Few things in life have the staying power of a person's name. A name is relatively easy to change at that, yet few take the trouble. We wear our names as if they were indelibly painted on signboards slung around our necks: sometimes with pride, sometimes with shame, but mostly with gross indifference. A woman will change her name once or twice in her life to suit a husband. Men, though, do it rarely, unless they turn to Islam or adopt the gender-equal practice of hyphenation, merging their partner's name with their own.
Mostly, the name awarded you at birth by your parents sticks to you like a tattoo your entire life, from the moment a delivery room nurse jots it on her clipboard to later be typed up for the birth certificate, to the time that a doctor scribbles it on a notepad to later be typed up for the death certificate.
A name may be one of the strongest glues known to mankind.
Some folks, bathed with a double coat of psychic Teflon and a good slathering of emotional axle grease to boot, nothing much sticks to - least among their problems is an irksome, derogatory or besmirched moniker. For them, baggage like names and yesterdays slough off like dead skin from a reptile, discarded, unwanted and largely unnoticed as the former owner blithely continues his journey.
Such was the case of a child with the fortune to be born Abimael Solomon Polischuk, the son of poor Russian immigrants, laborers, mostly, who took up residence in the hills near Ligonier, Pennsylvania. Ab's parents were of Ukrainian descent, truth be told, but in 1947 nobody in those parts knew Ukraine from Congo. France they knew, sure, and the other European countries that were in the war, and Russia, and China and Japan, of course. But already words like Iwo Jima and Yalta were dropping into the mists of irrelevance, unless you knew someone who'd been there. The rest of the world wasn't exactly a dark hole to the hill folks of western Pennsylvania, but it wasn't much anything they really thought that much about, either.
Borie and Tasha had come to America with their parents, full of hope and looking for a new life. First, they found religion, infected with the Pentecostal fervor in which poor, uneducated folks seem to find comfort. What Borie found, eventually, was a killing gas in the mine he worked. Tasha found her life's work on her knees, scrubbing floors at the Ligonier Public Library three nights a week, and at Lester Murdoch's big house near the brewery the other four. She had thought that she'd die some night there, down on her knees, scrubbing and wiping away the soil of human habitation. Actually, she died swathed in crisp white sheets in the Westmoreland County hospital, indifferently nibbled to death by cancer.
They had but one son, the aforementioned Abimael, which he was brought up to understand means, "My father is God." An Old Testament name, as was Solomon, the wisest of kings. And so from birth, this boy was prayed over and baptized in the Spirit and was fully intended by his parents and Pastor Patrick James Jeffries and the congregation of the Full Faith Tabernacle to lead a righteous life.
From the start, though, you could tell that Ab was a Teflon man. Religion wasn't the only thing that couldn't dig deep taproots through his skin. He grew up speaking Ukrainian at home and English in school, convinced that the life sentence at hard labor that his parents were compelled to serve was not for him. As a boy of only ten or so, Ab looked around and saw that the people who had the most comfortable lives weren't the ones who were shackled to scrub pails or coal shovels, but the bankers and lawyers and politicians.
Especially the politicians. As Ab got older, it began to dawn on him that bankers and lawyers and such needed college - an option not generally open to the sons of dead miners and immigrant scrubwomen in 1965. But politicians, now that was a bit different. All a man needed to run for office, generally, was a voting card and the ability to make people like him. Trust was never much of an issue in politics - but it was vital that you be likable, and Ab had that quality in spades. To go through life as Abimael Solomon Polischuk, a boy would either get used to being beaten and teased, or would learn to turn the tide in his favor. Ab learned that he could turn a malicious tide with humor or with his knuckles, but that good nature generally hurt less and didn't make enemies who were likely to carry grudges.
Politicians especially appealed to Ab because when they got elected, the work was done by the civil servants who actually knew how to go about being the county assessor or clerk or sheriff, while the boss just talked a good game and quietly got rich doing favors for the bankers and lawyers.
Ab apprenticed, if you could call it that, with Earl Johnson, the county treasurer, during his re-election campaign. He cut classes to ride around the county putting up signs by day, listening to Earl's speeches in the evening and kicking the daylights out of Billy Tanner's signs by night. Tanner was a hardware store clerk with aspirations and he was the opposition. Ab understood aspirations, but didn't care a whit for the opposition in a campaign. And that was the way it should be, as Earl would have told him had Ab asked, which he didn't.
The first time Ab stuck his own oar in the water, he had just turned 22. He filed for an open seat on the board of the county irrigation district. The filing fee had cost him a dollar and fifty cents, and later he liked to say that it was the best investment he had ever made. The part-time job officially paid just five dollars a month, but the unofficial salary made the post lucrative for a gifted young man who wasn't averse to trading favors. He treated this very minor office like he'd been elected senator, and some of the members of the Tri-County Republican Club figured that was exactly where Ab was headed.
He was elected Westmoreland County commissioner at the tender age of 25, and was the board's chairman by the time he was 30. At 41, he had finished three four-year terms in office, and had only begun his fourth when his pretty young wife gave him a child. He jokingly told his wife that he was going to name their son Shadrach, another Old Testament name, since Ab's had served him so well. They settled, though, on Todd. Then one day the clock stopped: two solemn state troopers walked into his office and slipped handcuffs around his wrists. He didn't even ask why he was being arrested - he'd done well in public life, so he knew that any one of a hundred transactions could have been at the root of it.
As it happens, it was a gift stemming from a county contract to provide crushed rock for a road-building project that snared him, but that's not as important as the fact that Ab paid his debt to society, sacrificing his family and three years of his freedom in the process. Ab cheerfully would refer to his time in office as "county service" and his prison stint as "state service."
"I've always been willing to do what the good people of Pennsylvania asked of me," he would say. "It's the nature of a good public servant." By a stroke of luck and equally of the pen, Ab received a full pardon from his old mentor, Governor Earl Johnson, on the day before Johnson left the mansion in Harrisburg for a comfortable retirement in San Diego.
On a cool spring day in 1991, a young lawyer in the county district attorney's office explained to Ab that the pardon fully restored his civil rights, just as though he'd never been convicted. She was incredulous when Ab asked whether that meant he could hold office again, but said that, yes, he would be able to vote and hold elected office. “Was that what he wanted to do?”, she asked. He said that he hadn't really thought about it, but that it was really all he knew how to do. Ab's days of serving the good people of Westmoreland County were over, though.
Over the next three years, he did whatever work he could find, and filed for whichever office was up for election - county commissioner, registrar of deeds, court clerk. He would have filed for his old job on the irrigation district as well, but it didn't exist anymore. Five years earlier as county commissioner he'd overseen the merger of the irrigation, water and fire districts into the county government.
Ab campaigned as hard as he ever had, but lost every election. The local newspaper dismissed him as "perennial candidate Abimael Polischuk." The phrase was repeated so often that Ab joked that he was going to ask the court to change his surname to Perennial.
The meaner writers never missed the chance to remind people of his felony bribery conviction and prison sentence as well. Some debts, Ab thought in his darker moments, society just didn't want repaid.
What vexed Ab was that he was the same man the people had elected before the conviction. He hadn't changed, but the voters had. Politics was a different game by the 1990's. The voters had become jaded and newspaper editors loved self-righteous crusades.
What Ab needed, he decided one lonely night, was to reinvent himself. And to do that, he had to move on. With his criminal record wiped clean by the state, he was free to look for unplowed ground far from Westmoreland County and the cynicism that had overtaken the area. He might even change his name, he thought, to confound anyone who might want to dig into his past just a bit too much.
The next day, his house (paid for in part by the county homebuilders' association and a company called Usanco that had wanted to build a toxic waste incinerator in the county) went on the block. A month later, Ab had a cashier's check in his pocket and was headed down the road.
'Perennial Polischuk' was dead, and tomorrow lay just ahead, but there was one more loose end to be tied up. Ab wheeled his Eldorado into Pittsburgh and found lodging at a hotel that rented rooms by the week. The next day, he changed his voter registration and driver's license to the motel's address, then got a library card for good measure. For the first time in his life (excepting the three years he had been a guest of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections), Ab was not a legal resident of Westmoreland County.
Then, with the help of a storefront lawyer and $450 cash, he applied to the court for a name change. Selecting the name hadn't been too difficult, as he took his father's name as it had been registered when he arrived in America. In a week, he was Boris Peter Polischuk, a new man, ready for new challenges.
Ab quickly found life in the urban hotel room depressing and a huge change of scene from rural, serene and safe Westmoreland County. With cash in his pocket, Ab-turned-Boris arranged for the motel to hold his mail, and set off on a road trip. He told people he met that he was out to discover America (a small stretch of the truth), or that he was researching his family tree (an outright lie, since he knew well where he came from). The truth is, Ab was looking for his future, a place with people who would accept him and he could comfortably win public office.
He cruised east through Pennsylvania and into New Jersey, intending to head south into the Carolinas, where there were small hill towns and rural counties. At a Holiday Inn bar one night, Ab heard a sound he hadn't heard for years - two tables in the hotel bar were occupied by people who spoke his parents' language, the one he'd learned and spoken as a boy - Ukrainian.
When one of the men separated from the group and stepped up to the bar to order another round of drinks, Ab addressed him in very rusty Ukrainian. Over the course of the evening, he learned that the man was part of a group of Ukrainian-Americans who were preparing to return to the country of their fathers, intent upon taking part in the development of the new nation.
Ab was aware on some level that the Soviet Union had imploded and that Ukraine was again a sovereign state. The thought of visiting the country had never even occurred to him. Lying in bed that evening, Ab thought about what the people had told him. Here was a new democracy just setting up shop, and which was welcoming people - especially those of Ukrainian descent - to come share their expertise. Citizenship was being offered to Diaspora as well.
The realization came that Ukraine might well be his new Westmoreland County. He had skills the country might find useful, and there was bound to be ample reward for a likable fellow with a passion for public service, he thought.
Fast-forward a decade. Ten years, after all, is nothing in the scope of things, just the blink of an eye, even in the life of an ambitious man.
The village of Slomanaya Vylka lies peacefully in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Life is easy here, and on a good day the landscape reminds Boris Polischuk of a place called Westmoreland County, a locale that almost - but not entirely - belongs to a different life in a parallel universe.
The mayor stuffs an envelope into his briefcase and stands as his pretty young wife and new son enter his office. Soon, they will take a ride into the mountains to look at some land he had just acquired. Within months, it would abut a high-end housing development that would attract well-heeled buyers from Kiev, Moscow and beyond. Life, he thought, did hold rewards for those who served the public.
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