Tuesday, May 10, 2016

On failure

Each child we pass is either standing on the dirt track or up on his or her father's shoulders. They all make the sign for pulling the whistle of the train, or wave, or both. The light lowers and the cumulonimbus move in from the west, pulling the atmosphere tighter and stealing magic hour away a little early. It is almost 7pm and I m passing back through the country where Berdychiv lies, on my way west to Lviv, and then to Kraków. I'll arrive at 10:30pm to the first, and then dash to figure out another train station before the midnight departure of the Polish train.

I'm thinking again about failure. There is nothing faster than faster love, writes Mary Ruefle. My failure to find anyone who knew our family in this country. The failure to find a grave of any Nuchims, walking the rows through the black earth and wet strawberry plants and tall grasses and vetch and dandelions and even, horror of horrors, Japanese knotweed, in one corner. Which makes it all the more likely that anyone who remained was one of the 30,000 executed on the edge of that green, green precipice at the edge of a wetland in 1941. The failure of religion. My failure to believe. My failure, thus far, to visit the Ukrainian archives (it was closed every day I was here except today, when I spent three hours trying to figure out how to buy a train ticket and so lost my afternoon, after being sleepless until 5am and finally falling to sleep, only to be woken by the hotelier at noon, the morning failed as well. I think I am frightened of going there. Another failure -- to face asking the questions, to be responsible. Even the failure of the ground to hold the dead. I found a hip bone in the Jewish Berdychiv graveyard lying on the black soil. I picked it up and followed the tunnels at the break point, where the marrow once lay. It was bleached white but surprisingly heavy. I put it back down, and thought about covering it with earth, and decided not to.

The birches outside the train window gleam like lightening. And above them the actual lightening is making the tree leaves so green they are blue. We pass soviet bloc apartments and brick warehouses, copses of birch and oak, immaculate vegetable patches, women in red dresses picking new shoots from the black-trunked pine forest. I suppose this is the southern edge of the eastern Boreal forest, the ecosystem that covers more land mass than any other on earth. If so, than most of what lies in it must be edible, and I am reminded of a euphoric looking Polish couple walking one of the hidden paths around Thetis Lake in the fall, their buckets full of mushrooms and roots. Many people here seem to know the earth. The killing field in Berdychiv had potatoes at the bottom of the ravine, rows of peas, onions, irises about to bloom.

And in the background, is this clamouring, another kind of failure. What do I say to this place? Who is this trip for? What responsibility? There are storms slipping across the fields and my great uncle, Gus, an artist, was born in Detroit and committed to a mental hospital by his wife when his children were small. A rift ensued between the family because of her decision. When I contacted them for information -- what could they remember? Who should I look for? What were the names? -- it was this fact that was discussed the most. Rifts: failures. We leave one land for another. We break away from a small town where on Sunday, before I drove away for likely the last time in my life, the entire community gathered and walked behind a marching band all the way to the Ukrainian graveyard, to decorate the graves with piles of lilacs, sprays of baby's breath, lilies, roses.

We leave one country for another, one story for another, one husband for another. And I can't solve anything by returning. My shoulders hurt. I'm not sleeping. I have to stay very quiet, I have to not feel too much, in order to keep moving. I am helped, constantly, by Ukrainians and Russians who offer to buy me a ticket using their phone, as mine won't work; who let me ahead in line, who laugh as I describe the pickled onions I want, because they appeared in a Tranströmer poem, and I want to eat them on a train, as the black cloud lights the canola and the field becomes the sun.