“You have to be kidding, Stash. He left us here?!”
“There’s path through trees. There. It’s not steep as it looks,” Uncle Stash said.
“I’m seventy-one years old!” Aunt Lovey shrieked. “You’ve had a heart attack! And did he not notice the girls?! He just left us all to climb?!”
Uncle Stash repeated, “It’s not so steep as it looks. I climbed a thousand times when I was boy.”
Aunt Lovey snapped her fingers. “It’s because you wouldn’t go in the brown shack?”
Uncle Stash sighed but said nothing.
“Oh lovely! And now we have to climb the hill!” Aunt Lovey steamed ahead. “Come on, girls.”
I loved the way Aunt Lovey just assumed my physical competence. She challenged the hell out of me. “It’s freezing, Aunt Lovey,” I said.
“Move faster,” she replied.
Ruby and I walked up ahead with Aunt Lovey and found the path through the trees. We felt some relief to see steps and railings built here and there where the hill was as steep as it looked. “All right,” Aunt Lovey breathed, putting a positive spin on it, “we’ve been sitting on our butts for two days straight. This is just what we need, girls.”
Ruby and I were doubtful. We started slowly up the path.
“Hovno.” The first time Uncle Stash said it, it was like a whisper. It had that “I don’t believe it” quality. The second was a curse. “Hovno!” And again. “Hovno!”
We stopped in our tracks, turning to find Uncle Stash stamping on the fallen leaves. “Hovno sracka!” Uncle Stash shouted.
We hurried back to see what was wrong.
“What, Stash? Honey, what is it?” Aunt Lovey cried.
“I forgot my mother.” He said it so dryly I nearly laughed.
“Oh no.”
“At hotel.”
“Oh, Stash.”
We all four had a vision of that envelope propped up against the lamp on the cigarette-burned desk: “Don’t forget to bury me.”
“What will I tell them?” Uncle Stash could barely whisper. I watched a thick ribbon vein snake up his temple. I’d never seen him like this and didn’t want to admit that he was on the verge of losing control.
“No one knows you were bringing her ashes, hon,” Aunt Lovey said practically. “Tell them we buried her at the farm. They’ll understand.”
Uncle Stash squeezed Aunt Lovey’s hand. They started back up the hill, this time together. The hill was steep but manageable, even for Ruby and me and our old parents. After nearly thirty minutes of climbing, Uncle Stash was huffing and puffing, and scarlet and sweaty. We stopped every four or five minutes to drink water from the canteens Aunt Lovey had packed. And to rest. There was nothing to look at but the dense black forest around us. I tried not to think of the Brothers Grimm and all the fairy-tale characters who met their fates in the deep dark woods. Ruby was quiet, which helped me focus. I was impressed with her restraint. After slightly more than an hour of slow and steady climbing, we reached the crest of the hill. I wished I’d had a flag to plant.
“The church,” Uncle Stash said.
Notre Dame and St. Peter’s and San Marco’s and all of the great cathedrals of the world were reflected in Uncle Stash’s eyes, but the church was only a small clapboard building painted white, weathered gray, whose roof was caked with pigeon shit. A black storm hung in the distance, granting form to the specters in the graveyard beside the church. Ruby squeezed me and made a quiet ghost sound. “Oooo.” I laughed and shivered too, because I suddenly remembered Aunt Lovey’s premonition. Her bad feeling. And I thought, “We’ve made a terrible mistake.”
We stood for a moment watching the church, surprised when a smooth baritone voice struck a note. There were no lights within the building, and I’d assumed it was empty. There was no organ to introduce the choir’s song, just this one man’s powerful voice rising up to shake the trees. Uncle Stash moved forward slowly as the hymn continued and the rest of the choir joined in. We couldn’t understand the words, but there was something familiar in the way sorrow met joy in the space between the notes.
The music drew Uncle Stash toward the church, and we followed. I thought he meant to peer into the church’s windows to see if he could find a familiar face. Or perhaps even go inside and stand at the back to listen, but he turned sharply, entering the church cemetery. Aunt Lovey stopped Ruby and me from following him to the adjoining plots with the two polished stones.
“His brothers,” Ruby whispered.
“I know.”
I was disappointed when Uncle Stash left the plots rather quickly and returned to us dry-eyed. “Must be Cousin Marek planting flowers. Or Velika. Or Zuza,” he said, pleased by the landscaping, and not struck by grief as I’d expected.
“That’s good, hon.” Aunt Lovey was struggling to be supportive.
Uncle Stash was smiling, still listening to the hymn inside the church. His face changed suddenly. “What day is today?” he asked.
“It’s November twenty-fifth,” Aunt Lovey said.
“It’s St. Katarina’s Day,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh my God, it’s St. Katarina’s.”
“The first of the Witches’ Days,” I mused, recalling. “That’s why the driver had the garlic in the bus. To scare off the witches.” Ruby made another spooky sound, but this time neither of us laughed.
(When we were children, Uncle Stash taught us about the Witches’ Days, and all the traditions associated with the saints’ days leading up to Christmas. According to folklore, from November 25 until after the winter solstice, when there is considerably less day than night, evil lurks in the darkness. And witches are everywhere. On one of the saints’ days, women aren’t allowed in the house until noon, because witches always try to enter homes in the morning hours and might do so in the guise of a wife. None of us had considered that we were arriving in Grozovo on St. Katarina’s Day, or, if any of us did, we never dreamed the people still believed in witches, as they had in Uncle Stash’s youth.)
Ruby joked about hoping to see a witch in Grozovo. But while she was laughing, I was beginning to fret about our arrival here on this particular occasion. What would these Slovak country people make of seeing Ruby and me in the flesh?
“Should we wait for church to end and see the family here?” Uncle Stash wondered.
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” Aunt Lovey glanced our way. “Wouldn’t that be a little overwhelming? The whole town must be in there.” She didn’t mention the Witches’ Days, or her worry about what a superstitious village might make of our arriving on the feast of St. Katarina.
Uncle Stash nodded but had no answer. I hated when they did this. I wished one of them would just take charge. (This kind of thing never happened with Ruby and me. We had to be decisive.)
“I find my bearings,” Uncle Stash said as he climbed the church’s front steps. From there he could see the tiny village in the shallow valley below. “Come see,” he breathed. “Lovey, girls, come see.”
We followed Aunt Lovey up the church steps to find ourselves looking down on a pretty little village with houses made of straw and stone, a covered well in the center square, and a reedy little duck pond beyond. It was just as Uncle Stash had described it to us. “It’s beautiful,” Aunt Lovey said. “Why don’t we go down to one of your cousins’ houses and wait in the yard?”
Uncle Stash nodded but hadn’t heard a word. He stood, gazing out over the village. I could see the flood of memories. But Uncle Stash’s timing was bad. Sooner or later church was going to let out, and meeting the whole town of Grozovo at once, like Aunt Lovey said, might be a little too much. (Did she mean they’d be too much for us? Or that we’d be too much for Grozovo?)
Uncle Stash left the church steps. Maybe he was ashamed of his emotions. Maybe he just wanted to be alone. He went around to the woods at the side of the church. Aunt Lovey hesitated, unsure which of us it was safer to leave alone, and decided that her husband needed her, t
hough I’m not sure that was the case. “You girls stay here,” she said. “Rose. Ruby.”
I felt abandoned but was too afraid, at my age, to say, “Please don’t leave us here alone.” It was time to prove what Ruby and I were made of.
The choir was singing beautifully inside the church. Ruby and I were startled when the doors to the church suddenly burst open. A crescendo of music, then the doors closed again. The woman who’d emerged seemed relieved, like she hadn’t left but escaped. She was a girl our age, round as she was tall, in a clean tattered dress and an ill-fitting coat, so pregnant it seemed she’d go into labor any second, or should have done so two weeks ago. Her face was inflated, bloated, and blotchy. Her lips and earlobes looked purple instead of red. The young woman spotted Ruby, then me, alone on the church steps in the mountains of eastern Slovakia. She didn’t appear especially frightened or even surprised—more curious. She moved toward us, squinting, as if she was certain we’d make sense to her if she just got close enough. She drew closer and closer, so close I could count the broken capillaries in the whites of her eye and feel the scratchy wool of her brown coat. The pregnant woman blinked and reached up and shocked Ruby and me by pressing her warm palm to the spot on our heads where we are joined.
“Oh my God,” the woman whispered in Slovak, then lost consciousness and fell to the ground.
“Sonya!” screamed a tall man with a sharp black beard and fierce eyes (blinking red in my memory, though I know that isn’t so) who exploded through the door just as the woman’s skull hit the earth.
In the moment before the man lunged forward and dropped to his knees beside his fallen wife, his dark eyes found mine. He didn’t look merely hateful, the way some people do. He looked murderous. And I understood his rage.
“Sonya? Sonya!” he cried.
Ruby and I backed away, watching as the bearded man found a lacy handkerchief in his wife’s coat pocket and used it to stop the blood trickling from her scalp.
Inside the church, the choir finished the final processional song, and the rest of the crowd, led by the priest, spilled out of the church. They were alarmed to find the bearded man hovering over his pregnant wife and didn’t see Ruby and me in their midst. At some point, Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash must have come from around the side of the church. I caught their familiar blur in my periphery. Aunt Lovey started for the fallen woman’s side, but Uncle Stash held her back.
“I’m a nurse,” she said.
“You’re a stranger,” he returned.
The husband looked up to find Ruby and me watching from the church steps. He pointed at us with a shaking hand, saying words in Slovak we didn’t understand. There was some nugget of relief in knowing that my sister was at my side, scared too. We held our breath as the crowd turned to look at us. No one gasped in horror. No one shrieked in fear. There was something in their collective quiet that made me think they’d been expecting us. Like prophecy. Or doom.
There was silence. But for the wind in the pines. Then the shuffling of feet as the country people crowded around us on the church steps, the way revelers surround a bride and groom, or mourners a casket.
The angry husband continued to stab the air with his finger, addressing the crowd, half of whom were helping with his wife, and the rest of whom could do nothing but pity him for his bad luck. We watched as the pregnant woman was revived with vinegar and cool water and sat up, leaning on her bearded husband. I felt relieved when she took a long deep breath. Her hand found the bloody spot on her scalp. She looked at the blood on her fingers and appeared to remember why she’d fallen. She turned to look for Ruby and me, but her husband stopped her, yanking her shoulders, speaking sharply. The woman began to cry.
“Oh my God,” Ruby whispered.
“I know.”
“Go, Rose.”
“I can’t.”
“Aunt Lovey!” Ruby cried out. “Uncle Stash!”
Then, suddenly, a woman’s voice, bewildered and astonished, cutting through the chaos. “Stanislaus?”
The sound, the word, was like a key that unlocked my knees. I turned slowly to find Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey not a foot behind Ruby and me, where they’d been all along. (How strange that was, because I’d felt utterly helpless and alone.)
“It’s Stanislaus! Stanislaus Darlensky!” the doughy woman cried. (The woman was Cousin Zuza, but I didn’t know it then.)
At that, a group of about twenty people (whom Ruby and I refer to generically as the “Slovak Relations”) came forward, as if they’d been sieved from the rest, to greet Uncle Stash, not like a stranger, or a prodigal son, but with something of disbelief. For a moment, Ruby and I were forgotten. We were mere freaks of nature. Stanislaus Darlensky was a ghost.
My attention was torn away from the Slovak Relations as I saw that the pregnant woman was conscious and walking, leaning on her dark-eyed husband and held at the other elbow by a man who was completely without hair. Along with the rest of Grozovo, the three were descending the hill, casting furtive glances over their shoulders and murmuring among themselves. Whoever Ruby and I were—witches, demons, angels—we’d finally come, they seemed to be telling one another, and it was Stanislaus Darlensky who’d brought us.
Uncle Stash held his hands out to us. “These are my daughters,” he said proudly, as though the fact of our being was an accomplishment.
“Dobre den,” I greeted the relations.
“Dobre rano,” Ruby corrected.
The Slovak Relations regarded us. My sister and I are accustomed to the ping-pong style in which people stare upon first meeting us. Some people zero in on the spot of our conjoinment, but most look back and forth between Ruby’s and my face. The very sophisticated, on first meeting us—we’ve met only a few sophisticated people in our lives, and then only ever in Toronto—act as though our conjoinment is not shocking or even very surprising. As if they know a dozen craniopagus twins and had their craniopagus dental hygienists over for dinner just last week. They make eye contact with us instantly. And never ask personal questions. (Sophisticated people are the worst.) The Slovak Relations did not ping-pong stare. They did not zero in on the spot of our conjoinment. They did not make eye contact. Instead, these Slovaks embraced my sister and me, one after the other, until all twenty-one were done and we smelled like them, of fresh cheese. And ham hocks. Uncle Stash smiled at Ruby and me and embraced us too.
Together we Darlenskys of Leaford and Grozovo made our way down the gently sloping hill to Cousin Zuza and Velika’s house for lunch. (One recently widowed. One never married. The female cousins lived together now like spinsters.) I had not determined who among these people was Cousin Velika or Cousin Zuza or Cousin Marek. I was aware they were all watching Ruby and me from behind, thinking us marvelous. And awful.
There was no discussion about the pregnant woman. At least none that we understood. No one spoke English here. Not a phrase. Not a word. We had Uncle Stash to translate, but how frightening it must be, I thought then, to be alone in a strange country and misunderstood. And how lonely. (No wonder immigrants stay together. Uncle Stash used to shake his head about his mother, who’d come to Canada and never learned more than a dozen English words. She had Slovak friends. She shopped at Slovak stores. She went to a Slovak church. Uncle Stash thought he was a fully assimilated North American, but I wouldn’t say that’s exactly true either.)
I was relieved that the place where our cousins lived was closer to hill than dale. We were drawn into the large squat kitchen of an old stone house and directed to make ourselves comfortable at the rickety wooden table, which Ruby and I did by bringing two chairs of similar height together. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash sat beside us, and the rest, perhaps a dozen relations in all (we’d lost some along the way—mostly women who’d hurried on to put up lunch for their men), stood or slouched nearby or leaned against the table.
Instinctively, as we do in such situations (not that we’d ever been in just such a situation), Ruby and I found the natural rhythm of explor
ation. She leads in looking. I lead in looking. Then she. Then me. Breathe-two-three, and switch-two-three. The walls were made of large fieldstone, with mortar and straw to block the wind, but I felt a cold draft on my neck all the same. There were four cots in the corner, pushed together in a way that said this daytime roost was temporary. In another corner, smoke rose from a woodstove where the round-faced woman who’d first recognized Uncle Stash was stirring something in an enormous black pot. Aunt Lovey had whispered to me that the woman was Cousin Zuza. I could not imagine that she’d once been beautiful. I could not picture her young.
There was no washroom, or door leading to a washroom, or any door at all, except the one we came in. There was a sink with a pump faucet. Oil lamps and candles. It struck me right away that there were no mirrors in the old women’s home, which made me feel cut off from my sister.
I heard cabbage sizzle in bacon grease. Cousin Zuza was cooking halushki. Slovak soul food. I was starving, watching the old crone stir her cauldron with her broom handle (okay—really it was a pot with a spoon, but you can see how I could get carried away), as the Slovak men gathered around Uncle Stash at the table to quaff their amber peevos and recall their brilliant youth. (I wondered when Uncle Stash would tell the relations about his mother’s death, or if he already had.)
Excluding Ruby and me, there were only three other women in the room, and they were all busy in the kitchen. Aunt Lovey had been recruited to slice thick bricks of black bread and did so with the look of a scullery maid, oppressed and vengeful. As she sawed the bread, Aunt Lovey tried to catch Uncle Stash’s eye, but he was enjoying himself too much to notice. He’d forgotten about Ruby and me many times before. I’d never once seen him forget Aunt Lovey. But then, Uncle Stash was not himself.
In due time, steaming bowls of halushki were served to the men by Cousin Zuza and a slightly younger pleasant-looking woman wearing a white blouse and chocolate skirt, who it turned out was Cousin Velika. Aunt Lovey buttered the bread she’d labored to slice and passed it out to the men, who didn’t say “Thank you.”