Eternal Calendar

Two centuries had passed since the Ottomans left the Podil eyalet. They made it to Yazlivets and then vanished from the land. After their departure, Yazlivets fell into decline and turned into a large village. The vineyards tended by the Ottomans over their eleven years of rule disappeared from the hills. The melon patch was deposed: the new landowners plowed it under to plant their corn and tobacco. Rains and winds pushed around the stones of the impenetrable fortress. Large gaps and holes remained in the walls from the artillery fire of the last assault. Armenians never again returned to the town. For some time the Jews tried to maintain their trade and crafts, but they never managed to regain the past glory of the Yazlivets markets and trading routes. Poles and wealthy Rusyns settled in the Armenians’ homes. All that remained where the town had been was the hills and serpentine streets. At the time of our story, in 1914 before the war, a few buildings were roofed in tin or tiles, while the poorer ones were thatched. The run-down fortress and castle could be seen from far off. Birds roosted in the arrow slits, and hares and moles burrowed thousands of underground entrances in the holes of the fortress walls begun by the winds. At the site of the Armenian Gate, built, as you remember, by Mynas Syrynovych, there was nothing. The other gates also disappeared. The road to Buchach was visible, for there wasn't a single arched stone gate along it. The overgrown and neglected Armenian cemetery, where Mynas and other Yazlivets Armenians rested in peace, was covered with a rich layer of Podil's black earth of oblivion.As for Chortkiv, what did it remember? The Ottoman convoys that rode through the city, some to Yazlivets, others to Kamianets? The Sultan's battered guard, retreating in defeat from Yazlivets, or the officers and their families who survived the hostilities even though the horses of the Polish cavalry were breathing down their necks? Were Murza and Varvara and their children among those retreating? What about Ivan Barevych, Varvara's brother? Did they reach Constantinople? No one knows because their faces and names have been erased. Their voices dissolved in the air. Anyone who saw or knew them has long been silent. For if they didn't die from one of the pestilences that visited the city from time to time, then they were killed by the soldiers of the next army to come looking in these places for glory. And no one recorded what happened here then. Chortkiv, burned and leveled, still somehow licked its wounds like a dog and rebuilt itself. At the start of the twentieth century, the main street was bursting with stone mansions and government buildings. There was a paved street leading from the Chortkiv train station, electrical poles were installed, and a hydroelectric power station was built. Not far from the Dominican church, they built the Hotel Bristol and filled the city with languages, books, and stores, as well as the smells of wheat, garlic, onions, and horse shit.After the fall of the Yazlivets fortress, Mytnytsia filled with people and began to grow. Three dozen houses were built along the Dzhurynka River in the first years after the Ottomans as various settlers came to take up residence: some were from the surrounding villages and countryside, hoping things would be better in a new place; others were escaping war, drought, flood, or famine. They built in the valleys near the foot of the eastern hill. The four ends of the streets that led to the countryside became the four ends of the earth. Life in Mytnytsia was full of ice floes in the Dzhurynka, the crowing of roosters, and the words of the different languages they spoke and prayed in.In 1900, Count Andrzej Wolański rented his family's Mytnytsia estate to a Jew named Leiba Goldstein while he and his family lived on their estate in Chornokinetska Volia. In winter the Wolańskis stayed in either Chortkiv or Lviv because their daughter Helena loved the officers’ balls and Konrad, the Wolański son, knocked about the brothels. Sometimes as a family they visited the resort town of Viareggio not far from Pisa. Old Wolański rarely went to Mytnytsia. The family legend about the Barevych curse hung heavy on him. Danylo Barevych built his home on the exact spot near Chervona Kernytsia that his great-great-grandfather Hryts Barevych had selected more than two hundred years prior. The Barevych home didn't look like the village huts. They had four spacious rooms on a sound foundation, stables, barns, and sheds. Gossip had it that the Barevyches had hidden Ottoman Murza's gold, which protected them all from destitution. Wolański never went to Yazlivets, nor took the Yazlivets road to his cousin Leopold Koziebrodski's in Mali Zalishchyky. The Barevyches returned the favor. When going to Chortkiv, Danylo never took the road along the folwark. And when those in Mytnytsia went on strike, he, an officer in the Austrian military, was the first to stand up for the rebels. Wolański and Goldstein had called in the army to the village then. Both families remembered their enemies each spring when they sowed their fields and in the fall when they brought in the harvest. In winter the Barevyches didn't talk about the Wolańskis, and the Wolańskis, sunning at their Italian resort and enjoying the mild Mediterranean climate, forgot about the Barevyches. As soon as Danylo's wife Anna heard from Undertheiceintothegreencorn that spring sowing had begun at the folwark, Barevych rode out to his own fields to see if the liar was telling the truth.Arriving home, he said the seed wouldn't take because the ground was still too cold. And when Wolański heard from Leiba, who'd been whispering with the grooms or maids, about the mechanical dryer Barevych imported from Czechia, he told his people to buy the same if not better. Danylo went to church, but he kept his distance from Father Felishtan who played bridge with Wolański. Yet both Barevych and Wolański desperately wanted to know what happened and when—why did the Barevyches curse Wolańskis? So they started going to Yazlivets to look for old papers, records, and chronicles. Some were kept at the Polish church, others in the former Armenian. Danylo and Andrzej almost ran into each other there, where they would have butted heads like rams. One had been taken to the archive by Sister Eulalia, and the other by Sister Mateja. When they saw each other in the basement of the former town magistracy, they turned and went home by different roads. Wolański, who had Goldstein at his disposal, asked him to read the Jewish sources from the time. He accidentally came across some records by an Ashkenazi who lived under the Ottomans in Yazlivets, and determined from the entries that he had known both Antoni Wolański and Hryts Barevych. But Ashkenazi's records only mentioned the hussar chorąży Antoni once and Hryts the customs officer twice. From age, dampness, and being hidden, the paper was moist and mildewy. The ink had blurred and Andrzej Wolański couldn't find out any more. Nor did Danylo Barevych, Wolański's opponent, read anything worthwhile in the Polish chronicles. They stubbornly went on searching for records in Polish, Hebrew, Armenian, and Ruthenian. Perhaps time had ensured that the Wolański and Barevych descendants would never find out what really happened that night when Chorąży Anatoli Wolański sliced the customs collector Hryts Barevych in half. The only hints were in a few strands of Hebrew writing recorded by the unknown Ashkenazi, but, to the misfortune of both families, they were illegible.Our story has reached 1906.Right before Christmas, when slightly fewer than eight years remained until the start of a new war, a lieutenant, Count Felicjan Korytowski, who had been transferred from Zhovkva to be closer to the Russian border, was traveling along the snowy streets of Chortkiv to the barracks. Felicjan had hired a sledge at the station. The snow in the city was knee-deep. He passed by the bridge over the Seret River, the sledge went right, and the street took a steep turn up. He saw two-story houses and snow-covered city dwellers. Back on the train looking out the window at the fields and villages covered in snow, he'd thought about the neglected land on the eastern borders of the empire and about the Third Battalion of the 95th infantry regiment he was to serve in. After passing the Vyhnanka station, the train entered some tall hills covered in hornbeams. A moment later he saw the blue fields and black roofs of the city. The Austrians built the barracks and a square for the cavalry and infantry drills in the upper portion of Chortkiv on the way to Buchach. In 1903 the entire Third Battalion arrived at its new service site, so tracks were laid to Chortkiv and a new single-story train station was built.When the lieutenant, Count Felicjan Korytowski, left Zhovkva and received his orders to go to Chortkiv, his young, airy head held no plans for the future. Chortkiv—so be it, Chortkiv! As a result of unpaid debts on a loan that Felicjan's grandpa Aleksander had taken out at the Royal State Bank, the Korytowski family was impoverished. Aleksander shot himself. When Felicjan was old enough, his parents sent him to the military college in Vienna on the state's krone. Given that his grandson was fully taken care of, we can assume that, suicide or not, the grandfather had somehow served the emperor.Having reached the barracks from the station, Korytowski first entered the regiment headquarters. The lieutenant was greeted by the duty officer, Podrotmistrz Linde, who told him the officers of the headquarters were on leave for Christmas, so Korytowski would have to seek temporary lodging in a hotel. Linde recommended building number 4.In 1907, the young Korytowskis arrived at their folwark in Mytnytsia right after their wedding. As we know, the lieutenant, Count Felicjan Korytowski, had met the young noblewoman Helena Wolański in Chortkiv. Count Korytowski was just under thirty and Helena, nineteen. In Chortkiv the young officer and young noblewoman danced through the whole winter of 1906 at the officers’ club and the hotel. In spring the lieutenant went to Chornokinetska Volia to ask for Helena's hand. Korytowski was met with restraint. After speaking to Felicjan and the two friends he'd brought for moral support, Andrzej Wolański, Helena's father, said he would consider the officer's proposal. Helena came out to say goodbye to the officers. Standing before the neither living nor dead Felicjan, she offered him her hand for a kiss and smiled, letting him understand that she loved him and her parents would agree with her choice.Felicjan's marriage to Countess Wolański took place during his weeklong furlough in St. Stanislaus's Dominican cathedral in Chortkiv. The officers of the regiment formed a guard of honor on horseback while the young couple rode in a britska to the church. Chortkiv talked about the wedding for a month afterward until the regiment had a sorry accident—two uhlans riding back from drills at night fell with their horses into the Seret. So after the Korytowski wedding, the city went into mourning for the officers of the infantry regiment.Along with Helena, Felicjan received two folwarks in Mytnytsia: an upper and a lower. On the upper one, practically in the exact same spot chosen by Helena's great-great-great-grandfather Antoni—the one who split Hryts Barevych in half—stood a yard neglected since Helena's parents primarily lived in Chornokinetska Volia. The Wolański family legend had it that that distant Antoni not only founded the Mytnytsia folwark but was also the one behind the Barevych curse on the Wolański line. Someone in every generation of Wolańskis had to be born a cripple. Helena's older brother Konrad limped; their grandpa, as it was told, was born without two fingers on his left hand, and their great-grandpa with a bulging, swollen eye. There were other Wolańskis with other defects. The Barevych curse only afflicted the male line of Wolańskis. The women in their family were born beautiful and fast. They got married and left home as soon as they reached sixteen.When Felicjan Korytowski became engaged to Helena, none of the Wolańskis told their future son-in-law the family secret. Konrad was in Lviv and showed up in Chortkiv only on the day of the wedding. He arrived at the Dominican cathedral in a britska with his parents and, limping, was the first to enter the church.“Who's that?” Felicjan whispered to Helena.“My brother Konrad.”As they began to recite their vows, Felicjan recalled that Helena's father always took great pains to hide his withered right hand. During lunches when the family and guests were seated around the table, Wolański would rest his hand on his knee. At these moments, in order to mask her discomfort, Helena's mother Ludwika would sigh and explain that during the January Uprising her dear Andrzej was shot in the hand and had been crippled ever since. All the Wolańskis knew this was a lie, but the guests were sympathetic. Helena's fiancé was given the same story.On July 28, 1916, in the Gregorian calendar, which corresponded to the year 1332/1333 of the Hegira, 1363 for the Armenian-Gregorians, and 5674/5675 in the Hebrew calendar, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. When Europe mobilized, August 8, 1914, in the old style, the sky was host to a total solar eclipse. It was observed from Karelia to the Black Sea and encompassed a three-hundred-kilometer swath of earth—the distance from Chernihiv to Zhytomyr. The eclipse, which the residents of the Russian Empire watched with their heads thrown back, seemed to outline the future theater of war and mark the next four years of world history with a black ribbon. A few astronomical reports were published in the Proceedings of the Russian Astronomical Society, and the newspapers in cities where the eclipse changed even the color of the air and the natural temperature wrote that instead of a sun, a dark sickle hung above the heads of the urbanites. Through a smoked glass, the residents of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Rostov-on-Don tried to observe the white corona of the sun with one eye closed. Even European and American newspapers wrote about this eclipse.Mytsio found Konrad Wolański in a large, empty building. He had come to tell him about the bushes. Every winter the hares gnawed them to shreds. “’Cause when the Korytowskis come,” Mytsio was thinking, “Leiba will tell them I haven't been looking after them.” A few of the rose bushes, among them some southern varieties, were unaccustomed to the local frosts. They shriveled and perished. From the time Konrad had taken up residence in the house in Mytnytsia and the elder Wolański had transferred possession of the folwark to Helena and Felicjan, no one had been taking care of the orchard or the landscaping in front of the building. Wolański had once bragged that his orchard would be better than Badeni's gardens in Warsaw. Fat chance!Mytsio cleared his throat. From the half of the home occupied by Konrad, only his dry cough echoed back at him. At first Mytsio thought he heard the squeaking of a door. He waited, thinking Konrad's skewed shadow—his congenital limp had curved the young count's spine, meaning his right shoulder was always closer to the ground—would appear at any moment. Mytsio stood for a bit but didn't dare enter the count's room. Only after lunch when he saw the damage done by the hare invasion did he decide to bother Konrad again. That very the who made Wolański's had left the folwark for home because one of her children was There were only a few grooms around the the elder Wolański was on Goldstein did not at all care for in the Wolański family what did he really But to look after Mytsio took care of like a over the A found a and it over the in the where he the The dead Konrad was as as a filled with Mytsio went to tell the grooms that Konrad had given up the and was in the room. They behind Mytsio through the When they entered the they and began to for the Mytsio told Leiba and then went to see Father When he got the to the he went up the the and began to the as well as he could because there was no one to it. In this Mytsio the village know that the of Count Konrad Wolański was in the air above after the Korytowskis sent to Goldstein that they were to Mytnytsia. The the he about all the and out all the and down the empty house had the in places the had Two arrived from Mytnytsia. At first they the from all the and with of they the of out to the orchard and it around the When they to the from the in the that had been by the winter winds. Goldstein knew that the got cold. Even in Helena would the order to the on arrived with an when Mytsio was the in the He was the first to that a britska was from Mytnytsia. Helena and the children would be traveling to Chortkiv from a few in their and then go to the this when he was about Helena and the The got settled in Konrad's room. Goldstein managed to the house in and Mytsio to the The house was by rose killed by the only his hand at words about the rose The full of the folwark after the of his and Felicjan Korytowski was about his He got a for it, so to day the folwark would its And Korytowski and the had chosen the plant the in. They to plant it far from the house because the said that it to when in Felicjan thinking first and of for it wasn't only the his that his was to The air around the house had to be and were held up at customs and then to the folwark They had along the Korytowski and he took it out on the two the he'd the and then In two the would to be than him and would through its August before the war when the Korytowskis had on with their children to a around Chortkiv that had their All of Chortkiv knew the Korytowskis were going to As Felicjan and Helena had in the first britska and to the station and the behind their and Old brought him from Mytnytsia to over their He the the and went the two-story No one ever saw Mytsio again. He was found with his head on the day when the entered the after the on the The front was and Mytsio was on his A from a had the left of his He have the when he was the room. of and were split in the After they the on the front the entered the house and Mytsio his he heard or was he just going to the in the of the never But they killed Mytsio and then about the rooms and They were around for and gold, their into the of and and with and and ends from the in the and The day before the and it had in town. One the tracks of a Felicjan Korytowski to the who sent a him back to Chortkiv, that the had Helena's a few made of and that Felicjan had left Mytsio before his In the dead they found a that the for some and a given to him by Helena when he was made the for At the they had only just managed to start looking into the and at the Korytowski when war was on August 8, and the that all of Chortkiv was about was never