digging into her side. Petro squeezes his eyes tight, expecting his father to be there when he opens them. The others give themselves to the intoxicating aromas. Maria says, “Amin’.” The children echo, “Amen.”

She looks at the faces hungrily turned to her and says, “Ïzhte.” A swarm of hands descend on the offerings. She notices that Petro’s eyes are still closed.

T
HE FAMILY WAKES AT SIX TO READY THEMSELVES for their Sunday church pilgrimage. Freshly laundered clothes, laid out the night before, are donned. Shoes are polished and hair is washed. The youngest are given baths. The oldest sponge themselves behind the privacy of the burlap screen. A tentative knock at six-thirty announces the arrival of Lesya and Petro. Myron helps the smaller boys grease back their cowlicks. Katya’s unruly curls are braided and coiled. Sofia covertly dabs wild rose petal water, a concoction she brewed in a liniment bottle, behind her ears.

Myron squeezes into his only dress shirt. It binds across his chest and shoulders, broadened from weeks of fieldwork. His fingers fumble with the tiny collar button and he grimaces as it tightens around his throat. If it wasn’t for Irene, who sits in the second pew to the right of the altar, whose bare ankle Myron glimpsed when she knelt to pray six Sundays past, he would have found an excuse to stay home with his father. He squeezes the button through the hole and it snaps off. The curse that spits past his lips is greeted by a swipe across the ear by Maria, who blames Teodor for these new words. Dania offers to sew it back on and retreats to a corner, grateful for the reprieve from the eight other bodies tripping over one another in the shack’s confines.

Ivan’s rump is smacked once for kneeling in his clean pants on the dirt floor to retrieve a daddy-long-legs scurrying under the bed. Assigned to sit on the bed and not move, he sidles off when the spider reappears and grinds it into the floor with his recently pol
ished shoes. When he insists that he is still hungry, Maria makes him remove his shirt and drapes a towel over his lap while he eats another half-bowl of oatmeal. She makes Petro wash behind his ears again, though he claims he already did, and gives him a pair of Ivan’s suspenders to hold up his droopy trousers. Noticing Lesya’s bare legs, she orders Sofia to loan her a pair of her stockings. Sofia selects her oldest pair, not ever wanting them returned.

Dania wears one of Maria’s dowry sorochky, a straight cotton chemise with traditional embroidered red motifs on the sleeves, the front, and along the bottom hem. She doesn’t care that it is too large in the waist and bosom. Its shapeless form gives her comfort in its anonymity.

Despite the season, Sofia dons a black skirt and white sweater trimmed with a rabbit fur collar given to her by her classmate Ruth, whose father owns the bank. Her parents consider themselves tolerant Christians and they look for opportunities to teach their only child lessons of charity and compassion. They proudly watched as Ruth passed the bundle to Sofia, who was asked to wait on the back porch. Sofia darned the hole at the right shoulder as best she could, and if her hair hangs just right, no one can notice it. The stain on the skirt isn’t obvious either, so long as she stretches the sweater past her hips.

When Sofia pulls back the burlap curtain and makes her entrance, Lesya gasps at her beauty. Maria gasps too, at the sight of the too-tight sweater hugging her daughter’s budding breasts, and makes her change into something more respectable. Ignoring Sofia’s sobs, Maria selects the blouse with roses embroidered down the arms, which she made for her three Christmases ago. It took seven weeks of hand-stitching, squinting beside the kerosene lamp after the children had gone to bed, to complete. The strain on her eyes gave her headaches and the precision of the stitches cramped
her fingers. Sofia’s protests that the blouse is too small and none of the other girls wear blouses like this are silenced when Maria questions the appropriateness of the skirt’s length and whether the shoe’s small heel, also a charitable present one size too large, is too high. Teodor intervenes and Sofia decides half a stylish wardrobe is better than none.

Katya’s dress is one of Sofia’s castoffs and hangs almost to her ankles. Maria tucks in the waist and adds a ribbon to cinch in the extra material, but the shoulders and collar still droop over her small frame. No matter how much she feeds this child, she doesn’t gain weight. Maria pushes away the pang of guilt and promises to add more cream to Katya’s oatmeal in the morning. As she takes in the seams, Katya refuses to put down the limp bouquet of daisies, milkweed, blazing prairie fire, brown-eyed Susans, and wild oats she has collected for the baby Jesus.

Katya loves church. She loves the paintings on the wall, the fiery gold crosses, gleaming chalices, and the sickening sweet incense that makes her feel dizzy. Sometimes she imagines floating up to the ceiling and taking the crown of thorns from the Jesus on the Cross and pulling the nails from his hands so he can fly away. She hasn’t made the connection that the baby and the man on the cross are the same person. She wonders if they keep the Christ body in a root cellar, or in a salt barrel, or frozen in the lake in the winter. She wonders how much of the body is left and how long everybody has been eating it and what will happen when it runs out. At communion, when she is on her knees, supposed to be praying into her hands, she spits out his body. She now has a large doughy ball of Christ she keeps hidden under the blanket chest in case the church eats all of him and doesn’t save any for her family.

By ten to seven, the family is dressed and fidgeting in their uncomfortable clothes. Maria looks to Teodor, sitting at the table in
his dirty workpants, bare feet, picking a poppy seed from his teeth, and frowns.

Since his return from prison, he has refused to attend church. At first Maria believed he needed time to recover and build up his strength, then once he started breaking the fields, he insisted he couldn’t take the time or the planting would be late.

But he doesn’t work the fields on Sundays. He hitches up the horse, loads the cart with tools, and heads across the field. He rolls past the ground broken through the week, past the birch grove, around the bush, and northwest through the clearing to the top corner of his quarter-section, exactly one mile from his sister’s house. There, on the crest of the hill, he is building his family’s home. It overlooks all one hundred and sixty acres. From a distance, it seems to hover between the earth and the sky.

He hasn’t made much progress. The frame is down and the first three rows of logs are laid. It will be a one-level house, ten times larger than the shack they are in now, with rooms for the children. He has planned for a window on the south side looking down over the fields, with wooden shutters that can be boarded up against high winds and bitter winters. This is his church.

Teodor releases the horse, free to feast on the tall grass or lounge under the shade of the trees, a day off from the fields, and heads to where the door will be. Here he feels calm. The sound of the crickets, the swish of the prairie grass, and the gophers watching him from a distance bring him solace. Here he can hear silence and that silence is holier than any words a priest could ever utter.

He no longer believes in promised lands. He rejects suffering for salvation later. He believes in life now. There was a time when he worshipped, bowed, and kneeled to a higher power. He believed if he lived a good life, he would be rewarded. But now he knows there is no God. A compassionate God wouldn’t have tried to starve his
family. A just God wouldn’t have taken away everything that he had built. A merciful God wouldn’t have abandoned him in prison.

Maria begged him for her sake, for his children’s sake, for the sake of his soul, she begged him to tell her why. She tried to convince him that God was with them, that He had never left. How else did they survive? How else were they together again? She tried to make him see how much they’d been given. She showed him the garden, the fields, their children, each other…she begged him to come back. He always walked away, disappeared into the barn or headed to the fields. One night, she chased him.

The children were already asleep. She was in her nightgown and had just laid out the children’s church clothes for the following morning. Teodor was working on the house plans by lamplight. She asked him again to come with her. She pleaded with him, her angry whispers heightened with his refusal to answer. One of the children groaned and shifted in the bed. Teodor pushed back his chair and stormed out. She followed him into the dark barn. Her voice now free, she demanded that he talk to her. He pushed deeper into the darkness, retreating to the empty stall beside the horse.

Inside the small pen, Teodor paced back and forth from wall to wall. He counted off the steps,
one two three four five
, and turned,
one two three four five
, stopping at the imagined stone wall that he had faced a thousand times a day in prison. Maria could see him moving side to side, his head down, his eyes fixed on the ground, slipping in and out of the moon’s shadows. She couldn’t see his hunched shoulders, his body coiled tight, his clenched fists. She couldn’t know that the wooden boards of the stall had transformed into stone and iron bars, or that Teodor could smell the rank sweat of human decay that had gagged him for six hundred days.
Talk to me
, Maria cried, hurt by how far her husband had pulled away from her.
Talk to me!

The horse snorted and banged against the stall, the cow rubbed its head up and down against the boards, unsettled by their intensity. Maria lifted the stall’s latch and Teodor heard a metal lock rasp open. He tried to get past her, but she wouldn’t step back.
Leave me alone
, he said over and over. He retreated to his right and tripped against a feed bucket. He smelled the stench of urine and feces from a jailhouse piss pot that hadn’t been emptied in days. The horse jolted. He turned in the other direction, blinded not so much by the darkness but by the panic roaring in his head, and then he slammed into the wall.

Pressed against the boards, his heart pounding, he didn’t feel the roughness of the wood. He felt the coldness of stone. He didn’t hear Maria say his name or the concern in her voice. His erratic breathing merged with the animals’ restless shuffling. His fingernails clawed into the wood, driving splinters under his nails, his shoulders heaved.
Leave me alone
, he said so low that she could barely hear.

She touched his shoulder.
Teodor?

He felt a nightstick dig into the back of his neck. Smelled his sour stench. Felt his fat gut pressed against his back.

Don’t fucking touch me!
He spun around and grabbed her arm and twisted it against her throat, driving her backward. His eyes wide, unseeing, his mouth distorted in a scream, inches from her face, he slammed her against the opposite wall. Maybe it was the lack of resistance, or her lightness, or the shock of hitting a wall that was more than eight feet away, or the softness of her skin, the thinness of her wrist in his grip, or the terrified eyes staring up at him—a woman’s eyes—he saw her and let her go. He crumpled to his knees.

Maria stood, arms out to her sides, pressed against the wall as if she was holding it up. He looked to her, unable to speak, his eyes
like those of a small child waking from a nightmare. Maria slid down the wall, her throat and wrist throbbing, kneeling in front of him. He lowered his head onto her lap and wrapped his arms around her waist. It took a long time for Maria to touch the back of his head. She never asked him to come to church again.

Maria dons her khustyna, tucks the loose strands of hair under the bandanna, and ties it severely back. She looks austere and proper in her crisp white blouse and long black skirt. She strings the crucifix around her neck. It is a simple wooden cross, carved from white birch.

She once owned an engraved, silver cross, decorated with rubies. It had been in her family for five generations. The family story was that it had been a present from a Russian countess to her maid, Maria’s great-great-grandmother, a thank-you for a lifetime of service. Maria had never seen anything so beautiful. As a child, she would sit in her mother’s lap for hours, running her fingers over its swirls and patterns. She’d close her eyes and practice seeing it with her mind, until she no longer had to practice and could conjure it whenever she needed comfort. It was her family’s only treasure. She thought it had been taken with everything else during The Hunger. She was pregnant with Katya then, the last to be born in Ukraïna. It’s why her youngest daughter is so thin, why she’s weaker than the others—it’s Maria’s fault for not having enough food.

The other children were mercifully too young to remember that time. That’s what she wants to believe. Children see things differently. They don’t know that Teodor went into the stripped fields at night to rummage for stalks of wheat that had been overlooked. Or that she made stews with mice and rats and pretended it was rabbit. If they saw someone lie down in the streets and not get back up, she told them they were tired and needed to sleep.

She made sure they didn’t hear the rumors of graves being dug
up and what was cooking in other people’s soup pots. They didn’t hear the stories of neighbors stealing from and betraying one another. She kept her children safe from all of that. Teodor traveled north. He had heard stories of others crossing the Russian border and returning with rations. He had heard many more stories about those who hadn’t returned. He didn’t tell Maria those stories. She wanted him to barter their wedding bands, but he wouldn’t. He had another cache—an Austrian silver coin from the Great War and a gallon of whiskey. He came back with potatoes and beets that he buried behind the house. She didn’t ask where he got them or what he had seen. He didn’t ask where she got the bags of flour.

Soldiers came to the village and selected peasants who looked fatted. The villagers pointed to Maria, whom they suspected of hoarding food, ignoring that she was pregnant. Her neighbors hid behind their doors when the soldiers came to her house. She was given new clothes and enough food for a week. They sat with her while she ate. She refused until they let her children eat, too. She was taken to the railway tracks, ten miles away, where there were a hundred others like her. Round, fat faces. Flesh on their bones. New clothes. New tools. Even a tractor. They had one job. When the train rolled past, they had to wave and smile. She waved; she smiled. They gave her two bags of flour in case they needed her again. That flour fed her family and her parents for six months. The neighbors were right. She did hoard her food.