“The Ukraine Again” was published by Tulane Review in the US, Fall 2019.
Today working with plumber Mihail again and dropping his back home afterward we had a cup of tea on his back porch. During the course Mihail mentioned his recent birthday, which eventually led to wife Maria bringing out his old papers, including his German certificate of baptism. The record on that document provides the locale of the farm where Mihail’s mother had laboured through the war, in the region of Hanover (top right corner); Belsen. Born in 1926 Mihail divulged, making mother Katrina a seventeen year old girl when she gave birth to her first son. The certificate is appended at the end here.
The Ukraine Again
Labouring and fetching all day with plumber Mick—Mihail in Ukrainian.
It was a surprise when the man arrived. Robbie in the back bungalow had masked an involuntary start when he was introduced to the bent figure in overalls and work boots.
Over a cuppa Mick reckoned he would have been six feet under if he hadn’t remained active and working. Staying off the fags and the booze had been a big help too.
Born in a German camp sometime during the war would make Mick mid-seventies at a pinch. Was he perhaps tipped eighty too?
Operation Barbarossa, the first Nazi assault across the Ukraine, was 1941. Did Mick’s family, or his mother at least, flee the Bolsheviks even earlier as had many others?
Mick had only a broken mother tongue; the broad Aussie Strine he delivered very much like a show-piece.
It was odd hearing that put-on from a broad, Slavic face. A carved granite kind of visage like an oracle, an Easter Island figure.
*
Footing the ladder while Mick worked above the eave repairing the spouting and cementing the tiled ridge, the question was whether one would survive attempting to break the man’s fall. A hundred kilogram weight crashing down, at the very least one or two broken ribs could be expected.
A couple of falls over recent years had left Mick with a hulking gait.
The plumbing license had been retained throughout, which presumably included insurance.
In bodily form Mick was a close approximation of Uncle Petar at the same age. In some glimpses it seemed like a visitation having Mick around the house.
With Uncle Petar there had been a day of shared labour in the last phase of Uncle’s working life. Some fallen trees below the house on the coast had needed to be cleared and the wood cut for the fire. We went down with the donkey and pulled in rhythm on a long, rusty saw, the eighty-two or three year old more than holding his own. That afternoon working with the last of the earlier male line, the feather snow that descended upon us on the terrace was initially guessed to be ash from someone’s burning off.
Ukrainian Mihail had similar strength in his shoulder and arm, as was proved unscrewing some rusted nuts in the laundry.
*
Mick’s parents had emigrated to the last continent—as Australia was called back then by that wave of post-war Eastern European immigrants. On that last continent two more children were born, a brother and sister to young Michael.
The family settled in Williamstown initially, Michael as they christened him there schooled at St. Mary’s in Cecil Street. The Catholic school was not too far from the suspicious State, and very much preferable after the flight from the hammer and sickle in the old country.
Without trade option at St. Mary’s the sister told Michael he needed to go to nearby Willy Tech., where Mick repeated Form 2, then completed 3, before an apprenticeship was arranged with the old curmudgeon Les Noonan, who had a house and adjoining workshop in Melbourne Road, Yarraville.
A sour, pitiless slave driver, money-hungry and mean old Les. Early days cycling to work in dread of his taskmaster, the young apprentice dry-retched a number of times along the way.
Lunches were always rushed on Les’s watch, the boss ordering the lads’ nosebags, as he called their lunch-boxes, back to the truck.
Sandwiches were gripped between the teeth while the sewer pipes were threaded under Les’s work regime.
Later as a kind of further duty Mick had dated the boss’s daughter. Sensing the extent of her father’s power, when a date had been needed for the girl’s school social Mick was wrangled for the role.
In a fit of anger at some poorly executed task Les once sent his apprentice home on his bicycle from a job in Collingwood. After getting himself lost in the suburbs, an old lady’s directions got young Mick back by the river. Pedaling around the bay, the boy finally arrived home at Williamstown after dark.
Turned out old buzzard Les was immediately cowed when Mick’s mother gave the man a tongue-lashing that evening on the phone.
*
In the familiar pattern that was common in mother’s stories of the village back home, when Mick reached manhood he raised his hand against the father to protect the beaten mother.
For years the old man had been a violent drunkard; there would be no more of that in the son’s maturity.
The confrontation with the father first took place in Mick’s mid-thirties when he had finally learned of his parentage. After that revelation there was no longer any curb with the brute at home.
An alcoholic evening at the Ukrainian Club in Electra Street had loosened tongues and the first version of the truth of Mick’s paternity came out.
The man Mick had believed was his father turned out not to be Mick’s biological father at all.
In the first version of his paternity the father had died during the war after being shot by the Germans. Whilst the story may have been true that the rich grandfather, after protesting collectivization, had been shot by the Bolsheviks, the first cover story of Mick’s paternity would later come to be exposed.
The stepfather in the house at Williamstown was the natural father of the two siblings that were born in the migrant camps in Australia; not the earlier Mihail.
The war had left the stepfather more than a little deranged, like so many other Ukrainians, Poles and Russians. After nightmares one of the neighbouring Poles would strip herself naked and run down her street screaming.
Many of the women knocked back the hard stuff just like the men.
Such and such number the old man had killed during the war, he claimed with bottle in hand.
Such things he had seen, such things—horrors that were never articulated.
It was only with drunkards such as himself that the old man spoke at length and the kids always shooed from the table on those occasions. It took many years for Mick and the younger generation to get some proper idea of the elders’ suffering through the war—before and after the war too.
First the Germans had overrun the Krajina; then a few years later the Russians in their turn. The current cycle had of course brought Putin and his local fixers and stooges.
*
At home the violence had flared for the most trivial matters, the 90% proof moonshine adding fuel to the fire. Once during some trench work a suggestion of young Mihail’s for dealing with a large rock in their way had the old man swinging a redgum post at his step-son, striking him across his back. For years a heavy belt had left welts all over Mihail’s body.
Much of this violence and brutality would be repaid with interest in later years.
Until she revealed the matter to her big brother Mihail, the younger sister had also endured beatings from her Australian husband. The brother-in-law was soon sorted out and needed regular sorting in the years thereafter. Sister would ring, big Bro call round, and the wife-beater receive his lesson—one that took a long time to be properly comprehended. In the sister’s household too the alcohol went with the violence.
*
The tragic Krajina caught between the Russian bear and German wolf. For good measure the Poles were thrown into the mix, taking their chance whenever possible. The borders had been drawn and redrawn innumerable times. Mihail gathered together the history from the talk at the clubs and after church. Later war books and movies filled out particulars.
Flatland of rich wheat-fields, forests, and rivers, the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the continent. All the Slavs down to the Adriatic knew of these fabled lands. Wheat of quadruple yield was reaped twice yearly there, the communists would proclaim in the outrageous early propaganda.
After the arrival in Germany the mother had landed with a kindly farmer and spent a number of years working on his property. There was some form of refuge found there. It was the subsequent marriage that brought renewed hardship.
The German farmer’s wife was the real ogre. One day early on she had pointed to their smoking chimney. Some hand-chopping motion was used to convey her meaning and this was immediately comprehended by the Ukrainian.
Should she fail to perform as required that was how Mihail’s mother would end up. There were lager nearby and it was known what took place there. The smell coming over confirmed it.
It was not only Jews given to the ovens—the Slavs were second on Hitler’s list, just above gypsies and homosexuals.
When General Eisenhower’s wife visited the newly liberated region with her husband a group of Ukrainian women approached the lady begging her to enlist her husband’s help. Word had arrived that the Ukrainians were to be repatriated. Prior word too had told what awaited those returning to the homeland, the tragic Krajina. A bullet to the head. Ukrainians who had aided the fascist occupier could expect nothing better. Prisoners who had been taken by the Germans could expect the same if they managed to return to their country.
*
Bonegilla was the first camp in Australia; the Nissan huts there young Mick came to know more from subsequent newsreels than anything else. There were few memories of the period.
The camp at Somers on the Mornington Peninsular left stronger impressions. Somers had housed only women and children under eighteen. The men worked where the government sent them, in the case of Mihail’s step-father, a janitor’s position at the migrant hostel at Williamstown, where he was eventually joined by wife and son.
The food was plentiful at Somers. A church camp next door brought Australian children and the swimming nearby was joined by the refugee kids. A surreal, almost holiday atmosphere was sampled when the Refo children got away from the dour elders.
One afternoon walking along Ninety Mile Beach Mihail came upon an Aboriginal man with wife and children. Having lollies in his pocket, he offered these to the forbidding strangers and thereby escaped the feared spearing he had heard about. In the camps the newcomers heard all kinds of disturbing tales about the new country.
*
Following a show of old photographs, the true story of Mihail’s paternity came out a couple of months later on his back porch in Altona North, just by Bunnings, where plumber Mick kept an account.
The eaves at the house in Spotswood had been repaired, new guttering raised. There had been leaking mixers to replace, a sewer to clear, washers and spindles requiring attention. Mihail had been needed again and again. Coffee and croissants led to much banter, some in the shared Slavic. Theatrical haggling was played out for all it was worth and greatly enjoyed on our respective sides.
In the end Mihail had been passed two volumes of Svetlana Alexievich, which were quickly devoured by Mick on his back porch. It was on this back porch after breakfast each morning that Mihail read the books that came his way. One of his clients had gifted Mihail over fifty volumes.
A reading stand like the priests used in church held the books on Mihail’s back table, the pages folded back by a large paper clip. Pillows bolstered a comfy outdoor chair.
The photographs came out one afternoon while Mihail’s wife Maria was away with her girlfriends in Darwin. The marriage to Maria, a Ukrainian herself with much of shared history, had set Mick on a steady, straight path. There was a great debt owed Maria; without her patience and calm Mihail could easily have run off the rails like so many others. Maria was properly acknowledged by her husband.
We had developed a good friendship in a short time. Mick drove a hard bargain charging his fees and the man got as good as he gave.
The echo of Uncle Petar was never far from the surface. As time went by we discovered that we in fact knew many people in common over the Western suburbs of Melbourne. Maria Popov and her husband Stefan who had walked from Moscow to Berlin after the war. We remembered the giant pink and white Chevy with amazing fins protruding that Maria drove through the streets of Spotswood and Altona North. There was Auntie Marija and Chika Savo in Hansen Street, who eventually moved from the Nestle factory in Maffra, where they had initially settled after Bonegilla. It had been father Lazar who had bought that Hansen Street block for the pair, where Mick had attended many times over the years. Tough old Pero Majkovic in Hudsons Road went from client to close friend, visited in hospital by Mihail after his stroke.
It was strange to have taken so long for our paths to cross. A damn good plumber too Mick, into the bargain.
*
On Mick’s back porch the photographs of early days were passed across like Tarot cards. Each of the old black and whites in particular offered glimpses of the shadowy past and seemed also to foretell the future.
As the now aged man claimed, in youth he had been quite a stud. There was the mother Katerina, a typical Slav who removed her head-scarf after a few years in the new country, before donning it again near the end of her life, precisely like our own Baba.
The younger brothers and sisters appeared in the albums. There were no photographs of the father, the wild and violent alcoholic step-father. He had been excised from the records. Perhaps too the man had shunned the camera, like so many of his generation and history.
Now then though, what was a Slav from Eastern European stock doing in these youthful shots looking like a spiv? A greaseball and wog?... At least at that age.
There was hardly a hint of the Slav in these old black and whites of young Mihail.
….Mick had returned to the question of his paternity again and again with his mother.
Over the years the particulars had changed innumerable times. There was the man shot during the war by the Germans, like his grandfather had been by the Bolsheviks.
In the camps there had been an Italian. Another time he had been a Frenchman.
It was clear Macka Katerina did not know herself who had fathered her first child.
There had been numerous rapes, her eldest boy was finally bluntly told one day by his mother. Near the end of her life the old woman revealed the gruesome truth.
One hundred was the figure the aged mother, much loved Katerina, mentioned.
*
This brought us to the outer limit of our investigation. There could be no more probing after that.
Old plumber Mick had divulged the truth in perhaps the same flat tone that his mother had used with him. The time for shame and embarrassment had passed.
Telling a stranger more or less must have been odd for Mick later when he thought about it. Something like the stranger on the train stories.
Did Mick’s own children know the truth of their family history? There were two less-than-dutiful boys who had drifted from their parents after their marriages.
*
The Serbs have it that anyone can be your father; but you can have only one mother.
A saying that in earlier years had always seemed a little puzzling.
Ukrainian Mick had immediately understood the expression and liked it.
Altona North, Melbourne
