A Sun Drenched Elsewhere: The Zoya Septet, #4

By Murray Pura

Yura's total existence has had a rough start. His mother's breakdown, his brother's chronic illness and his father's physical abuse have turned his 24/7 into a quest for healing on every level imaginable – mental, emotional, spiritual.

But where will the healing come from? Choi Jeans, the tattooed CrossFit Goth who believes his destiny lies in the zodiac? Zoryana, the six-two goddess and jazz dancer who thinks her love and a condo in Europe should do the trick? Or what about his Uncle Nazar, who detests assimilation, and crams Yura's Eastern European bloodlines into him over beer, homemade dill pickles and Russian Orthodox icons?

Miraculously, it all begins to come together with Zoryana. Until a family secret and a revolution in the streets of Kiev threaten to break Yura's beautiful new world into bright shiny pieces and make life more impossible than it has ever been before.

Or, depending on the constellations and the summer equinox and an offbeat eternal point of view, offer more of life, love, romance and a star-spangled universe than he's ever dreamed possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MillerWords, LLC
• Release date: Sep 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393962373

Murray Pura

Murray Pura’s novel The Sunflower Season won Best Contemporary Romance (Word Awards, Toronto, 2022) while previously, The White Birds of Morning was Historical Novel of the Year (Word Awards, Toronto, 2012). Far on the Ringing Plains won the Hemingway Award for WW2 Fiction (2022) and its sequel, The Scepter and the Isle, was shortlisted for the same award (both with Patrick Craig). Murray has been a finalist for the Dartmouth Book Award, The John Spencer Hill Literary Award, and the Kobzar Literary Award. He lives in southwestern Alberta.

Book preview

Dedication

In memory of my younger brother Jimmy (my Tommy) 

In your broken world, you always understood love and kindness, and because of that, you were always whole.

Dedicated to my friends Doug Cummings & Katie Datko

creators, lovers, healers, visionaries, warriors of peace, ones who embrace light

the children of a braver morning

Ariadne

The constellation Corona Borealis represents the crown of the daughter of King Minos of Crete, Princess Ariadne, who is a Greek myth. Princess Ariadne fell in love with Prince Theseus of Athens who had come to kill the monster called the Minotaur – half-bull and half-man, seven young men and seven young women had to be sacrificed to it every seven to nine years. She helped Theseus slay the beast by giving him a sword to perform the deed. She also helped him get free of the dark and confusing labyrinth that was the Minotaur’s lair by gifting him with a ball of thread he could unwind behind himself. Ariadne and Theseus became lovers and she fled her homeland of Crete with him.

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

CHICAGO

Uncle Nazar Ivas Klimenko

Aunt Ulyana (nee Andrushko)

Roman Andrushko (father)

Rilla (nee Wichmann) (mother)

Yura (son)

Abi (older sister)

Manfred (older brother)

Tommy (younger brother)

Aunt Zlata (Ulyana’s estranged sister)

Uncle Walter Wichmann (Yura’s mother’s brother)

Ian & Bobby Wichmann (cousins)

Rabbi Levy (longtime friend of Nazar)

Choi Machaca (friend of Yura)

Julio (Choi’s older brother)

Zoryana Brutka (girlfriend of Yura)

KIEV

Maksym (father)

Yana (mother)

Danylo (son)

Daria (daughter)

Forethoughts

We do not heal the past by dwelling there. We heal the past by living fully in the present.

Marianne Williamson

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Isabelle Eberhardt

§§§

Some of us don’t realize we’re broken until one day we surprise ourselves and fall apart. Then we suddenly become aware that pieces were breaking off of us all along because we can’t find them. There are those who know what it means to lose parts of themselves from the very beginning and those who have such amazing beginnings they are never troubled by any loss. But along the way everyone eventually loses something or someone and many lose much more than others. Then it no longer becomes a question of how we were broken or why, but how we are going to recover. 

It’s this: How do we regenerate ourselves once important parts of our lives are gone forever? How do we get strength back, any kind of hope, any kind of faith in any kind of thing? Smile smiles that aren’t forced? How do we get to the real that everyone talks about so much – the healing place?

If we even want to be healed. But suppose we do – how does it happen, where does it come from, who does it to us? Do we heal ourselves by going inside? Or is it others who do the healing by starting from the outside? Is it written in the Koran? In the Bible? In the Origin of Species? Is it written in the stars? Or do we have to take the stairs to the stars, and rearrange their place in the sky, and by doing that, rearrange our destinies?

I confess I never gave much thought to it all. Things were good, things were bad, the sun rose, the rain fell, one day followed another until there were millions of days behind me, and I just kept going. 

Until everything went to black.

1 December

My bedroom was like ice. Dark as a grave chiseled out of winter earth. So, it was right that death should come.

The phone rang downstairs. The landline. The ring was brittle, and harsh and as cold as the room.

My father and mother slept down below. Father picked up.

His voice went through the house disembodied. Just a voice. No feet or legs or arms or head. His voice walked the black rigid halls.

Hello, Ulyana.

It was my aunt. Dad’s youngest sister. My uncle’s wife.

Uncle Nazar.

I did not move a muscle under the covers.

I did not twitch.

I strained to hear the disembodied voice of my father.

Uncle Nazar had been sick. Of course, I knew he had been sick. But there had been prayers. Many prayers against the darkness. Candles had been lit that drove the darkness back. Soon it would be Christmas. I was nineteen. Home for Christmas from university. Of course, I understood there could be death at Christmas. Yet it still seemed evil to me. A blemish on the month, on the season, on Bethlehem. On God.

So, he is gone. Father spoke it like a groan. You don’t need to stay there anymore, Ulyana. There is nothing left. The body is empty. The spirit is gone.

I had been warm under my covers until then. Now a chill shot over my spine. I saw ghosts. I saw a pit of spirits groaning and wailing. I saw the hood and scythe of the Grim Reaper. Skeletons walked. It was as if I were nine. The chill seized every part of me. Was Uncle Nazar’s spirit, free of flesh and bone, going to enter my room now? Was he coming up the stairs? Would he sit by my bed, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of beer in the other? If he talked, would he talk like a dead man? Would he be able to smile?

I had heard all the conversations between my mother and father I was not supposed to hear. I knew my uncle’s skin had shrunk into his skull. I knew his face was like a mask. I knew death had come to his hospital room, long before it had come for his soul, and rearranged his features, changed his nose and eyes, removed his hair. They whispered that he was yellow. His cheeks, his forehead, his hands, all stained like his fingertips were stained by his cigarettes and the tobacco and nicotine.

When I had last seen him, before I left for university, he had just looked tired. Nothing a good sleep wouldn’t fix. A long rest in a hospital bed. That’s what they said. He was too busy. Too much on his plate. Never knew when to stop. A hospital stay would set things right.

I just need to settle my brain for a long winter’s nap. His face had been gray. But not unpleasant. Not deformed. Not dead. His smile was my uncle’s smile. Then we talk some more. Then we walk. All this is true, Yura?

I had no desire to smile with the sharp smells of medicine and the sweet sting of decay in my nostrils, but he smiled so I smiled. That’s how it worked between us.

All this is true, I replied.

He reached out and placed his hand on mine. It was as warm as sun. I promised.

Yes. And I promised to be patient.

Patient that I would tell all.

That you would tell all, yes, Uncle Nazar.

I will not disappoint you.

I threw back the covers on my bed as violently as possible. Because if I didn’t do it that way, with one huge hurl of the blankets, I would never do it at all. And I did it because his promise could not be kept. Could never be kept.

I was in flannel pajamas, but my bare feet cringed when they pressed against the floor. It didn’t matter. Death was cold and I wanted to feel its bite. I went across to my window and pushed aside the blind. The streetlamp was golden. The snow all around it shone as if it were a Christmas ornament. I pressed my face into the glass. Cold dug into my cheeks and gouged my flesh like rough fingernails. Good. I pressed harder. The cold cut deeper. I closed my eyes.

I will call you around noon, Ulyana. Try and rest.

Silence.

Try.

More silence.

You must try. There is no need for you both to die. No, there is not.

I had been in Uncle Nazar’s and Aunt Ulyana’s backyard when I was ten and the sky had rumbled with thunder and darkened in an instant. Uncle Nazar had grinned at me as he pushed his wheelbarrow – Thunder is the sound of the devil dragging souls into hell. It is the loud noise of the wheels on his death cart. It is a huge cart. It has to be. He saw he had frightened me and added, That is what my father told me in Ukraine. Never mind, Yura. You have too much imagination. It is just a story.

I stared back at him as the thunder pealed a second time, making the air shake. Do you think the devil is a story, uncle?

His cart is.

I pressed my hands against the window pane. Winter clutched them. It sent a wind through my veins and arteries and white bones. I didn’t resist the drift of snow or the killing frost. Let it fill me. Let it fill me with knives and sword points. He was dead. This is what it was like for him. Let it be like that for me.

I heard the click of dad placing the receiver back in its cradle.

Mother asked a question.

Dad rumbled a reply like the sky had rumbled that evening in Uncle Nazar’s backyard. Except father’s rumble was quiet. So quiet. Was he worried he might wake me? Or my brother and sister? As if any of us could sleep through a phone ringing like a fire alarm. Father used the toilet and flushed, not bothering to close the bathroom door. Spirit. Body empty. Uncle Nazar gone. Gone where? My dad was an atheist. Why was he talking about spirits and absence? One of Dawkins’s disciples had said that when she died, she would rot. I think she was quoting Bertrand Russell. The book was on dad’s shelf. If he believed that then why talk about Uncle Nazar snatching up his coat and soul and vanishing into the icy night for a better world? Would he leave boot prints in the snow? Like he did when he walked ahead of me along a sidewalk no one had shoveled? Dad would sing Good King Wenceslas when he strode in front, breaking a path for me. Uncle Nazar did not sing. Just trudged. In the choir at his church, he sang. Not outside.

I forced myself to get painfully cold. It was, I thought, the least I could do to honor my uncle. If I could not, for the first time in my short life, go where he was going, I could feel like I was going there. I had written a poem about death already. Just a few weeks before. Out in the Snow. I suppose I had been thinking about him somewhere inside my head, but I did not think about him as I wrote it. I had read an article online about how corpses were handled in a hospital. Washed. Scrubbed. Defecation cleaned up. The jaw tied so it did not hang open and present everyone with a silent screaming mouth. The hands crossed over the chest and bound – a tag identifying the person placed there. Another on the big toe. Then the plastic shroud. The ride on the gurney down to the morgue. The fake gurney. The top draped in white and empty. The drape long enough to cover the bottom shelf of the gurney. That held the body people outside the hospital did not know was there.

Once the writer of the blog had been pushing the gurney to the elevator with the body underneath and the family of the dead man had passed him in a rush, racing to his side, a side no longer there, a bed stripped and disinfected and naked. Staff had waited three hours, now family would have to see him at the funeral home, yet he had passed them in death, taking his ride along the corridor, saying hello and goodbye under a covering like December snow. I had written my poem and signed it Yura with a large cursive Y. I had been inspired to write two pages of blank verse. Perhaps inspired is not the word I should use. Stirred? Moved? Pushed? Commanded? So much of my nineteen years had come into being because I had been commanded to do things by my parents, my friends, my enemies, my teachers, the church, the priests, the voices in my head, the angels. Angels? Had angels commanded me? Or simply persuaded me? Had fallen angels tricked me more than once? Yes.

The dead of winter was very much in me when I attended the viewing two days later. It was my first viewing. I was handed a card with a color picture of the Virgin on one side and a prayer on the other for the soul of Nazar Ivas Klimenko. I had only seen one other death in the family, Grandmother Andrushko, Babushka Anna, Bab, Babba, my father’s mother. I might have only been five. I had gazed at her a long time in her open coffin when we filed past.

What is Babba doing? I asked.

She’s sleeping, my father told me.

I thought about this. Will she wake up in time for Christmas?

Father got angry and shook me. Hush! he snapped. Don’t you see we are in a church?

He was a school principal so decorum was important to him. Perhaps even more important was making sure we fit into the Anglo-Saxon culture and did not present any Slavic flaws to the outside world.

Aunt Ulyana came to my defense. Roman, she said, tears glistening in her eyes, but laughter on her mouth, he is only a boy. What does he understand about any of this? He loves his grandmother. He wants to spend Christmas with her. How can you find fault with such innocence?

But Uncle Nazar’s death gave father another opportunity to get angry with me. Aunt Ulyana asked me to be her escort and I sat with her while she cried into balled up Kleenexes, uncomfortable in my suit and white shirt and tie, uncomfortable with the funeral home, uncomfortable with the cold I had pushed into my blood. When she got up to look at her husband in his open coffin, a man now white and small and far away, she suddenly threw herself on his body, grasped him in her arms, and lifted him out of the coffin, crying. Nazar! Nazar!

I was stunned. I watched her as if I were watching something bizarre unfold on TV. Ushers rushed to her side and restrained her from hauling Uncle Nazar out onto the floor. My father was there. He looked at me in a fury: Why didn’t you do something? What good are you doing just standing there like a block of wood? When order was restored and we all sat down, Aunt Ulyana with a fist crammed with tissues thrust against her face, my mother spoke up, Roman. Leave him alone. What did you expect Yura to do? Pin her arms behind her back?

He is old enough, Rilla.

To pin someone’s arms behind their back? Like they did to me at the psychiatric hospital? I don’t want him ever to be old enough to do that.

If we were at war . . .

"Well, we are not. We are not."

It was cold inside the funeral home. Cold on the sidewalk outside as we waited for a cab. My bedroom remained Arctic. Or maybe Antarctic since I’d read that was colder. Part of the problem was father had never properly insulated the attic or closed it off. Half the roof rafters were stuffed with pink insulation and the other half were not. The attic on both sides of my room was partially sealed using a sheet of plywood with a dresser shoved up against the plywood. Winter came in through the cracks and there were many cracks. Actually, I did not need to use the Arctic or its southern cousin Antarctica as a metaphor for cold. It was enough to say my room was as cold as Chicago. My city didn’t need to be compared to anything else when it came to winter. I could also say as cold as the Dakotas. Or as cold as Minnesota. Or as cold as the Lake Effect which plagued Michigan and Wisconsin with ice, wet snow and axe chop winds. Chicago got it too. Some of those who had flown up for the funeral constantly complained about the winter weather. As if Chicago was supposed to be Miami or LA.

But I had wanted the cold so I said nothing. I had touched Uncle Nazar’s hand before Aunt Ulyana went berserk and it had been cold, yes, but somehow warmer than mine. How was that possible since his soul had fled past the rings of Saturn and the constellation Vulpecula? Always in me the morning, Yura, always in me the sun. I didn’t have numbers for the times he had smiled and said that.

You haven’t even cried, my sister accused me. Not once. And he was so good to you.

How do you know what I’ve done, Abi? I retorted. You don’t know what happens when I’m alone.

There’s not even Kleenex in your wastebasket. I empty them, remember.

You don’t have to cry when someone you care about dies.

Normal people do.

Maybe you are the ones who are abnormal with all your tears and snot and I am the normal one with my dry eyes and the wound kept inside and private.

God cries.

I rolled my eyes. God’s not even human. How can he cry? He’s spirit. Spirit doesn’t have tear ducts.

Grief doesn’t need tear ducts.

You guys are weird. My older brother Manfred snorted when he walked into the kitchen and overheard our argument – older than me by three years, at twenty-two, but not older than Abi, who was older than him by two years and me by five – she had turned twenty-four that summer. Both home for Christmas like me. You have the weirdest conversations. I’m growing up in the weirdest family on the planet.

Who says you’re growing up? I snapped back.

He poured himself a bowl of bran flakes even though it was ten-thirty at night, and he poured them into a large mixing bowl, and poured a liter of milk over the whole thing.

You used half the box, I complained.

He sat down and began to shovel it in. So, you don’t pay for it.

I like to eat some now and then. If the box isn’t empty.

Cry me a river.

I sat in my room with a hoodie on and went back over every detail of the viewing in my mind. Part of me imagined Uncle Nazar viewing the viewing from overhead. (How come heaven was always up and hell down and who could decide what was up and down if you were out among the stars and moons anyway?) Another part of me wondered if he’d been obliterated, completely wiped out of existence, and once his body rotted away to the bone inside his casket that would be the end of him, only memories and photographs left. And another part turned Aunt Ulyana over and over and examined her as if she were an important part of my personal growth and life experience and now on display – were her shouted words Nazar! Nazar! really an expression of a grief so intense that she must haul his body out into the open in the hopes he might stand on his own two feet again in response? Or did she want people to look at her because she had an even more intense need to be noticed, and be more of the center of attention than her dead husband at his own funeral? Memories sprayed by a million tears, she had written in his obituary. Did she mean that? Or was it all theatrical, all Hollywood? I thought I might be going after my aunt because, unlike her, and as my sister had accused, I hadn’t shed one tear, and felt no desire to drag my uncle out of his coffin and resurrect him. I missed him. Yet I also accepted he was gone too far for me to reach. I had given up. But his wife hadn’t.

The next day was overcast and coated in ice. Our breath was white clouds. We entered his church, a church where people genuflected, and folded a shelf of wood down to kneel on, and where the male choir he was no longer part of – except in spirit – groaned and thundered in Ukrainian. Where a priest in robes swung a censer that billowed smoke, and filled my nose with scents strong and complicated and incomprehensible. It was like entering a strange dark forest where everyone and everything was dressed in black: trees, undergrowth, people, foxes, stags and creatures in flight, creatures with wings.

The graveside was colder than my room, or the bones under my skin, or Uncle Nazar inside his casket. The snow refused to melt even after a backhoe had churned it up and mixed dirt with ice. It was a white crust over everything. It was in my heart and lungs – I found it difficult to breathe. The priest made no sense with his Ukrainian. My aunt’s weeping made no sense, the tears freezing on her white cheeks. The funeral director waiting for us to turn our backs, and leave, before he gave the go ahead to begin lowering Uncle Nazar into the ground – why do that, what was he trying to spare us when no one up to that point had been spared anything? My uncle was not like all these rituals and ceremonies, there was nothing about them that reminded me of him – he was all sorts of colors, like a huge box of crayons, and religion and death and cemeteries knew only one or two colors, unless people brought plastic flowers, or real ones in the summer, but the real ones too were soon dead, and took on the color of the dead.

As if I were watching from another room, although I was sitting right there, I saw the priest nibble squares, and talk with my aunt, and with others that hovered through her house or sat with cups of coffee and tea. Then father herded us out to the taxi that had parked in front of Aunt Ulyana’s place. We had no car. Neither my mother or my father ever learned to drive and the vehicles my siblings possessed were miles away by plane. The taxi, at least, was warm.

I thought about how silent Ulyana’s house would be after everyone had left. Death is over, time to get back to life, we cannot pause long for death. My room would be better than her house. Colder, but Uncle Nazar