Читать книгу The Mango Man and Other Stories - Georgina Prasad - Страница 3

The young man got off the train at the tiny village east of the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine. He was oblivious to the commotion around him of people trying to get on and off the train. Rather than being possessed with the natural curiosity of a visitor in a far-off land for the first time, his face wore a grim determination, a single-minded obsession with but one purpose. His right hand frequently kept patting his left breast pocket, as if to constantly assure himself that something was still safe inside.

With what little he had picked up of his ancestral tongue, he asked about for directions to a certain individual's house. He did not have much trouble finding someone who knew whom he was looking for. A few excited waves of the hand pointing directions, and some animated conversation sent him off on a fast walk.

About a half hour later, he found himself outside a very old, but still sturdy, whitewashed house. It looked like it could use a new roof, though. A bare electric bulb shined through a small window with a partly broken glass pane patched with clear plastic. He paused for what seemed an eternity, with pounding heart, before he clenched his fist and almost had to force it to rap on the ruggedly finished, solid wooden door.

He heard a voice answer, and presently a girl in a peasant dress and in her late teens opened the door. "I'm looking for bubba Nadia" he said in his stumbling Ukrainian. The girl turned and pointed to a very old woman with a mane of platinum white hair, lying in a corner of the room. She looked like she was over a hundred years old. She raised her head from her pillow to look at the stranger who was calling, and then slowly sat up on her bed, never for one moment taking her eyes off him.

"My name is Larry ... Larry Danyluk," he introduced himself in imperfect but understandable Ukrainian. "I come from the city of Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba in Canada."

He paused, waiting for some reaction from the old woman. There was none. She continued her steadfast gaze at him, but said nothing. A faint pang of discouragement arose within him, but he continued in his efforts to break the ice. He did not want to disclose the real purpose of his visit before he was sure of whom he was talking to.

"I go to law school in Winnipeg. I'm on vacation now. I have, since my childhood, been fascinated with stories of the Ukraine, and I have been looking forward to visiting it someday. So here I am!"

There was still nothing said, not even a change of expression in the old woman, but she never took her eyes off him. Larry cleared his throat self-consciously. He turned to the girl standing to one side of the room and asked, "Do you think bubba understands me?" She nodded her head.

Larry continued. "My father's name is Victor, my mother's Anna. Father was born on a farm near a town called Minnedosa in Manitoba, Canada in 1930. Mother was also born and raised in the same place and went to the same school that father did. When they got married in 1952, they decided to move to the city of Winnipeg as there were more opportunities for better paying jobs and a better future for their children which they planned to have. The only experience he had until then was on the farm, so he was fortunate to find a job with a company that produced farm machinery, contraptions of which he knew something."

Larry was beginning to feel a bit hot, either from his discomfiture of wondering whether he was simply making a fool of himself, or from the fire in the wood stove in the room, or both. His forehead was beaded with perspiration, and he badly wanted to take off his jacket, but he did not feel free to do so. He ran a sleeve across his forehead, again patted his left breast pocket and continued.

"My paternal grandfather, Borysko, was born on a farm in Neepawa, Manitoba, which like Minnedosa was on the Canadian Pacific Railway route, about 30 kilometres to the east. As a young man, gido Borysko worked for a few years with the railway, and that was how, on one of his frequent trips through Minnedosa, he met my grandmother Valentina.

"When they married they decided that Borysko's railroad job wasn't good for their family life as it kept him often, for weeks at a time, away from home. So they bought a small farm near Minnedosa from Valentina's uncle. They were reasonably successful as farmers, and over the years managed to enlarge their farm, a little at a time, buying a quarter section from one neighbour, a quarter from another, and so on."

It was obvious that Larry had a liking for detail. He possessed a mind sharp enough for a successful legal career. He paused and turned to look at the girl. She was still standing, apparently transfixed by his narration of life in a far-off land. She suddenly broke out of her concentration with a shy smile and turned to go fetch a chair that stood near the fireplace from where came the very familiar aroma of simmering borscht. Placing it near Larry, she beckoned him to sit down, and then returned to standing at the side of the room, hands clasped together demurely. He could not help noticing what beautiful dark eyes she had, and the dimples on her cheeks when she smiled.

He looked again at the old woman who continued to sit silently without moving a limb. But he sensed that she had warmed up to him, and he thought her face now betrayed a longing for him to go on.

"My grandmother Valentina was the only child of my great-grandfather Pavlo Kuzyk and his wife Elena." He paused again, examining intently the deeply wrinkled face of the old woman for any glimmer of recognition of those names. If there was any, he could not see it. Though further disheartened, he continued.

"As a small boy, I used to enjoy listening to stories that bubba Valentina used to tell me, of life on the Canadian prairie farm in the early 1900s. But, most of all, I was fascinated listening to her tell me stories told to her by her parents, of how they first came to Canada from the Ukraine as a newly-married couple in their early twenties, towards the end of the 1800s.

"They had heard of how the Canadian government's Free Homestead Act allowed homesteaders to take possession of a quarter section of land for ten dollars. To get full ownership of the land they had to occupy and improve it by clearing it, building a house and farming the land. They had read a book about emigration to Canada written by a Dr Joseph Oleskew, a professor in Galicia, who in the 1890s, aware of the free land available in Canada, travelled across the prairies looking for possible settling areas for Ukrainian farmers. The young couple got together some money by selling almost everything they possessed, and some more from Elena's father, to pay for their train and boat tickets and have some left over to help start them on their new life in Canada.

"They went by train to Hamburg where they boarded a steamship. After a miserable five-week voyage, braving rough seas, sea sickness, crowded decks and poor food, during which the only thing that kept their spirits from being totally broken was the hope of a new and better life, they landed in Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Canada.

"After immigration formalities, they boarded a train that took them across the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec and Ontario and into Manitoba."

Larry had said almost all he had wanted to say, but thought he was getting nowhere. The old woman still sat quietly and stared at him. He was not sure whether he was in the right home or talking to the right person. Perhaps the whole trip was a wild goose chase. Perhaps the two were nothing more than a bit amused and entertained with all his fanciful, though interesting, narration.

He turned helplessly towards the girl and shrugged his shoulders with a foolish smile on his face. The girl, now seated on the floor on a small rug, chin resting on her knees, hands wrapped around her legs, spoke up for the first time.

"Bubba seldom speaks. When she does, it is only to express the wish that before she died she would hear something about her only sister, to whom she was very close, who left Galicia over eighty years ago."

Larry reached into the left breast pocket of his jacket and produced an envelope. With trembling hands he opened it and carefully pulled out a half of a torn page. It was from a Bible printed over a century ago, from the book of Genesis. He held it out to the old woman. "Shortly before she died, bubba Elena expressed the hope that this half page would one day be returned to Galicia."

The old woman gazed for an almost unbearable length of time at Larry’s outstretched hand holding the tattered piece of paper. She slowly lifted a shrivelled, wrinkled hand and took it. The tear on the page was through the middle of verse nine of chapter thirteen, the narration about the parting of ways between Abraham and Lot. The text ended at the rip: "... if thou wilt take the left hand, ..."

Her eyes were too dim to read the words, but seemed to recognize the piece of paper. Her hand gently dropped to her lap and for a long, long time she stared across the room, past the broken window pane, past the fields outside, to a moment in time that swept aside several decades. She looked up at Larry, then slowly bent over, reached under her mattress and pulled out a small, dark, stained and frayed leather bag. From within it she eased out a tattered envelope, yellow with age. She opened the envelope and slipped out a piece of paper which she unfolded with great difficulty.

The tear that ran along it seemed to reciprocate the tear on the paper Larry produced. It was the other half of the page. The text started at the rip with, "then I will go to the right ..."

The father of the two sisters could afford to help with the journey abroad for only one of them. So with heavy hearts they had drawn lots, using the two halves of the page from Genesis. Before they parted they promised each other that at least a part of each of them would one day be reunited. They were two halves of a whole, as much as the halves of this page, each ripped asunder to fulfil the dictates of their own private destinies.

A single tear streaked down the old woman's face. The genealogist whom Larry had hired to trace his roots had done his job well.