I sat at the kitchen island, under the blind gaze of my grandmother. In my palm, I held the bottom of a varenyky dumpling. I put a spoonful of cherries in the middle, and then another piece of dough.
“That’s too many cherries,” my grandma said, looking at me with those cloudy gray eyes.
You can’t even see that far, I thought.
“It’ll be fine, Grandma.” I pinched the sides closed, turning a bit in my fingers to make a decorative edge to the pastry.
“There’re going to explode when you bake them, Larysa. Don’t argue with me.” The Eastern Eurpoean accent tilted her raspy voice.
I took a deep breath, and put the completed dumpling on the pan. I couldn’t remember a time when my grandmother had not been difficult, obstinate, and spiteful. There were no happy Grandma memories in my life. I remembered asking my dad once, why she was like this. He had just sighed, and said that she was an old woman who had seen too much, and to let her be.
I put together another varenyky.
“You’re not doing the edge right. You’re being sloppy. If you’re not going to do it right, then don’t do it at all.” She spit the words at me.
I felt my mouth flatten into a thin line.
Why was she like this?
She settled herself like a fat, angry starling. “Give me a piece of that babka you made.”
“Dad told me not to give you any before dinner.”
She mumbled something in Ukrainian that I didn’t understand. It sounded like expletives. “I am a hundred years old, girl. If I want to have cake, then I should be able to have cake.” She reached for the knife that was balanced on the cake platter, but I grabbed it before she could get to it.
She huffed and sat back in her chair, sulking.
She could sulk all she wanted. The last thing I needed was a blind woman with a knife.
“I heard the news on the radio,” she said.
I filled another dumpling with fruit. “What news?”
“About the attack on Ukraine.”
I nodded. “Yes. Pretty horrible.”
“Fucking Russians.” She shook her head.
“You grew up there, didn’t you?”
My grandmother narrowed her eyes at me. “I was born here, in Chicago. I’m an American citizen, you know.” Her anger was never far from the surface.
I didn’t say you weren’t, you mean old bat.
The sour look remained steadfast on her face. “My mother took me there when I was a baby, after she divorced my father.”
That got me to stop what I was doing, and look at her. “Your mother took you back to Ukraine, in the 1920s?” From what I knew of Soviet history, they couldn’t have picked a worse time to go back. “You’ve never told me that.”
My grandmother shrugged, unseeing. “It’s not important.” And as if to prove her point, she returned to the previous topic. “Too many cherries, Larysa! Look at what you’re doing — you’re just making a mess.”
I sighed, fairly certain she had no idea how many cherries I was using.
“What made you come back to the States?”
This was the first time I was ever hearing this story, and I wondered if they’d escaped before Stalin’s army burned everything to the ground. Or had they been refugees?
She laughed, and it was a bitter sound. “We lived with my aunt and uncle on a little farm in the country. One day my mother went to town and never came back.” Another string of mumbled Ukrainian curse words bookended her sentences. “We never knew what happened to her. They told me that it was because of me that she ran away.”
She strained her eyes at my fingers, working pastry. “I want a piece of that babka.”
My heart broke for the little girl my grandmother once was, losing her mother like that. “Dad said no, Grandma.”
She blew out an irritated breath. “My uncle worked me to the bone in the fields. I worked every day from before dawn to after sunset. I worked until my fingers were bloody. And even then, sometimes they wouldn’t have enough to feed me. I was nothing to them — an extra pair of hands, nothing more.”
God.
I cut her a piece of cake and handed it to her. She smiled smugly, as she settled it on her lap and dug in.
“So then what did you do?” I asked.
Again, she shrugged. “I got tired.” She took another bite. “Not enough raisins. Next time, use more raisins.”
“Okay, Grandma.” I pressed my lips together, wondering if I should press forward. In a way, this was my history, too. I wanted to know. “What happened then?”
A rare smile crossed her face, elusive, and gone just as quickly.
“Then I met Mischa.”
“Who was Mischa?”
“Our priest. He was so nice to me.” Her voice softened, and it sounded strange to my ears. I had never even heard that kind of softness for my father, her own son.
She took another bite of cake, and I swear she blushed.
“Grandma!” I said, incredulously.
Her stoic expression returned. “It was nothing.”
“It doesn’t sound like nothing.” I pinched the edges of another dumpling closed. “What happened? Orthodox priests can get married, right?”
“Oh, they can.” She laughed, but it sounded like broken glass in her throat. “He already had a wife.” The fork clattered against the plate in her lap. “God, I was so young and stupid.”
She looked up at me, and I could see those storm cloud eyes were glassy. She took a deep, rasping breath, and she was hidden again, behind that perpetually angry face.
“That doesn’t explain how you ended up back here,” I said quietly. I wasn’t sure if it would be a kindness to continue this conversation.
My grandmother glared at me. “Your filling is dripping out of the last three varenyky. You really don’t care, do you?”
I pursed my lips. “I care.” I tried not to sound indignant, to rise to her bait.
She humphed.
I took the plate from her lap and cut her another slice of the sweet babka. “Tell me how you got back to Chicago.” I put the plate in front of her.
Her mouth quirked up into a hall-smile. “Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look.” She took a bite. “Less honey, next time. It’s all you can taste.”
I tried to ignore the insults and wait patiently for her to continue her story.
The silence grew between us.
“It was after I was with child that Mischa started asking if I had other family.” She said it as a statement of fact, nothing more.
I gaped at her; I couldn’t help it. “What?”
She shrunk into herself. “If you’re not going to listen, I’m not going to talk,” she spit.
“No, no that’s not what I meant. I mean… I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
My grandmother’s blind eyes darkened, and she stared straight at me. If I couldn’t see the cataracts clouding her pupils, I would have sworn she could see me. “I don’t need your pity, Larysa.”
I wanted to scream, but I let myself take only controlled breaths. The only sound in the room was the scraping of her fork against ceramic.
She took a deep breath. “My father still lived in Chicago, last I knew. I didn’t want to go. I…” She paused. “… Loved him.” That words seemed to stuck in her mouth, like something odd and unfamiliar. “I was carrying his child. I thought… God, I don’t know what I thought.” Her eyes lowered.
“What did Mischa do, once he found out about your father?” A cherry slipped out of the dumpling I was making.
“For Christ’s sake, pay attention to what you’re doing! This is why you’re not married yet.” She scowled. “Always rushing.” After what I assumed were some choice words in Ukrainian, she continued. “He wanted me to leave, right away. Said it wasn’t safe for me or the baby.”
I thought about the Red Army burning and pillaging the fertile fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s.
“It probably wasn’t,” I said.
She sighed theatrically. “Of course you’d take his side. Against your own poor grandmother.” She shook her head, laying the guilt on thick. “No, he wasn’t concerned about me, I know that now. He was concerned only with himself and looking good for the parish. He wanted nothing to do with me. I was going to ruin everything for him.” She swore. “Fucking liar. I still remember his face as he handed me over to the Red Cross. He was terrified, the coward.”
Somehow, I wanted to believe that there was another reason he was scared. They had to have heard rumors of the coming attack. I wanted to believe it was because he feared for the safety of the two of them.
“I know what you’re thinking, and no, it wasn’t that,” she said. “It is written across your face, plain as day. You’re so naive, like I was, back then.”
I felt my shoulders slump. “Alright. Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right.” She polished off the last bite of cake.
I pushed the edges of pastry together to form another dumpling, this time without spilling anything. I thought about what she had just told me. As far as I knew, my father was her only child, and he had been born after the war was over. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What happened to the baby, Grandma?”
She waited a long time to answer. “The Red Cross put me on a boat to New York. It was dark. The stairs were icy. I slipped.” There was no emotion in my grandmother’s voice, just flatness, without inflection. She might have been reading me the weather from the newspaper.
What could I say to that? What was there to say?
I don’t need your pity, her voice kept echoing through my head.
“I thought…” and her voice finally broke. “I thought that I could keep a little part of Mischa with me, through the baby. Maybe it would look like him.” She laughed, and it sounded like a sob. “Dumb. I was so dumb, back then. I bled for a long time, Larysa. No one cared.”
I reached out to her, and she batted my hand away.
“No, stop. None of that nonsense.” She straightened up and collected herself. “No one cared then, and no one cares now. I learned to take care of myself, because no one else would.”
I retracted my hand, not knowing what else to do. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I didn’t know.”
I care.
She shrugged and seemed to retreat back into the angry, bitter woman I had known all my life. “It doesn’t matter. It was nothing. The Soviets probably shot him, anyway.”
I wanted to tell her it was not nothing. I wanted to say something, anything.
But nothing came.
“Help me up, I want to go outside,” she said.
I gave her my arm, and she grasped it with her bony fingers, struggling to make her hips work. As she took one shambling step after another toward the patio door, I thought of all the inner battles people fight, that no one else knows about. I thought of the private tragedies, the personal losses we don’t share with anyone else. As I lowered her into the cushioned chair outside, I thought of what those little catastrophes might do to one’s outlook.
My grandmother stared blankly out into the yard, lost in her own memories.
I knew we would never speak of this again. But maybe I had more of an understanding of why she was, the way she was.