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    Beautiful skin: The Zoya Septet, #3
    Beautiful skin: The Zoya Septet, #3
    Beautiful skin: The Zoya Septet, #3
    Ebook212 pages3 hours

    Beautiful skin: The Zoya Septet, #3

    By Murray Pura

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    About this ebook

    Once upon a time there was a war and Andrew Chornavka and his family were caught up in its fires.

    Love, betrayal, sacrifice, heroism, savagery, things amazing and miraculous - it was all part of his world, and the world of his brothers and sisters, as armies clashed and battles raged in the skies and on the ground. Yet the wars of the heart were no less fiery and painful, and the hunt to find hope and meaning within nations ripped apart by conflict, just as desperate as the struggle to survive.

    America, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Germany and Berlin are the backdrop to a powerful drama of the human soul, to a story of a love that proved impossible to stop, a war that proved impossible to win and a faith that proved impossible to break.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMillerWords, LLC
    Release dateDec 1, 2017
    ISBN9781386488651
    Beautiful skin: The Zoya Septet, #3
    Author

    Murray Pura

    I'm born Canadian, live in the blue Canadian Rockies, sound Canadian when I talk (sort of) ... but I'm really an international guy who has traveled the world by train and boat and plane and thumb ... and I've lived in Scotland, the Middle East, Italy, Ireland, California and, most recently, New Mexico. I write in every fiction genre imaginable because I'm brimming over with stories and I want to get them out there to share with others ... romance, Amish, western, fantasy, action-adventure, historical, suspense ... I write non-fiction too, normally history, biography and spirituality. I've won awards for my novels ZO and THE WHITE BIRDS OF MORNING and have celebrated penning bestselling releases like THE WINGS OF MORNING, THE ROSE OF LANCASTER COUNTY, A ROAD CALLED LOVE and ASHTON PARK. My latest publications include BEAUTIFUL SKIN (spring 2017), ALL MY BEAUTIFUL TOMORROWS (summer 2017), GETTYSBURG (Christmas 2018), RIDE THE SKY (spring 2019), A SUN DRENCHED ELSEWHERE (fall 2019), GRACE RIDER (fall 2019) and ABIGAIL’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE (Christmas 2019). My novels ZO, RIDE THE SKY and ABIGAIL’s CHRISTMAS MIRACLE are available as audiobooks as well. Please browse my extensive list of titles, pick out a few, write a review and drop me a line. Thanks and cheers!

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      Book preview

      Beautiful skin - Murray Pura

      What readers are saying

      Beautiful Skin is a riveting story of a Ukranian family struggling through war time. The characters are rich and complex and pulsing with life. One of them, Saint Zo, is a woman with mystical powers who determines, in part, the fate of her family. Imprisonment, poverty, death and betrayal—the consequences of war—keep the story moving at a swift pace. It is a heart wrenching, heart-warming tale of love, loss, and hope, a Must-Read for those who like historical fiction. ~ Joy Ross Davis, author of Countenance

      BEAUTIFUL SKIN is savage and sensual, a poetic, heartbreaking epic that navigates through wartime horrors and the turbulence of the heart. ~ Mark Carver, author of Nikolai the Penitent

      ANDRII CHORNAVKA IS a bitter atheist in this riveting tale that takes place at the start of communism and throughout WW2. Andrii leaves his native Canada and winds up in the Ukraine. When the fighting comes to the Ukraine, his family ends up siding with the Germans who are against Stalin. Andrii’s family eventually gets split up fleeing the fighting and Andrii himself flees helping the beautiful Zhanna. Andrii travels on the road to Berlin with a priest after Zhanna heals from a gunshot wound to the head and the war is chasing him once again. Once in Berlin, Andrii is made a Tank Commander in the German army to help protect Berlin. Zhanna on the other hand is taken and made to sing Jazz in a Berlin night club and is the toast of the town. Andrii soon discovers that Zhanna is in love with him, but he can’t accept that she has grown into a beautiful woman. Andrii is left to deal with his feelings of war, death and destruction, God, his ex-wife, and Zhanna all while Berlin is on the verge of collapse.

      Mr. Pura tells a riveting tale of war, families torn apart, love, lust, redemption and reunion. Beautiful Skin is a page turning war filled love story that will leave you begging for more. ~ William Tasch

      SOMETIMES LIFE DOES not give you an option and you do what you must to survive and protect those you love. Beautiful Skin is a moving novel that will cause you to think how you may have reacted during the years of World War II.

      Andrii Chornavka looks back at his life during the years of war and recalls the horrors of World War II. He remembers his comrades, the people he loved and above all the extraordinary woman he married.

      In a beautiful prose, Mr. Pura has written a literary piece that touches the madness of war. Beautiful Skin goes deep and grabs your attention . . . and might quite possibly leave you a changed person. ~ Marian Baay, Editor and Reviewer

      FROM THE FIRST SENTENCE of the book to the last musings of its anti-hero, Andrew Chornavka, Beautiful Skin by Murray Andrew Pura takes you on an astonishing road trip through Russia and Germany as the two countries burn together in the gotterdamerung of World War II. When you begin to read, be prepared to embark on a journey filled with beauty and horror, endings and beginnings, absolute despair and inspired faith— a journey in which you will meet the Deity of the sublime and the God of the ordinary. The book is a literary tour de force peopled by actors crushed down by death and lifted to sublime heights by life, an absolutely fascinating tale that will take its place with the work of Herman Hesse or Earnest Hemingway.  This is writing at its best. Brilliant. ~ Patrick E. Craig, author of The Amish Princess and The Amish Heiress

      I BEGIN MY REVIEW OF Murray Pura’s novel,  Beautiful Skin, with the end, which resurrected memories of my father, who while my brother and I were serving kept a Christmas tree up until March so as my brother would also have a Christmas.

      A moving romance, which takes place predominately during the Second World War in the areas around and in between the Ukraine and Germany, Mr. Pura drew me in with his knowledge of the area and history. His depth in the characters he portrayed had led me to ask the question almost immediately, was this biographical of a family member.

      Contacting Mr. Pura on social media, one will find out that he is affable and will respond in kind.

      The romance is well written. It took me from the gray in war torn Europe; to the brightness of post war Canada and the story of a family dealing with post war loss and the newness of the cold war.

      What struck me and stood out is that I was reading and enjoying a warm romance from the perspective of the Germans during the gray and darkness of the war. It brought another perspective to what is usually cold facts in history books, adding humanity and life to what one views as the enemy during the time. ~ Willard Carpenter, author of Prodigal and Unveiling of the Secrets of the Sons

      Dedication

      Grandfather Robert Dressel & Grandmother Minnie Dressel

      Rose (Minnie Dressler) Pura, my mother

      Walter & Linda Dressel

      Bill & Evelyn Dressel

      Ernie & Hazel Dressler

      Lawrence & Pat Dressel & their children & grandchildren

      Maureen (Dressel) McDonnell & Greg McDonnell & their sons

      Karen Dressler Pacheo & Jerry Pacheo & their son & grandchild

      Donny & Gayle Dressel & their children & grandchildren

      Cathy (Dressel) Hofmann & Joe Hofmann & their daughter

      Roy Dressler

      Elsie Dressel

      Bobby Dressel

      From petals,

      poems of a war in Ukraine

      I had a dream of a nation and a people

      One face after another

      All sorts of eyes and mouths and cheekbones

      All sorts of bodies

      Stretching from east to west across the steppe

      I took one life

      Just one person

      And cupped her whiteness in my rough hands

      Just any one person

      Plucked from the crowd

      I did not know if she came from the cities or the fields

      But her simplicity was not simple

      And her bones were wrapped around

      A core of impossible depth

      And impossible strength

      I had a dream of millions

      My heart’s blood and their hearts’ blood

      A stream of one blood

      Cutting through earth and stone

      Making a land a crisscross of veins

      She was the stream

      She was the swooping wind

      She was the luminosity

      Of the dark nights that were never dark

      Of the burning days that never burned up

      I am nothing, she said

      I am unremarkable

      Just one of millions

      An ordinary woman

      Who only wants an ordinary world

      You are the dream, I told her

      And someone has put beautiful skin on it

      Zenzi – the pet form of German Kreszenz, which is derived from Kreszentia, meaning to spring up, grow, thrive

      I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the LORD.

      Ezekiel 37:6

      1

      Brick buildings burned like candles whenever the sun disappeared. A thousand flames, no, more than a thousand, for trucks burned, and cars, and German and Russian tanks, all night, night after night, they burned like stars that had fallen on Berlin. And people burned too – shopkeepers, wine merchants, bankers, lawyers, soldiers, women, men, children – sometimes they burned the brightest.

      A road trip to Berlin, whether short or long, is the devil’s mile. It will take more out of you than you are willing to give. But if you do not give it you will never arrive. You may show up at the outskirts of the city, you may even drive to the Brandenburg Gate, but you will never be there.

      My trip took everything out of me it could and Berlin took the rest – my money, my health, my faith, and any hope I had of emerging from the war alive. I lost my family, my loves, my dreams, and my gods. Then Berlin drove me out. Thrust me from its streets and parks and the brick buildings. Brick buildings that burned like candles whenever the sun disappeared.

      The fires and the road trip began in Ukraine before I was born. Two brothers emigrated from Lviv and Ternopil and eventually arrived in Chicago. They stayed there a while, I don’t know how long. Then one went north to Canada and Winnipeg because Winnipeg was a boomtown in those days before the Great War. The other brother stayed in Chicago but later on bought a train ticket for LA. The woman the Winnipeg brother loved was my mother, the woman the LA brother loved was not. So I became a Canadian with American cousins. I saw them every two or three years. No one traveled then the way people travel now. It was too hard to get around.

      The Great War I remember because my older brothers fought in it and one was wounded. The gas took out his eyes. And an uncle was picked up by the police and placed in an internment camp in Banff, Alberta. Men were shot to death there. Their crime was coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. West Ukraine, which was called Galicia then, was part of that Empire in 1914, so my uncle was taken away. They did not take my mother or father even though both of them had come from Galicia. I’m not sure why. I suppose the bureaucrats in Ottawa missed them when they shuffled through all the immigration paperwork.

      I remember when Uncle Vasyl finally was allowed to return from the camp. It was after the Kaiser had abdicated and the shooting had stopped. He was like a splinter – so thin and all his features so sharp. And I remember when my brothers came back in the cold and the snow, one of them blind, the other healthy and still full of fight. We were happy to have everyone home. And it was a good home. Until 1919.

      In a way my life and road trip are about sisters, two in Canada, two in Ukraine, and two in Germany. The ones in Canada were my flesh and blood, born of the same mother and father as I. The ones in Ukraine were sisters to each other but they were not sisters to me, they were my lovers, and one became my wife. And the German sisters were my friends, friends who took me under their wing and protected me with the strength and poise and absence of fear they possessed. Those were the days when I was handsome and strong and in my prime, the days before the locust, the days before men were cut down like wheat stalks on the fields of Europe and left to rot.

      There is Andrii Chornavka complaining again, they say. He is a bitter man.

      I complain the same way other old men complain. I want people to see the young man in me. I want them to look at my pictures and understand how brave I was, and striking, and how I took women in my arms and loved them like a blazing fire loves oxygen and wood. But people only smile in that way people smile who don’t believe you but have no desire to say so and hurt you. I am past the hurt now, too old for the hurt, I don’t have the strength for it. Complaining I can do.

      My sisters were Yuzunia and Zoya. Zoya, Zo, she was the younger one, younger than me, the baby, the child with yellow hair, yellow as dandelions. Yuzy was dark as night. Sometimes they fought, sometimes they held each other as tightly as rings clasp fingers. But after the Great War there was the family war and each took different sides in the conflict. Socialism erupted in Winnipeg in 1919 – father, and my Uncle Vasyl who had been in the internment camp, and Yuzunia, and her boyfriend, they all took up Bolshevism. They supported the Winnipeg General Strike. My wounded brother Stepan fell in with them. But not my other brother, not Mykhailo, he hated the Reds and he hated my family for becoming Bolsheviks. The house was a battlefield. Arguments and shouts and meals not finished and chairs overturned and mother frantic as different beliefs tore her family apart.

      Mykhailo was special police. All the regular police had been sent packing by the mayor, he did not trust them. Soldiers with machine guns were called for and showed up. And Mounties who were ready to kill and did kill. And while they were shooting and killing and riding their horses and charging the strikers, charging like the Tsar’s cavalry had charged the people in Moscow years before, Mykhailo and the special police were beating people with wagon wheel spokes and baseball bats. In the end, father threw him out of the house.

      Never, never, as God is my witness, will you set foot in our home again! Papa raged, spit on his lips. No Masses will be said for you, no prayers, you are dead.

      It doesn’t matter to me! Mykhailo shouted back on the front steps. Your curse is a blessing on my ears! The next time I see you I hope you are rotting in the ground! I pray to God you will be maggots!

      Get out! Papa threw a shovel at him that was leaning against the wall beside the door. I will see you in hell before you sit at our table! No rosaries for you, no priests, no one will cross himself, your name will never come to our lips!

      I thank God for that! Your stinking Masses! Your stinking priests!

      But Masses and prayers were said. Not by the priests or by Papa but by our yellow-haired girl Zo. She sided with Mykhailo and even wrote to him long after he had left home and left the city. And the more the family leaned to the left, especially her sister and Uncle Vasyl, the more she hated them for it. Soon we had a home where one sister considered herself a Catholic saint, maintaining the holy faith in the face of apostasy, and the other considered herself a Communist revolutionary, ready to bring about a new world through the teachings of Lenin and Marx. Both were bent on transforming the earth by their faith.

      At first it seemed the saint had won out over the revolutionary. Stepan was healed of his blindness. I cannot remember the exact date, I cannot remember if it was before the general strike or after, but the doctors examined him and, although they had a number of theories, they could not account for the recovery of his sight. Zo could. Her fasting and prayers and candles had saved her brother.

      Do you see? she cried out at the dinner table. "Do you see who the Lord and the Blessed Virgin favor? Was it medicines that saved Stepan? Or Lenin’s godlessness? Or singing your foolish song the Internationale? It is I, I who am highly favored of God. No one else here, no one else has been chosen!"

      Yuzunia retaliated by entrenching herself more deeply in Communist doctrine. Her boyfriend became a doctor, became her husband, became a card-carrying Communist. The two of them made plans to cross the ocean and work with the revolution. Even after they had a child they did not give up on their plans. Even after Mykhailo came to our door and begged forgiveness and father took him in his arms, even then they would not stay. So in the 1930s the road trip to Berlin experienced a great leap forward. Yuzy finished training as a physician and took ship to Europe, and her husband Ian with her, and their son Nykola, and Uncle Vasyl, and I, yes, I. First the train across Canada and then the boat across the Atlantic and then the train down the length of Europe. Soon it was Moscow, soon it was Ukraine, soon it was the village Uncle Vasyl had come from so many years before.

      But there was no village. There was no village for hundreds of miles around. Everyone was dead. Millions were dead. Stalin had killed them. He had taken their crops and their seed to plant new crops. He created a biblical famine and they died in a biblical way in ditches and muddy fields and snow banks and cottages with thatched roofs. I waded through bodies the way I had waded through tall grass and mud in the Canadian prairies. Only one spark of life did we find – a girl who had survived, her stomach swollen, her head and face a monstrosity from the starvation. We took her as our own and called her Zhanna Yeva. She was like a blue sky to us.

      For years after this, Yuzy continued to defend Stalin

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