Unbound by Lisa Grekul

Author:Lisa Grekul
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4426-2596-9
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

4. A Meal

January 6, 2009. Christmas Eve for my father’s side of the family. Old-school. They speak Ukrainian perfectly. They celebrate Christmas in January. They even do that thing where you lay a place setting for the dead.

I have taken two buses and a subway. My cousin’s high-rise apartment on the edge of Mississauga. Earnestly, I lug with me home-made organic wild mushroom sauce. Overpriced rugaleh from the Harbord Bakery. A pair of fancy shoes. I aim to please.

They’ve been inviting me for years. I have ignored their invitations for as many years. But this year, this new, fresh year. No time or energy to do an alternative celebration. This year there’d already been some heartache. This year, as though heeding a divine directive: I go.

The bus lets me off. A seventies high-rise somewhere north, or is it west, of downtown. I cross a six-lane thoroughfare. Spotlit by high beams. A lone figure in a brown coat and a bulging black fabric bag. A long driveway past identical apartment buildings. An elevator to the seventeenth floor.

The door of my cousin’s apartment opens. To a small living room crowded with cousins from Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. And an ancient aunt. The walls covered in paintings. Embroidery everywhere. The group ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-nineties.

Some of these cousins, I haven’t seen since I was little. They terrified me. With their ethnic bravado, their lack of irony or regret. All those years in church basements and graveyards or marching in uniforms.

I am kissed three times by each person in the room. A time-consuming ritual that surprises me with its tenderness.

I can smell buckwheat. Beets. Fish. I hear wind and time and the voices of the dead. Urging us on.

I sense I am in the right place at the right time.

But I’m wary at first. I sit quietly and watch. My older cousin Yurko passes around traditional unleavened bread. Speaks quietly to each person in the room. Wishing them health and prosperity and the fulfilment of their dreams. At that moment, I have no sense of prosperity. No dreams to speak of.

No one seems to mind.

By the end of the evening, after the traditional twelve courses and countless glasses of fine wine. I am laughing along with my younger cousins. The stories and the jokes, most of them at our elders’ expense. Are all so familiar, like a sweater you’ve had forever at the bottom of your drawer. You never wear it, and you’ll never throw it away. You might need it, someday.

I enter the kitchen to arrange my rugaleh on a plate. I’m. So. Glad. You’re. Here. blurts cousin Marta. Puts down her tray. Hugs me impulsively, pale small face unfolding into a smile.

No one ever really said: Don’t come, or, go away. You left, or you missed out. Because it was unbearable, to be included in such a way. It had been a problem of translation, and of their not knowing. Perhaps of not even wanting to know.

That night, I thought of my friend Dennis.

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