the tale of ukraine

"A long, long time ago in ancient times, the land we live on now was called Halychyna and was home to a people called the Red Rus’. That’s as far back as we can remember, when we were still called Rusyns. Then there came a Prince called Vladymyr the Great, he was one of the greatest of the Kievan Rus’ people. His people came and took over the big Red Rus cities while fighting with the Poles. And so we became part of the great Kievan Rus. Their empire was so large it reached as far as Moscow and beyond! Just imagine, Moscow was once ruled by Kiev! Prince Vladymyr the Great, and Prince Yaroslav the Wise ruled for a long, long time and the Kievan Rus’ grew and grew. With them they brought Christianity, our Cyrillic writing and the freedom to develop our own cultures. But this was a long, long time ago, much before anyone now alive was born...”
“The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria came much later, when we were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In those times, we Ruthenians (as the Austrians called us) were peasants much the same as we are now and we were ruled by Polish aristocracy and gentry, although some Poles were poor peasants like us too. But the Polish landlords didn’t like us very much. Because they in turn had to answer to the Austrians, who cut back their rights and dues. We peasants no longer belonged totally to our Polish masters and we had more personal freedoms. We owed them much less work and we could even get married without our Lord’s permission. Ha! And what’s more, we could go over the heads of our Polish Lords and appeal to the Imperial Courts, whatever they were. I never heard of anyone who did such a thing, but maybe we didn’t need to - the idea that we could if we needed to seemed to be enough for everyone. All the common folk; be we Poles, Jews, Ruthenians, we all loved the Austrian Emperor. Although in some ways we paid for it too. The Austrians took lots of our people away and made them fight in their armies. But they were our masters, and we were mostly left in peace so we weren’t so badly off.”
“But for a long time there had been a problem. The Poles were not content with what they had. They wanted The Kingdom of Galicia to be their own, and didn’t want to belong to the Austrians. We, the Ruthenians, just wanted to be equal with the Poles. We wanted to keep our own language, our culture, stories and folk songs. The Polish Lords tried to turn us into Poles! Us! But they failed to make our Church change to their funny calendar or to replace our letters with their horrid Latin ones. The answer to us was always obvious, yet the problem has caused so much trouble. People seemingly will only be happy in a country which is truly their own. So divide Galicia - the Poles can live in the West and the Ruthenians in the East, united with the rest of our beloved Ukraine.”
“These peaceful times ended with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrian Emperor had to abandon us back to our Polish Lords and what about us? We were not happy. But we couldn’t decide together what to do and split up into groups such as the Russian-lovers, and the Ukrainians - they were the main group. They were linked to the common people, peasants like you and me. Ukrainians still wanted equality with the Poles and to cut up Galicia into a Polish West and a Ruthenian East. But the Poles were still saying that Galicia was once upon a time theirs, and should still be so, because the Austrians had taken it away from them one hundred and fifty years before...”
“But then there were great wars, with much heavy fighting and so many men dying all around here, so terrible were the battles. We were caught in the middle of everyone else’s wars and revolutions, such as mess! Austrians, Russians, Germans, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainian republicans and anarchists marching throughout our lands. A Red Army, a White Army and a Green Army. And we Ukrainians, in our country which isn’t even our own, what could we do?”“We had the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsing on our West, and the Imperial Russians falling apart on our Eastern flank. Here in Galicia we were stuck right in the middle of these two battling giants. And our villages were forever being destroyed in their crossfire. When the Great War started in 1914, we were split up into the two opposing armies. Lots of our men fought with the Imperial Russian Army, while others fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Many ended up fighting each with one another, on other peoples’ behalf! Even worse, those of us not fighting also suffered as both armies killed people thought to be collaborating with the enemy. First the Russian troops came and took over, forcing the Austrians out of our Galicia. The Russians then immediately started to stamp out all Ukrainian ways of life. They arrested many of our leading people: politicians, lawyers, writers, teachers, and sent them away to Siberia never to be heard of again. The next year, the Austrians came and took back Galicia and they promised us many things, trying to buy our support because things were going badly for them on other fronts. But we were not satisfied, we strived for complete independence. Because you couldn’t win with either side, or neither. It was turmoil. Anyone suspected by the Austrians of being sympathetic to the Russians was taken away never to be seen again. Then the Russians had their revolution and their civil war and it got even worse. A lot of their fighting took place here. And by the end of all these wars, more than a million Ukrainians had died, and those of us who had miraculously survived saw all of our land given to other countries. And we vowed once again that we should be our own country, independent of all these others."

the cardboard box

On the table, next to the laptop, is an ordinary cardboard box. Battered and a little stained, despite its small size it probably contains more than I have ever known about my late Ukrainian father. Real things. He rarely talked about his life before arriving in Britain, as if he had been born directly into his late twenties and whilst aiming for Canada, had somehow ended up settled in Nottingham and married to a Glaswegian nurse. It was as if someone had only then remembered to press the record button on his life, and all previous existence had been lost. Just occasionally there were shards from a life before, very different to this British working-class life my father had been assimilated into. Once it was a recollection of drinking fermented milk that was so sour it tasted alcoholic, and probably was. Another time was during a trip to Derbyshire, where the hilly landscape surprised him with memories of the Carpathian Mountains. And then there was one of his favourite tales of being caught stealing apples from a local orchard, him and his friends, back home during the famine. The owner punished them by removing their trousers and putting them in the middle of the village square. My father and his friends had to lurk half-clothed, hiding and waiting for darkness, before they could finally retrieve their trousers and skulk off home.
And there were other glimpses of his Ukrainian beginnings. For instance, he knew how to build and run a still. He once discovered me as a young teenager crudely trying to distil something – anything - out of a dribble of leftover wine. Having laughed at my feeble and amateur attempt, he made a still for himself out of two Swarfega cans and fuelled it with home-grown potatoes and sprouted barley. His comment had been that this wouldn’t be possible ‘back home’ but that since here in Mapperley nobody would recognise what the still actually was, we would be perfectly safe. Home distilling of alcohol was definitely ‘Not Allowed’ back home. The resulting liquid was stronger than vodka and tasted disgusting, and was drinkable only when heavily disguised with blackberry cordial, made from home-grown blackberries of course.
And that was another hint of his past life. My father had two very productive allotments in addition to a large garden at home, and a total of three greenhouses. These he ran over and above his daily work as a fitter. And apart from the chrysanthemums, which he produced commercially, everything was laid down to food crops. Good, solid, bulk food. No silly sugar-snap peas when you could be growing kilos of proper peas. Potatoes, apples, runner beans, tomatoes, he grew them all in industrial quantities. As children, we had evenings at home shredding beans and shelling peas and thought nothing of it. It was all carefully preserved and stored away - a massive, edible safety deposit against times of need. The house was so crammed full of food that every space was occupied, leaving just enough space for us.
And now as I look back at these aspects of my childhood, I realise they may not be so typical after all. The allotments, the gardens, the greenhouses, the food stores. I knew my father had been a market gardener or some sort of small farmer ‘back home’. Had this been my father’s attempts to mentally dig his way back to a former way of life? Was he maintaining a link with his past self? Reliving his memories again and again as he turned over spade after spade of soil - memories he could neither share nor get out of his head. Or simply didn’t want to. Was it more of a guilty hangover from surviving through times of great famine and hardship? And a determination that we should never, ever have to go through the same ordeal ourselves.

chapter 2

My father was most definitely Ukrainian, yet he did not come from the Ukraine. The country did not actually exist at any point while he was alive. And anyway, at that time and in his part of the world the borders and states, leaders and countries shifted back and forth almost like the tide. Meanwhile the population itself was a fairly even mix of Ukrainians and Poles, with the difference being made up by Jews, Germans, Czechs and Russians to name but a few. But by mixed, I don’t mean living side by side. It was more a matter of ‘this village is Ukrainian, the one down the road is Polish’, and so on. No, for my father being Ukrainian was not simply a matter of coming from a country called Ukraine.
Take his surname for example, transcribed from Ukrainian into its nearest English equivalent. The clue is in the ending ‘-skyj’ as opposed to the more typical Polish spelling ‘-ski’. All down to how it was initially translated into English. There is no straight equivalent to ‘-ский’ since some of the letters simply don’t exist in the English language. The Ukrainians tended to opt for ‘-skyj’, which I happen to think is much nicer looking. I like the way the y and the j curl round one another and underneath the k, keeping each other company and neatly rounding off the end of the name. The Polish i on its own looks harsh and sharp in comparison. Or maybe this is just the hidden Ukrainian in me. So what if the native English speakers cannot cope with the sight of y and j next to one another?
But what did make my father Ukrainian then? Even more, what made the Ukrainians living where he lived, in the Western-most province of a place called Galicia, think that they belonged with the rest of the Ukraine to the East? When Galicia has a separate, long and extremely complicated history all of its own. A little hotchpotch region of Eastern Europe falling between Soviet Russia and Poland, the East and the West, the Carpathian Mountains and the river San...more; it is a positive boiling pot of cultures and ethnicities. So where did this group of people get the idea that they belonged together? That they had an identity which bound them tightly, irrevocably to one another and excluded everyone else? Scattered peoples in the borderlands, intermixed with so many others and yet separate, segregated.
It is ironic that a Ukrainian state existed for a few short years just before my father’s birth and never again until about ten years after he died.

ode to Garfield

I must have sat heavily on the sofa for some time. Eventually the ginger cat, having eyed up my lap and carefully calculated, stirred his lazy limbs in my direction. With an ungainly half-jump; half-scramble he arrived and started the long process of resettling himself on my knees. He padded as always, incessantly, with half-moon claws reaching deep enough to touch my skin, even through the denim. Curling the claws a few degrees and then withdrawing, over and over, over and over. His blissful, round face searched out my own. His eyes were tight slits in the sun, half-closing in happiness.
But the claws annoyed me more than usual, nicking my skin, while the heat collecting between our bodies was oppressive. I started fidgeting - my brain was not in the mood for enforced stillness. I shifted, causing the cat to stand up, re-circle and move upwards towards my chest. He tucked his white paws neatly beneath his sternum and looked at me, blinking slowly and purring deeply. Now I felt suffocated and squirmed even more. I sighed deeply, trying to inflate my lungs against the furry mass and wondering vaguely when the cat had become so heavy. He was insistent, he was here to stay. My will finally broke as his whiskers innocently tickled my nose and I tried to force him to shift. With this he seemed to become even heavier still until he spotted a better alternative, somewhere warm and inviting. He bounced up onto the table, using my ribs as a springboard and his claws for good purchase on my chest. There he settled almost gracefully onto the open laptop, overhanging slightly at each edge and looking truly triumphant, while the laptop purred gently back to him.

novel opening?

I have a crazy surname, with too few vowels for English comfort. When forced to call my name people pause and stand still, with a panicked expression and their mouths twisting silently as if warming up to the challenge. They have three options – they can bravely try to pronounce it, and although they usually start off well, by the end they have speeded up. They are trying to get through the k, the l, the m, and the y’s as fast as possible and have almost made it too, when the final j punches them hard in the face. They tend to finish with a quietly mumbled yet high-speed slur. Sometimes it is almost a pitiful whimper. Or they give up after the first five letters which, after all, look deceptively normal. Another option is to continue standing silent and still, eyes wide and mouth contorting, until I finally feel sorry for them and pronounce the name myself. You can normally tell from the facial confusion that it is your turn. Some days I just feel mean, and wait for them to try anyway. The final option is to just use my first name, my already-anglicised forename. Despite the fact I am Nottingham born and bred, I didn’t start life as a Peter.