Julija Sukys - Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning

Saint Catharines, Canada, 1979.

Anthony is tall, broad, with large feet. He has huge hairy hands and shaves his head bald with an ivory-handled straight razor. On Sundays he and his wife pile into the backseat of their daughters family car. The two aging bodies rise gently over bumps in the road and then slump to one side in unison when the sedan turns a corner.

Though he shuffles from Parkinsons disease when he walks and his hands tremble, Anthonys mind is sharp. It will never betray him. His wifes is another story. After his death six years from now, Ona will leave Saint Catharines and spend her final days in a nursing home more than a hundred kilometers away, close to her elder daughter. There, she will walk the halls, gesture to nurses and other residents, and say, Tell them I was in Siberia.

Whenever my brother and I come to visit, Anthony teases us. He tells old-fashioned jokes we dont understand.

How do you recognize a Russian spy? opens one of his favorites.

He speaks Russian? I try. I am seven.

No, he drinks his tea like this! Anthony takes a cup and closes his right eye as he sips. You see? Hes removed the spoon, but he cant break the habit of closing his eye to avoid its getting poked. Thats how you know hes Russian. Russians never take the spoon out.

Bewildered, I force a laugh. Truth be told, I am afraid of my grandfather. Anthony retains a hardness that served him well as a young man in the military. Even the framed photograph from his and Onas fiftieth wedding anniversary shows him stone-faced. He proceeds to tell us children how he, a Lithuanian, used to drink tea in the Old Countrynever after the (according to him) Russian fashion, with the spoon still in the cup, but through a hunk of sugar held between his teeth. He snorts, and his face softens into a rare smile.

Every family tells its children the story of who it is. Our story was of proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. They took my fathers mother and shipped her east of the Ural Mountains, alone. They took her by mistake. It was all a mistake, or so the story went. Her husband, Anthony, had been the target. But he had escaped, to the safety of the West, by luck and through cunning with his children.

Our job, as kids, was to learn this story and remember it. To master our grandparents language so that, one day, we might return home from exile. The first problem in taking on this latter task was that we had never seen this home to which we were to repatriate. The second was that the story wed been told wasnt strictly true. Important pieces of it, the complicated bits that made it hard to narrate, had fallen away.