Tailor of Inverness, The Read Online Free PDF

frustration at her inability to communicate and her reliance on my father as a translator. There was never any question about coming though. I’m sure she understood howimportant these visits were for him, and for us, so she always supported him and although she sometimes complained about the extent of my father’s generosity, she recognised that it would always be necessary for a significant proportion of the family’s income to be spent on the biennial Polish trip and on Adam’s family and on the brothers’ mother, Zofia.
    Zofia was the grandmother I never met. A fairytale figure in a thatched cottage in a fertile land. A farmer’s wife surrounded by ducks, geese and hens, haystacks and horses. A weatherbeaten
Babcha
in a scarf, staring out at us with a defiant look from the only picture I’d ever seen of her, taken during the ‘60s, I guess. She looked strong, determined and worn. She called silently from a beautiful, inaccessible place. The old country, the former Polish lands in the east, in eastern Galicia, lost to the Soviets when they invaded in September 1939, only 17 days after the German invasion from the west, now in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. If we were inside the Iron Curtain, there was an even thicker Iron Curtain beyond, at the eastern Polish border, impenetrable, protecting the monolithic power, the Soviet Union.
    Zofia had survived the Soviet invasion, the German onslaught and the Soviets’ vengeful reconquering of her land. And she was still there in Gnilowdy when I was a boy, but barely present in our consciousness, barely mentioned. Spectral, yet alive, red-blooded, living in the real world. Feeding her hens, meeting her neighbours, going to her church, picking her apples. In that frightening, fairytale place, so green and yet so grey. I recall no letters from her. I don’t think they were allowed. As a child, I didn’t understand how I could have a living, breathing grandmother who I would never meet. I didn’t try to understand. As a child, I simply accepted that this was the way things were. She was on the other side of the border. We weren’t allowed to go there.
    One or two letters did come from Ukraine. They were sentby my father’s cousin, Bogdan Baldys. I understand now that Bogdan would only have been allowed the privilege of sending a letter to the West because he was a Communist official, a party member. I think the letter or letters arrived around the time of Zofia’s death, in 1971. Beyond news of her illness and death, my father didn’t tell us anything about their contents. They were exotic to us, words written with the Cyrillic alphabet. We were told it was Russian. It might have been Ukrainian, Bogdan’s native tongue, but then Ukrainian may have been suppressed and disapproved of. If so, Bogdan would have written in Russian. I didn’t even know there
was
a Ukrainian language until I went there in 2003. My father certainly never told us, even though he could speak it. He always described it as ‘Russian’. I only began to understand all this in the light of the new history I would learn in my middle age.
    I also learned in later life that my father sent money regularly to Adam, which he would then send on to Zofia, via Moscow. The Soviet system made small concessions to compassion, often only if it was advantageous, as in this case, where my father’s hard currency would enter the coffers of the Communist banking system while providing a little stimulus to a local economy. So Zofia was more comfortable than most of her neighbours in Gnilowody, but money would never compensate for the complete inaccessibility of her sons. Adam was eventually granted a visa to visit Zofia when she became ill, and again when she died, to attend her funeral. Every detail of his journey, including precise train and bus times, exactly where he would be staying, who he would be visiting and when these visits would take place had to be submitted prior to the granting of his visa.