вторник, 25 февраля 2025 г.

My mother's stories (chapter thirty one - the continuation)

chapter 31

The last war

(the continuation)


       I don't really know how long my mother and her fellow-villagers lived under the Romanian occupation. I think for about two years. The Romanians definitely thought they came to settle down on our land for good. At the time of their rule children even attended school where they had to learn German and Romanian. I remember my mother complaining to me how she hated the very sound of German. But, unexpectedly, she liked Romanian and was so successful in it that she was even offered to enter some boarding school for gifted children. Her mother, however, refused flatly as she had always preferred to have her industrious elder daughter near at hand. It was my grandmother's usual selfishness but, in that case, I believe, it was the right decision. Shortly before the war began, they had already been marked as “a family of an enemy of the people” by Stalin's repressive machine. They definitely didn't need “the collaboration with the occupants” added to the list of their sins after the Soviet power returned. Although, during the occupation nobody really knew whether that day was going to come at all.

       There were some vague rumours, of course, but, on the whole, they were completely cut off from all sources of information. No news-papers to look into. Not to mention that all the radios were confiscated by Soviet authorities at the very beginning of the war. Maybe I am not right here but I have always found this action as infuriating as the notorious law of three spikelets. Perhaps it's true that they did it to prevent panic. Yet I suspect that communists just didn't want our people to listen to German propagandists, whose cheerful voices tried to inform everybody that any kind of resistance was futile and would entail inevitable death. And who could know better than communists what a powerful weapon propaganda can be in skillful hands?

       But it doesn't matter whose propagandists were better at the time. It takes much more than just ingenious propaganda to win a large-scale war. That's why it's impossible to predict how it is going to end. People in my mother's village didn't know, of course, that somewhere far away in snow-covered fields, not far from Moscow actually, the advancing German troops were stopped and started to retreat at last. So the villagers were rather surprised when one day they discovered that the Romanians suddenly departed, leaving their river bank to the Germans, who immediately justified their dark reputation and proved to be even worse than their predecessors.

       Unlike the Romanians, the German occupants didn't bother about school education - at that time their affairs at the battle-fields were too alarming for that. Besides, they started to have real problems with lack of manpower in their own country. Actually, it's inevitable if a war lasts longer than two years, and it explains why, trying to overcome their difficulties, the Germans started to seize more or less young and healthy people from the local population in order to send them to work in Germany. Naturally, nobody wanted to be sent there, or to be precise “driven away”, as if they were slaves or some cattle. And here I can't tell how much it reminds me of Stalin's regime's ruthless attitude to its own people. The great mustached leader liked to send the whole nations into exile. No wonder his mates - communists - also preferred violence and cruelty while trying to whip everybody up in the direction of the bright future.

       But coming back to my young mother, I can only say that people tried desperately to avoid the dubious honour of being driven away to Germany. During the raids my mother's family was successfully hiding in their neighbours' deep pit, skillfully disguised. They were a bit cramped there but at least it was spacious enough to accommodate them all. Not everybody was so lucky though. A man and his teenage son were discovered in their hole and were both shot while running away. The boy got off with only permanent damage to his leg but his unfortunate father was shot dead. The Germans didn't leave his corpse to lie in peace but hanged it in plain view in a tree to show the others what the price of disobedience was. The villages, however, didn't shrink back from what they considered to be their duty. In spite of the great risk, someone quietly removed the dead body from its tree as soon as the darkness of the night enveloped the village. After dragging the poor man's body to their neighbours' gate, they warned them that now it was their turn to move it further in the direction of the cemetery. Those people dragged it to the next yard and in such a fashion the body reached my mother's family's gate at last. As their yard was the nearest to the local cemetery it seemed logical that it was them who had to bury their fellow-villager as soon as possible.

       To their luck, just at that time a teenage boy, disguised as a girl, was hiding in their hut. He lived not very far from them but as he was threatened with being driven away to Germany his mother asked them to give her son a shelter. Every morning the boy surreptitiously shaved his adolescent mustache in order to look more convincing in his female clothes. So it was him and my 13-year-old mother who got a difficult task to bury the dead man before the sunrise. I imagine those two teenagers, hastily digging the grave in the dark, occasionally looking east to see the first glimpse of the approaching sun. Actually, it was the boy who was digging and my mother was raking out the earth. The scene was definitely worthy of some Soviet movie about the war, especially those which were made soon after it was over or even during it. Those films were usually of lower quality and as a rule contained one or two really gruesome episodes. Who knows how many such traumatic scenes I watched over in my childhood and teens? And an odd thing is that for some reason none of my mother's stories about the war gave me such a strong feeling of revulsion and fear as those old movies did. Even her story about three Ukrainian policemen seemed to me rather funny, at least the first half of it. I think it was their ingenuity and reckless bravery that gave me that feeling.

To be continued...

(c) Anna Shevchenko

32. The informer (the continuation)
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пятница, 29 ноября 2024 г.

My mother's stories (chapter thirty one)

 

chapter 31

The last war


      What is the real war for me? Nowadays I know what it is because of our extremely greedy northern neighbours. Still, my knowledge has been rather limited because our city is situated in the rear, thank God. So, for us, it's mostly frequent black-outs and explosions at night and in the day-time. And, afterwards, some dry impartial news briefly reporting to us what had been destroyed and how many people had been killed. Nobody pays much attention to air-raid warnings - they howl too often without any visible threat. Besides, most of us have merely a vague idea where the nearest bomb shelter is. 

      The real fear comes only when those damn explosions are so loud that they shake our window-panes. But it was particularly scary during one unforgettable night. I was just about to fall asleep when suddenly one by one two or three missiles passed by my window, illuminating my room with bright orange light. My son shouted from his room that it was our air-defense working and it gave me a fleeting sensation of relief as if we couldn't get killed by fragments of a Russian missile as well as by the accursed thing itself. With a sinking heart, I was waiting for the new bangs to follow the first ones, knowing that they would be loud enough, and thinking of the poor souls who would probably be killed just now. And, above all, there was the helpless realization that my family and I could be next. I confess that after finishing the previous sentence I spat thrice over my left shoulder, just in case, as if it could really help.

      Anyway, in comparison with that, my mother's tales about the Great Patriotic War were much more diverse and intimidating. She was 11 when the great wave of the Second World War at last crossed the borders of the USSR. In fact, my mother could have been easily killed on that very day. At the time she was staying with some of her relatives who lived in another village on the opposite river bank. On the 22nd of June her uncle didn't tell her anything about the war starting and only announced all of a sudden that she had to go home as soon as possible. As my bewildered mother was driving with him in his shaky cart towards the car-ferry, her uncle suddenly remembered that he had forgotten something at home. For a while he hesitated, thinking of going back, but then decided to go forth without any delay.

      This decision was really providential, because when after crossing the river, they reached the nearest hill and stopped to watch the ferry that was on its way to their bank again, two or three airplanes with swastika on their wings appeared out of the blue, dropping bombs like some ugly revolting eggs. “And one of them hit the ferry, can you imagine?” my mother used to finish her narration in a dramatic whisper. “People and cows flying in all directions. We could have easily been among them if my aunt's husband had chosen to return then”. For some reason this story stuck rather unpleasantly in my memory, and afterwards whenever something really unbearable happened in my life I used to think selfishly “Oh, if only my mother had been on that ferry, I wouldn't have to endure all of this now”.

      Fortunately, my mother survived on that day, and many years later had a lot of stories about the last war to tell her only daughter and grandchildren. She loved the process of narration, usually savouring those details, which she found peculiar or significant. It gave us an odd feeling as if she was telling some scary stories from an old tattered book that she had found in a distant corner of a library. In our childhood and youth it didn't occur to us, of course, that all of that happened not so long ago, and what is more, could happen again in the future.

      Anyway, their life under the occupants' rule was a hard experience even in comparison with the disaster of collectivization or the great famine of 1933. In fact, it's difficult to say what was worse. It's true there was no famine in Ukraine during the war. Only Stalin's regime was so ingenious that managed to organize it twice in our parts, which have always been famous for their fertile soil. But the war undoubtedly brought a lot of other trials and calamities.

      To my mother's luck their village was located on the territory where German allies - the Romanians - were in charge. At least it was rumoured that Germans, who occupied the opposite river bank, were much more fierce and violent. Yet it was almost impossible to believe it, because the first thing that the Romanians did upon starting their rule was to kill all the communists whom they could find and capture all the Jews in order to send them to the camps of extermination.

      In those awful days my 11-year-old mother was not at home again but staying with her favourite aunt, who lived in the neighbouring town at the distance of 10 kilometers from their village. Luckily, my young mother was a good runner. So she was quick enough when on one of those days she was sent to her village to tell some unfortunate people that their relatives were shot and were just lying dead in the street. She let them know about it just in time. Who knows how many nameless graves appeared during that war, but those people did manage to bury their kinsmen in a proper fashion thanks to a little girl, who was not afraid to run alone through the forest. My mother liked to finish this story by telling us how extremely grateful those people were to her. They even gave her a nice present. It's a pity I forgot what it was – some nice food or a pretty headscarf, perhaps. That was a proper present for a little rural girl. Years and years later, when my mother was over eighty, she still sometimes dreamt that she was running through the forest with some urgent errand. Although at that time, having serious problems with her memory, she had already forgotten, thank God, what that errand really was.

      Not all their troubles during occupation were so horrible, but they were definitely very irritating. If you think about it, by that time only ten years had passed since communists destroyed the age-old way of life in the villages by forcing peasants to join the collective farms. And now they had to adapt again to their new masters. One of the signs of that new life was a gigantic bonfire that the Romanians built to burn the books from the local library. In my school days it was one of my favourite occupations to search for interesting books on the shelves of some library. No wonder that I was shocked when I learnt about that bonfire from my mother. It seemed there was something medieval about it. But Romanians hadn't done their job well and quite a few books at the very bottom of a large heap survived almost intact. They were saved by a local boy who lived nearby. Later, my mother and his other cronies had a great pleasure of reading those books in secret, savouring the poignant odour of smoke coming from their pages. I believe they could pay with their lives for that entertainment but the temptation to deceive their oppressors was too strong.

      There was no industrial production on the occupied territories, of course. Part of the factories had been destroyed, some of the strategically important ones had been evacuated beforehand. Not to mention that most male workers had been recruited and left with the retreating Soviet Army, or Red Army to be precise, because that's how our army was called at the time of the Second World War. To be honest, I completely forgot about this detail. This playing with the words seems trying sometimes. Besides, I lived in the USSR for 35 years - till its loud downfall - and the word “soviet” was in wide use then. In those days I used to find it funny that western authors rarely called our country the USSR or the Soviet Union. In Agatha Christie's books, for example, even the high officials always said “Russia”, or “Russians”, or “Moscow”. Or at worst “red” or “red power” if they were in a playful mood. Obviously, I don't find it amusing any more, especially now when Russians are slowly advancing across our land, greedily biting off new pieces. Nowadays I understand clearer than ever before that western society has always perceived the USSR as the reincarnation of the Russian Empire. Yet it doesn't really matter what the nature of my former country was. I don't believe that during the Second World War our grandfathers fought for the state or for the great mustached leader with blood on his hands. They fought for their families and their land. And isn't that how any aggressive war starts? The cause of it will be covered with heaps of grand words, of course, but the real motive will be still there – just a trivial desire to grab their neighbours' land that - in their opinion - is too good for them.

      I am afraid it upsets me too much when I begin to reflect on it all. So it would be better if I stopped right here and came back to my 11-year-old mother and her fellow villagers who were trying to survive at the time of the Romanian occupation. They definitely had a lot of troubles. Very soon they had to face a total deficit of such important things as salt, soap, matches and fabric. However, it was not as catastrophic for them as it could be for modern people. Those peasants, undoubtedly, knew much better how to survive without manufactured goods. They couldn't make pickles any more but at least it was possible to dry fruit or herbs in order to add some vitamins to their nourishment in winter. As for kindling a fire I'm sure there were some old people in the village who still remembered how to do it with tinder and flint. My great-grandmother Euphemia was almost certainly one of them. Moreover, the old woman clearly remembered how they used to make wood ash infusion in her youth and used it instead of soap. But Euphemia was especially brilliant when she found an old striped loom in the attic and much to her granddaughters' admiration managed to properly assemble all its parts. Later, she taught them all to spin yarn and weave fabric from the hemp thread. That damn war definitely threw them back to their ancestors' 19th century style of life. No wonder that 27 years later at the very thought that a new war was coming those who remembered the last war rushed to the shops to buy salt, matches and soap in big quantities. It may look like a funny coincidence but I was 11 then, exactly the same age my mother was in 1941, and there I stood in a long queue with old and middle-aged people, trying to understand why everybody was so scared.

      But these weren't the only troubles that peasants had to endure during the Romanian occupation. I remember my mother telling me that people were irritated past endurance when they were ordered to grow corn instead of wheat and paint traditionally white walls of their huts pink. Everybody was revolted by the corn diet but my little mother suffered from it more severely than anyone else. At least a Romanian doctor confirmed their guess that her frequent nose-bleeding could be provoked by nourishment based on corn. As for the pink walls of the huts, I remember I used to find this strange whim of the Romanians completely ridiculous. But it wasn't really. The explanation was very simple. The Romanians just felt homesick and pink was a traditional colour of huts in their villages. It would have been better for them to have stayed there, because their clumsy attempts to feel at home on our land only increased the hostility of the local population. And is it really odd that people always hate occupants so much? It seems occupants can force you to do anything when they are aiming at you with their machine-guns.

To be continued...

(c) Anna Shevchenko

32. The informer (the continuation)

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среда, 18 сентября 2024 г.

My mother's stories (chapter thirty)

 

chapter 30

The  Victory Day


       It can seem odd how much my perception of the world was influenced by the Second World War, considering that I was born 11 years after it was over. Perhaps it's just the fate of any generation that comes soon after a war. My parents were too young to take part in it and my only known to me grandfather was killed by Stalin's bloody regime in 1938 – a year before it started. We never called it the World War though. First of all, it was the Great Patriotic War for us, that is the war that started in 1941 when Germans crossed the borders of the USSR. “On the 22nd of June, exactly at 4 am, Kiev was bombed and we were informed that the war came to our land” - incredible but I still remember how touched I was when I first heard one actor singing those simple uneven lines in some long-forgotten Soviet movie. And even now, when Russians crossed our borders and have been bombing Ukrainian cities, towns and villages for more than two years, I still find this old song touching. It's difficult not to feel that there is something wrong about it, especially remembering how zealously our former compatriots use the memory of the last war to justify their unjustifiable aggression against Ukraine. Yet my attitude towards it is quite understandable. We were brought up on books, movies and songs dedicated to that war, and most of them were created by people who took part in it or lost their loved ones because of it. No wonder that most of those works of art were so good and touching. All of them, it seemed, tried to show to people why that horrible war should never be repeated again.

      At school we swallowed a lot of information about it, studying in detail all the battles with their maps and war heroes with their biographies. Too much information, perhaps. That's why, I think, feeling a bit confused, I asked my father once what the difference between our War and the Second World War actually was. And what a surprise it was to learn suddenly that one was just the part of the other! Father was a man whom I could trust in such matters as he had served in the Soviet Army for ten years. They definitely had to have some lectures about it all. It was Father who once struck my imagination telling me with pride that the USSR had never fought aggressive wars. Obviously, he didn't know it was not really true. As for me, I loved the idea of my country being so peaceful. Our teachers, newspapers and TV programmes told us the same. Our country was always fighting for peaceful co-existence. It seemed completely logical that after all the horrors of the last war, which our films and books showed so vividly, the USSR fought so eagerly for the peace in the whole world. Or celebrated a bit noisily and pompously the Victory Day on the 9th of May. Personally, I couldn't notice any discordance in that.

      It was one of my favourite holidays. The weather was usually nice and sunny on that day, and the chestnut trees were in full bloom. It's nowadays because of that damn global warming, that these shapely trees begin to blossom in April, but in those days they usually started flowering shortly before the Victory Day. It's amazing how much I remember about its celebration. For instance, old men in military jackets with decorations on their chests. I always had a warm feeling watching one of them walking somewhere in the street or in the park on that day. Or I still remember my jubilation when I was 11 or 12 and our class took part in the Young Pioneer Parade. It was really exciting to march along the main streets and then through the Central Park, reciting loudly some rhymes that we had learned by heart for this occasion. 

      “Good training for your boys, who were supposed to serve in the Soviet Army,” my son remarked sarcastically many years later. But I didn't feel like that. There was only a pleasant sensation that we looked very picturesque in our white shirts with bright red ties and blue field caps on our heads. Perhaps for that reason at the young pioneer's age we often participated in some outdoor celebrations. On one especially hot day one of our boys even fainted when we were standing motionless in the sun before the war memorial, listening to some long dull speech about peaceful co-existence - or maybe it was about the USSR saving the world from the fascist plague, I don't remember anymore. Anyway, that boy's fainting caused a great panic among our teachers. But mostly my recollections are warm and light. And no wonder in that as May with its bright greenery and bloom has always been my favourite time of the year.

      If I stayed at home on the 9th of May I used to sit with my father in front of our black and white TV watching Military Parade on Red Square in Moscow. At first, well drilled soldiers were marching across the square, measuring out their pace. I didn't find them very interesting. But I did like my father's explanations about military machinery that followed after them. Most of all, I was impressed by large missiles crawling by like huge swollen caterpillars. They looked rather innocent, but I knew it was a deadly weapon. Father assured me there was no need for worry as those things on the screen were completely harmless dummies. Sometimes they showed us the real missiles on TV too and it was even more impressive. They were well-hidden somewhere under the ground, and I still remember how a heavy hatch cover silently slipped aside, showing a dark hole underneath. Then a sharp nose began to emerge followed by a light gray body of a missile and some time later it all sank into the dark tunnel again. Almost certainly there was some disquieting music to go with those video-shots in order to give the audience the right impression.

      It's so difficult to accept it but perhaps now Russians destroy our cities, sea-ports and power-stations, and kill our people with some of those missiles, whose dummies my father and I discussed so peacefully on the Victory Day. But at the time of my childhood and youth we sincerely believed that we needed our weapons only for self-protection. Who could have had any doubts about it, remembering the innumerable victims and great devastation of the last war? Definitely, peaceful co-existence seemed to be the only right way to follow. That's why, I think, my generation had never accepted clumsy attempts of Soviet propaganda to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. There were a lot of jokes about “the limited contingent of the Soviet Army” there. Our propagandists' stupid terminology was really annoying and could deceive nobody. No one believed that we had anything to do with Afghanistan or that we had to interfere in their inner conflict.

      It was especially infuriating because by that time the lack of food on the shelves in our shops had become well palpable, not to mention permanent deficit of other important things. I can't be sure here but maybe it was Afghanistan that became the last straw for the Soviet economy. People usually explained it all by our endless help to brotherly countries from the Socialist Camp and all over the world. On this irritating background the Afghan campaign seemed really idiotic. Moreover, it contradicted too much the idea of peaceful co-existence that they had proclaimed so many times before. Our leader Leonid Brezhnev fought in the Second World War himself and seemed to be sincere in his fight for the peace in the world. That's why Afghanistan sounded as a discordant note in our ears.

      But, in fact, it was not something really new or unexpected – just 10 years before that, in 1968, they sent Soviet tanks to Czechoslovakia to help our brothers communists to stay at the steering wheel. It's a pity that I can't remember my parents' attitude towards the event. I was only 11 then. Maybe they discussed the matter out of my earshot because the memory of Stalin's dark times was still fresh in their minds. All that I can recall is that people suddenly got a bit crazy and started to buy salt, matches and soap in big quantities. “Who knows, maybe a new war is on its way,” my mother explained to me in a low voice. After that she handed a three liter milk-can to me to buy salt and sent me to the queue that was winding like a snake in front of the local shop. “No more than two (or three, or five) items in the same hands,” our shop-assistants usually cried to the crowd in such cases. I forgot the exact quantity but I do remember standing in that long queue, trying to guess how much it would take to reach the counter. A smart young girl passing by stopped to ask about the cause of agiotage. After being told she sniffed so scornfully that I felt a wave of shame rushing over me for standing there. 

      I am not sure if I saw it then but there it was, a notorious gap between generations, showing itself in all its clarity. People in the queue were mostly elderly or at least over forty. They surely knew what a real war was and tried to be prepared for a new one at any cost. As for the girl in a smart dress, the war for her was something thrilling from a book or a movie, something unreal that couldn't come and kill her and her relatives or burn her house to the ground. I am afraid that's how fertile soil for a new war begins to develop. My mother was a good narrator. But even I, listening to her stories through all my childhood and teens, could never understand in full measure all the atrocities and horrors of the real war. Obviously, nothing can be a better teacher than your own experience. That's why human collective memory has always been too short.

To be continued...

(c) Anna Shevchenko

32. The informer (the continuation)

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суббота, 13 апреля 2024 г.

My mother's stories (chapter twenty nine - my great grandma)

 

chapter 29

The village that I lost

(my great grandma)

     


       I don't know exactly why my mother felt the loss of her new-born son so keenly that she decided once and for all not to have children any more. After all, she lived in the village till the age of 21 and had to be hardened by that experience. I think it was that damn C-section that did it. My mother was told, of course, that after such an operation she wouldn't be able to have another child without going through the C-section again. But at the very thought of it she always felt a thrill of revulsion. I think in the past people weren't so sensitive or, at least, nowadays we believe they weren't. God gave and God took away – was it not their usual consolation for a woman who lost her baby?

       To my mother's misfortune she spent her childhood and teens in a shabby hut that was situated not far from a local cemetery. It was not a pleasant experience and perhaps that's why she was always so perceptive to the dark side of life. I remember her complaining to me how she couldn't help hearing all that crying and sobbing because by rural tradition it was a proper behaviour for close relatives. “Such hypocrisy!” my mother used to tell me with bitterness. “At first they made me listen to all of that and then after a few drinks at the funeral banquet most of them forgot what all that was about and were almost ready to dance.”

       Nevertheless, even my mother with her flat rejection of rural customs had to admit that it was not always the case. Sometimes one person's grief was so strong that nobody could be left unmoved. It was definitely so with that poor mother whose babies lived only a few months after they were born. Villagers were whispering, telling each other that she lost 13 or even 17 of them. I believe they exaggerated the number, as rumours usually do, but there was no doubt about that inconsolable mother's grief. At first, she tried to be patient, listening to the old wise women's advice. But, in the end, something snapped inside her and to people's horror she suddenly started shouting offenses to the sky, shaking her fists and asking God why He was so cruel to take all her babies away from her. Everyone stood there rooted to the spot, expecting that at any moment the lightning would flash from the sky and incinerate that lunatic of a woman. But it never came. What is more, the poor soul came to her senses in the end and afterwards had two or three children, who all lived to grow up. It really looked like a miracle after all her previous losses.

        My own maternal instinct has never been as strong as that woman's. Actually, it was a bit slow to reveal itself. I have never been one of those girls who like to play with somebody else's kids, and was already 25 when, to my surprise, I suddenly understood I'd like to have children of my own. Still, even before that time I had always felt that the ending of this story was extremely comforting. The poor woman wanted to have children so badly, and she got them in the end. When I am thinking of it nowadays, I usually feel a pang of regret that I have never been able to overcome my atheistic up-bringing. In such stories I feel the presence of God. Here He is as I'd like Him to be: strict but at the same time kind and understanding.

       I don't really know when and why Christian tradition was broken in our family. Most of my playmates were baptized and had godparents in spite of official disapproval of such things. I remember when we were already at secondary school one of my friends told me in secret: “You know, my mother and I discussed it all and decided it's the right thing to celebrate Easter and Christmas. Just in case. They say there is no God. But who really knows?” Actually, it was a wide-spread attitude towards religion in the USSR, even among communists, I suspect. Only they, especially those of higher rank, couldn't afford to show it in public. There were no communists in our family. So why was it so uncompromisingly atheistic? My mother used to bake Easter cakes every spring. But she always emphasized that it had nothing to do with religion, that she just loved the taste of them. As for making them in the shape of prolonged rolls, according to her words, she was simply incapable of baking them thoroughly in their traditional cylindrical form. Yet, I am not sure it was entirely true. Perhaps it was that aspiration of hers for being different and her desperate desire to forget her old rural customs.

       It was not so with my great-grandmother Euphemia, who taught my mother to say her first prayers. As far as I can remember my mother's stories about her: she was devout, hard-working and had immense knowledge of life that was really priceless during those hard times. If to think about it, she was a typical representative of rural women of her generation. Besides, she belonged to that part of the female population, who were tough and resilient enough to live till old age in spite of poverty, hard labour, famines and epidemics. But what frightens me most is those poor women's fate to give birth to a lot of children knowing that as likely as not only some of them will survive.

       Euphemia, or Euhima as everybody in the village called her, was born in 1870. I believe that after the revolution of 1917 and the Civil war that followed it all old records were lost. Not to mention that all the churches, where they usually kept such documents, were ransacked during that awful time and later were closed or turned into store-houses by Bolsheviks. Anyway, it was the year that Euhima remembered and always gave as her year of birth to her relatives. The same year when Lenin was born as my mother liked to emphasize. It was the easiest way to remember it. Everybody, who finished school in the USSR, knew when the first communist leader was born, especially taking into account that every April Soviet propaganda made a great fuss about it.

       Unlike her grandchildren, Euphemia was ignorant in such matters. She had never attended school and couldn't read or write just like most of her contemporaries from the lower classes. Actually, from an early age she had to work and take care of her invalid mother. Soon after her mother's death, when Euhima was about 16, she was forced to get married. In her own words it was not something unusual, because at the time of her youth parents didn't pay much attention to their daughter's actual age. If a girl began to look more or less feminine, it was a sign that they could marry her off and preferably without delay. After that her main task would be to have children and bring them up properly, that is to ensure the continuation of her kin. And hasn't it always been the main part of any female in human society or in the wild nature?

       Euphemia undoubtedly followed this tradition. But when she was over 30 and already had five children an epidemic of typhoid fever or some other intestinal infection rolled over the villages. All five of her children died, including her elder girl, who was at least 16, because she was just about to get married at that time. Euphemia herself was close to death and it seemed there was little hope for her recovery. Still, she obediently followed a local doctor's strict orders not to eat anything at all. I suppose her husband watched her in secret, because the doctor definitely warned them that eating in that state would mean the death of her. Nevertheless, the time came when Euhima couldn't stand it any longer and surreptitiously stole into the inner porch, where a big barrel with sour cabbage stood in the corner. As she confessed to my mother many years later, she had never had more pleasure from food than at that moment when, after breaking the thin crust of ice, she started gobbling the icy cold sour cabbage. After eating her fill, she resignedly hobbled to her bed and lay down to wait for her death. Miraculously, it didn't come. What is more, it was the beginning of her recovery, and it only confirmed my great-grandmother's inner belief that nature had always had some hidden wonderful remedies. The only problem was that very few people were able to find them.

       After her full recovery, Euphemia didn't fall into some incurable nervous break-down or anything of the sort but continued to work as hard as before and gave birth to four more children who all lived till old age. Even her two sons survived, although they fought Germans during the Second World War.

To be continued...

(c) Anna Shevchenko

32. The informer (the continuation)
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