Blood and Belonging (19 page)

No one wants to work now, the head of the collective farm tells me later. Why don't you give them the land? I ask. Who do I give it to? Who has the capital? Look at these fields. He spreads his hands out to the huge, featureless fields of beet. What he implies is crucial: if agriculture is the backbone of the new Ukraine, who will save it now? Where are the peasants? Where are the small farmers? He takes me down to the river, near the church, to have a look at the kolkhoz flour mill. Erected in 1886, it says over the front door, at the same time as the church, and inside I find all the machinery Great-grandfather imported from Leipzig and Dresden, still working, with hammered bits of Soviet tin and iron replacing those parts that have worn out. I watch as women in flour-covered kerchiefs pour sacks of grain into the old machines and watch the fine cone of white flour emerge beneath. I move the flour dust away from one of the labels: “Leipzig, 1886.” “Still the best flour mill in the region,” the head of the collective farm says.

I cannot shake off the sensation that these people are the survivors of a great catastrophe. From the family album, and the pictures taken by the English nanny, I know some of the names of the peasants who used to live here in my grandfather's time. Their names are inscribed in white ink beneath their pictures: full-bearded Sessoueff, the estate steward, with his ample wife and their seven children. Rudnitsky, the sly-looking head of the stables. What had happened to them all at the Revolution? In the churchyard, I found the grave of Sessoueff, buried next to the family vault. And his children? All “repressed” in the 1930s. And Rudnitsky? Repressed, too. Why? The priest shrugs his shoulders. They were kulaks, rich peasants, grain hoarders, moneylenders, enemies of the state, two victims among Stalin's hecatomb.

Walking along the empty, dusty tracks of Kroupodernitsa toward the big house, past some cottages in brick with tin roofs, past others still wattle daub and thatched, as they were in the nanny's photographs, I sense the reasons for the sadness that hangs over this place like a shroud. Something like 3 million Ukrainians died of hunger between 1931 and 1932. A further million were killed during the collectivization of agriculture and the purges of intellectuals and Party officials later in the decade. An additional 2 to 3 million Ukrainians were deported to Siberia. The peasant culture of small farmers and laborers that my grandfather grew up among was exterminated. This was when the great fear came. And it never left. It remains in the eyes of the old women who stare at me over the picket fences of their kitchen gardens as I make my way up the muddy track to my great-grandfather's house.

It is on high ground, looking down on the village, a capacious two-story mansion, in white stucco, with a ceremonial front porch, before which the family brougham used to draw up when the family arrived to spend the summers. The ceremonial gardens have long since gone. One wing burned down, another is in ruins. But it is still recognizable from the old family photographs.

The teachers greet me on the steps. A girl in a peasant costume and Ukrainian headdress, made of purple and pink plastic flowers, curtsies and presents me with a round loaf of bread, decorated with pastry leaves and a pastry sheaf of grain, and a small bowl of rock salt. Thus was my grandmother greeted when she came here, as my grandfather's bride, in 1902. From cottage to cottage they went, and each peasant family presented them with bread and salt. Now it is my turn, but I do not know what to do—my translator
whispers that I must take a piece of bread and dip it in the salt and eat. Instead, I bow, in embarrassment.

They lead me through a house that my aging uncles in exile in Canada can still remember room by room, corridor by corridor. I feel I am sleepwalking through their memories. I walk across thick plank floors, pass through long low corridors, with children clattering behind me. I hear the school director tell me, pointing, that it was there, just there, at the bottom of those stairs, that my great-grandfather died, one morning in 1908. How he knows this he does not say. The house seems to relay its mythology, some of it untrustworthy. Is it true, the principal wants to know, that Honoré de Balzac spent a night here? He leads me into a long room, with a raised platform at the end, which might have been a stage for family theatricals or recitals. Now it is hung with pictures of Soviet pioneer heroes of the Great Patriotic War, and I am asked to give a little speech. I tell the children that I am the great-grandson of the man who built this house. I present them with copies of my family album's photographs. They stare at them and at me with awe and disbelief.

No one knows exactly what happened after the Revolution here. My grandfather's sister, Aunt Mika, who ran a dispensary in the village, stayed on, and then was spirited away to Kiev, where she went into a nunnery. Everyone says, without ceasing, how all the children in the village were my family's godchildren, how Aunt Mika looked after them. This is true. It is also true that the house must have been put to the sack. Not a stick of furniture, not a picture, not a samovar, not a spoon remains, although one old man comes up holding a faded photo of my great-grandfather at the end of his days, wearing his old general's greatcoat, leaning on his wife's arm, rheumy, tired, his mustaches untrimmed and
drooping, slippers on his feet, in the ornamental garden. By the 1930s, it was a dwelling house for many families; after the war, an orphanage, now a school. In one room, eight- and nine-year-old children are singing Ukrainian patriotic songs, mournful, violent songs about the Cossack warriors who will overthrow Moscow's yoke:

The riflemen of the Sich come into the fray of this bloody dance

To free their Ukrainian brothers from Moscow's chains.

We'll cast off Moscow's chains

And in our illustrious Ukraine we'll make merry.

In one room the children are learning the Ukrainian alphabet, while in another there is a folk museum of the Ukrainian peasant past: a wooden spinning wheel, a wooden rake, a blackened iron samovar, the obligatory picture of Taras Shevchenko, the national poet. The rough plank floor is strewn with fragrant grasses. But there is so little left; the historical remains are so poor. The disaster of famine and forced collectivization has stripped the peasant past bare.

So I learn that a new Ukraine is being made in the house of my great-grandfather. The children learn about Shevchenko, as they once learned about Pushkin; they learn about throwing off Moscow's yoke as they once learned about the heroic Soviet achievements of Yuri Gagarin; they run their hands over the broken spinning wheel that is all that is left of the peasant culture of these parts.

Then to the church, where the bell is tolling and the parishioners are assembling for a special
pannihida
in memory of our ancestors. The priest's son has come from Vinnitsa with his choir. The priest's wife lights the thirty candles on the
candelabrum and hoists it skyward. The walls are bright with newly completed paintings of saints and holy scenes. I stand to the side with the choir. At the back, a large cluster of old men and women, crossing and recrossing themselves.

I had felt suffocated in the maze beneath the monastery. Now another feeling began to steal over me, a feeling that, like it or not, this was where my family history began, this was where my graves were. Like a tunneler, I had gone through suffocation, and I had tunneled myself back to at least one of my belongings. I could say to myself: the half-seen track of my past does have its start, and I can return to it. The choir sings, the priest names my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, the names, some of them Anglo-Saxon, peeking through the seams of his prayers, the choir and their voices singing, the sound filling this church my great-grandfather built.

Afterward, the priest asks me to speak to his parishioners. And I do, with Lena, the translator, to help me, explaining who I am, thanking them for coming. They stare and stare, and then they come closer. Old women are crying. They take my hand, kiss it. They explain, through broken teeth, that they have walked for miles to be here, they remember, they remember. How Aunt Mika, my grandfather's sister, ran the dispensary. How well the choir sang when my grandfather conducted it. How strict my great-grandmother was when you waited on table. How they brought mushrooms to the kitchen door, how they collected strawberries, and how they were rendered down in tubs in the pantry. It is impossible to catch these stories, to hold them. Everyone is talking at once, crying, the women clutching my sleeves. They push pieces of paper into my hand. My grandfather served in your stables and went to Canada. We think he went to see your
grandfather there. Do you know? No, I don't know. Threads of connection are established, then broken, across seventy years. They are all weeping, clutching at me, crying hopelessly for the past, seeing the young kerchiefed girls they were before the horror began. One old woman, bent nearly double, slumps against a bench at the back of the church, crying on her own, her mouth a black, stump-filled hole of lamentation.

The priest shoos them away, and leads me out of the church into the crypt, a low, damp, flagstoned space, with icons ranged along the back wall. In the gloom, against the far wall, I can see piles of lumber. One by one the icon lamps are lit, and in their glow I make out three graves of cut stone. In the center, my great-grandfather's, with his military rank, and the names of the treaties he had negotiated in the Tsar's name, embossed on the side. On either side, the grave of his daughter, my grandfather's sister, who died in a hospital train of typhus tending the wounded in 1915; and my great-grandmother. The priest points out on the white marble of my great-grandfather's grave cuts in the stone made from a butcher's knife. This was a slaughterhouse in the 1930s. I run my hands across these black slices in the marble. We stand and sing the
viechnaya pamyat,
the hymn of memory, the priest blesses the graves, and then they leave me alone, with a candle.

Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.

Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for
the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both.

LVOV

After saying goodbye to the priest and his wife, his son and the choir, we set off for Lvov in western Ukraine. As the hours pass, the countryside changes, from the flat, black-soil lands of the plain to the rolling and more prosperous villages of the Carpathian foothills. I eat the remains of a boiled duck, the collective farm's parting present to us, and a mouthful of the ceremonial greeting loaf from the school, I fall asleep, and wake to the sound of the bus clattering over Habsburg cobblestones.

The Russians call it Lvov. Under the Habsburgs, it was known as Lemberg. To the Jews of the poverty-stricken nineteenth-century Galician stetl, it was their Jerusalem. Ukrainians know it as Lviv. It is one of those fated places in Europe where imperial borders have always met, peoples have clashed, and nations have been born. Now it is witnessing the painfully slow birth of Ukraine.

The sound of the trams grinding and rasping their way through the cobbled crooked streets makes you think of Vienna. The green copper Baroque spires make you think of Prague. But the tired, worn people in the bread shop, their faces lit by the bleary light of a forty-watt bulb, could be only where they are: foraging for food amid the ruins of the Soviet empire. Lvov is a kind of Habsburg Pompeii, perfectly preserved beneath the dust and ash of the Soviet volcano.

Lvov has always been the cradle of Ukrainian independence, perhaps because it once was, not a Ukrainian city, but
a Jewish and Polish one, and so the Ukrainian minority had to develop an ideology to be heard above the competing din of other people's.

The city was always the least Russified, least Sovietized part of Ukraine. Until 1918, the double eagle of Austria-Hungary graced the top of municipal buildings. Between 1918 and 1939, it was ruled by the Poles, and you can still see the Polish street signs just above the new Ukrainian ones. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 handed Lvov to the Soviets, but the invading German army—supported by some Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries—drove them out. The Soviet army retook the city in 1945, and it was not until 1956 that the last resistance from Ukrainian nationalist guerrilla bands was wiped out. Grizzled survivors of those bands now walk the streets, wearing their old forage caps.

In the more Russified eastern Ukraine, Soviet rule could count on some popular support. Here in western Ukraine, the Soviets ruled as an army of occupation. The Uniate Catholics were banned; their churches were closed and their leaders imprisoned. Nationalism was defined as fascism, and nationalist families were deported. But it is the western Ukrainian nationalist myth—often nurtured in exile—which is now attempting to make itself the official nationalism of a whole state.

When the late 1980s brought glasnost and perestroika, the repressed force of nationalism returned with a vengeance. Western Ukraine was convulsed with student demonstrations, strikes, and religious processions. The mistake that cost Gorbachev his empire was to believe a new Soviet man had been created here. He was to discover just how bitter, enduring, and unforgiving national memory can be—in the Baltic, in Georgia, and here in Lvov.

As in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, nationalism and national revival here mean returning to Europe. Returning to Europe means pulling your nation, like a battered horse and cart, from the muddy ditch that is the Soviet system.

We are Europeans, the waiter tells me in the National Hotel in Lvov's main square. We are Europeans, a Ukrainian MP who once did six years in Siberia tells me in her tiny three-room apartment with a statue of a Cossack on her piano and a Ukrainian picture of the Crucifixion on the wall. Being a European here means not being Russian. It means being an individual, taking responsibility, standing up for yourself, all the characteristics the western Ukrainians passionately believe are absent in the Russians.