My mother's stories (chapter seven)

My mother's stories 
chapter seven
My mother's struggle for freedom

         The mass loss of cattle at the beginning of collectivization was not completely in vain. Communist leaders thought better of it and peasants were allowed to have some livestock of their own. According to my mother, they could have a cow, a pig, some poultry and goats in one yard. And that milk in the kettle, that she used to carry to the reception center, was a tax upon a cow that their family had to pay to the state. My mother remembered their cow clearly: it was black and white and aggressive with long sharp horns. No wonder she was afraid of it. It was not very productive, but, of course, they got much more milk than those three liters in the kettle. Her mother, however, preferred to sell it.

         “Of course, she drank a lot of milk in her childhood,”  my mother always finished her story about her longing for milk in quiet rage, “And money she usually lent to someone or spent on clothes. But she never got her money back and the clothes were mostly black. Nobody wanted them except her!”

       Hatred – that was the main feeling my mother had for her mother. Was it really mutual? My mother always believed it was. Their neighbours scarcely had any doubts about it, watching how fiercely her mother punished her for any fault she could find. And their children liked to have some fun telling her mother, when she was coming from the field-work, tired and sulky, how they had seen her elder daughter beat her little one. After that they had a real entertainment, watching the process of punishment over their fences. When my mother’s younger sister Zina grew slightly older, she always rushed forward to protect her sister, shouting that it was not true – it was their neighbours’ slander. She waved her arm, pointing that their neighbours were just laughing at their mother, not even hiding out of sight and calling her “thick-headed goose”.

       So that was how everything was going on in my mother’s childhood. Actually, I was growing up listening to my mother’s stories about her childhood and youth. How often I heard in response to my complaints that it was nothing in comparison with what she had when she was a child. My mother was right, of course, but somehow it didn’t make my tribulations less painful or more bearable. Nevertheless, in spite of all those pictures of poverty, starvation, people’s envy and malevolence, that usually prevailed over their kindness and helpfulness, her stories left me with a feeling of an extremely interesting and exciting life. I think it was her passion and inspiration as she was telling her stories that did it.

         How much bitterness there was in her voice when she used to tell about her sister playing with her ball while she was working hard. Surely their mother was so fond of Zina because she was black-haired, rosy-cheeked and had a good appetite! And, of course, everybody thought her younger sister was sweet because she was lisping something funny till the age of five. And what a surprise it was when one day a 5-year-old Zina came running into the kitchen-garden, where my mother was working, and shouted that their mother called her to join them at the dinner-table. “Why!” exclaimed my mother in shock. “You can speak properly”. And her sister confessed that she was making up her baby-talk so long because everybody was laughing and loved her for that. “But I won’t do it any more!” finished Zina eagerly. “I am going to be like you”.

         It was, I think, the beginning of their friendship. Yet, my mother has never appreciated her sister’s devotion in full measure. She could never forget and forgive that Zina was their mother’s favourite. She was always too small to work and had never been beaten. Except once when during an argument Zina recklessly called their mother a slut and provoked her fit of fury. An ax that their mother threw, as she was chasing Zina across the yard, missed her favourite daughter’s head by inches. “And imagine,” my mother used to finish this story with a note of admiration in her voice, “we had to call a man to pull that ax out of the fence pole”.

         Her voice trembled with vindictive joy when she told me another story – how she made her mother stop beating her at last. She was twelve or thirteen at that time and one or two centimeters higher than her. So no wonder she managed to look steadily into her mother’s eyes and warn her she was going to fight back. “Can you believe it?” my mother usually finished this episode in triumph. “Her fist came to a halt just in front of my eye and she never touched a hair on my head since then!”

         She was rather sarcastic when she told me how their neighbours and relatives disapproved of her blond hair, calling her “White”. She used to mimic eagerly their loud whispers telling me how they pestered her mother with questions about her appearance. How could it be that her blond daughter had black brows and eyelashes? Why has she allowed her to dye them? My mother was, actually, chuckling with pleasure, describing vividly how her mother lost her temper at last, rushed upon her with a white wet cloth and began to rub her brows vigorously - only to discover that it was their natural colour.

       To be continued… 

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country
7. Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

My mother's stories (chapter six)

My mother's stories
chapter 6
Roaming through the village and a man with two horses

             Ten years after I visited my mother’s village for the first time I was there again. But it was not really a visit – just passing along the main street of the village in a group of tourists, pupils from different schools. We had a walking tour through the countryside and it was just one of the villages on our way. As we were toiling along the road with heavy rucksacks hurting ruthlessly our shoulders, I was trying hard to find something familiar that could remind me of my first visit, but without success. It was a village like so many others which we had already passed. Maybe one of the poorest as it had so many houses with thatched roofs. I had a feeling that time had stopped there and nothing changed much since my barefooted mother, slightly older than five, was trotting along the same road on one of her mother’s errands.

             Usually my mother was sent to borrow something or to take the thing her mother had lent to someone back. Actually, her mother could lend anything: from a smart headscarf to a toothbrush if a person, who had asked her, was skillful enough in flattery. Sometimes it took a long time to find a borrowed thing, because people continued to lend it to each other and it was travelling around the village. My mother still remembers one pretty kerchief, cream-coloured with red flowers - she had been searching for it for weeks. She was especially persistent in that case, because she had just reached her teens and it was her turn to inherit this nice-looking thing from her mother.

             However, it was not safe for a little girl, who was afraid of dogs, to stroll through the village - they say those animals can smell fear. Or maybe my mother was running and that is why a pack of dogs began to chase her. Anyway, she stopped dead, watching the dogs that were slowly approaching her, growling. Thanks God a man with an iron chain in his hands was passing by. He rushed forward shouting, attacked those dogs, who didn’t want to retreat, and my mother was saved. This accident didn’t stop her mother from sending her elder daughter on errands, of course. But, I think, my mother didn’t mind it, actually – at least those journeys through the village saved her from hard work in the kitchen garden or from housework, which she was forced to do since the age of five.

             Sometimes my mother even had some benefits from her wanderings, as it was when she found the cream-coloured kerchief at last, or when she used to carry a kettle full of milk to the reception center. It was the only way for her to have her beloved milk – she just stopped, when she thought nobody could see her, and sucked surreptitiously one or two mouthfuls of milk from the kettle snout. At the time of my mother’s early childhood it was not really difficult to find such a secluded place – at least half of the houses stood empty, swept out by great famine, which broke out at the very beginning of total collectivization. Yet they were lucky, as far as I know in the steppe regions the whole villages stood deserted, swept empty by death. Of course, those poor people didn’t have their forest with its berries, mushrooms and nuts to help them to survive. Besides, the forest was a good hiding place for those cunning people, who managed to save some of livestock from being taken to the collective farm. In fact, most of the cattle was lost, slaughtered by those who didn’t want to give their animals away or died from hunger and bad treatment in the collective farms. Sometimes it caused a real tragedy.
       My daughter has recently reminded me one of my mother’s stories that I had forgotten for some reason – maybe because it was that kind of story, which is better to forget. It was about a man, who loved his horses. I think those two horses were really handsome and thoroughbred, because some people from abroad came to the village and tried to buy them. Those people offered a really high price, but the man refused point blank. And later, after those poor horses were taken to the collective farm and died somewhere among the other doomed animals, their master lost his mind. He was often seen roaming about the village, almost naked or completely naked in different versions of my mother’s story, complaining that his horses had escaped again and asking if anybody had seen them. People usually said they had and waved their arms in some direction. The man didn’t change his manner of clothing even when winter came. Some time later he just disappeared and nobody had ever seen him again. And nobody had ever learnt if it was frost that did it or he was secretly imprisoned or taken to the asylum not to compromise the noble idea of collectivization.

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages
6. Collectivization and electrification of all the country

My mother's stories (chapter five)

My mother's stories
chapter 5
Collectivization and electrification of all the country

My mother was born in 1930 – just eight months before that (in November 1929) Stalin announced his programme of sweeping collectivization all over the country, and within nine years the centuries-old way of life in our villages was forcibly broken. The catastrophe that burst out during that period was not really unexpected. Peasantry considered collectivization as treachery of the new communist regime that gave them the land soon after revolution and was now trying to take it back. Peasants couldn’t be convinced or attracted by abstract conversations about future happy life in the communist society without any private property. The land had to have its master – that was their deep inner belief. The consequences of the inevitable struggle that followed were really disastrous. The resistance of the peasants, who didn’t want to join collective farms, the confiscation of their crop, two years of draught caused a great famine with six million peasants starved to death. And as if this was not enough, several millions of the most successful, the most industrious workers were labeled as “kulaks” and killed, imprisoned or sent into exile depending on the form of their resistance, or just for the very fact of their prosperity.

The creation of collective farms was completed in the end, but what price did we pay? Why did we have to pay so dearly for collectivization? Our school textbooks explained it clearly – it was a struggle between centuries-old backwardness and new communist consciousness. It sounded very convincing for my young brains but, eventually, some doubts began to come. If collectivization was so beneficial, as we were always taught, why was the growth of agriculture the first and the most urgent issue at all the Congresses of the Communist Party? Though lack of food on the shelves in our shops and its low quality, especially in comparison with expensive products from peasants’ kitchen gardens at our markets, was the best proof that something was wrong with our collective farms.

             I used to go to the countryside occasionally, but even those short visits were enough to show me clearly that there was no prosperity in our villages. My mother never got on well with her mother – so I visited her village only twice. I went there for the first time at the age of five with my father and aunt, because my mother refused point-blank to join us. I remember very little of my first visit. Yet, for some reason, two small barefooted girls in ugly grayish dresses, my distant relatives I think, stuck steadily in my memory. They were too proud to play with me and it hurt my feelings of course. Now I understand their reasons – in their eyes I looked like a little princess in my multicoloured cotton dress and leather sandals. Later my mother told me that those girl’s dresses were grey with dirt as there was no laundering for small children’s garments in the villages.

             I remember I told this story to my future husband and, surprisingly, he had the same recollection from his early childhood when he lived with his parents in the village for some time. He told me about a feeling of shame and injustice, that he had in his young age, comparing himself in his nice clothes with pockets full of sweets, with barefooted and always hungry rural children.

            Several years ago my friend from university, whom I thought I knew well, shocked me with two stories from her childhood. She lived in a village in Moldova till the age of twelve. Her father was the chairman of the collective farm there and his most important achievement was the electrification of the village. I couldn’t believe it, but till the age of nine my friend lived without electricity and even after that she spent a lot of dark evenings because of frequent breakdowns in the line. How could it be that in 1965, 45 years after Vladimir Lenin proclaimed his daring “plan of electrification of all the country” my friend with her fellow villagers still spent their evenings in the dim light of oil lamps? We learnt about electrification at primary school! I remember well this touching story about Herbert Wells, the well-known writer and father of science fiction, who visited Lenin in Moscow in 1920. It was the time of Civil War - all the country lay in ruins and people suffered from cold and hunger. So no wonder that Wells couldn’t believe his ears when Lenin told him about his plan of electrification, and later called him “the dreamer in the Kremlin” in his famous book “Russia in the shadows”. Nevertheless, as our teachers always triumphantly finished, following Lenin’s advice, the famous writer visited our country 14 years later and admitted that all Lenin’s dreams had come true.

             And many years later my friend’s simple story shattered this myth about the USSR that I still believed. But she impressed me even more with her second story: how she, a daughter of the main person in the village, once went to the nearest town for the New Year Celebration, organized for children. She told me with a weird frozen expression on her face how overwhelmed she felt, when she, in her cheap homely dress, entered the brightly lit hall with a glittering New Year tree in the center and saw all those girls in magnificent frocks with diadems sparkling on their heads. And there she stood stiff on the threshold, a little awkward Cinderella – only without a lovely dress to support her confidence and bring out her beauty. Those diadems were made of white cardboard and multicoloured glass beads, actually, but for her it was like a fairy tale and even now, almost 50 years later, she still dreams about that brightly decorated hall with smartly-dressed children, dancing around the New Year tree. And I am afraid the same feeling of being out of place is coming to her in these dreams.

             How all of this could be happening in the country, where there were so many talks about equal rights for everybody declared in the Constitution? We were taught since the primary school that our country was the best, with the fairest relationships in the world. It was written everywhere: in our textbooks, newspapers, on our placards and proclaimed from our TV screens. Why didn’t we realize how dramatically it didn’t match the reality?

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations

2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)
5. Urban life and its advantages

My mother's stories (chapter four)

My mother's stories
chapter 4
 Urban life and its advantages

        My parents, meanwhile, were building our house. It was not a quick process, because they didn’t have their parents to help them with money, and they couldn’t hire any workers. My father could bring some nails and two or three boards from work. Authorities turned a blind eye on such things. Maybe they realized that their workers were underpaid or maybe in that way they felt better, as they were sneaking something themselves. But, actually, people didn’t consider this as stealing – deeply inside, I suppose, they really believed that everything in the country was theirs.

             Nevertheless, most of the materials my father had to buy of course. He spent his weekends and holidays building the house, I imagine how tiresome it was for him. Saturday as the second day off was given to factory and office workers only in 1967. Peasants as usual were left without this new benefit. Anyway, by that time the construction of our house was drawing to a close. Mother helped my father a lot – not only with plastering and painting but with a hammer in her strong hands too. So our house was finished in the end, though it happened when our neighbours had had their houses already built for several years.

             I helped my mother sometimes with her house work or in the kitchen garden, but it was not too much. My hands were too slow and I preferred reading books or playing with my friends. My mother often emphasized how different my life was from what she had in her childhood. “You have never been beaten on your head, your father has never been shot and you have never had a war”, - my mother has said these words recently and suddenly it came to me. That was the refrain of my childhood and my teens and the later years, I suppose, too. I think she used it as self-defense every time when I complained or reproached her or asked her for something she didn’t want to do.

             And she was actually right – my life was much more quiet, comfortable and carefree. What were my troubles in comparison with hers? I hardly ever had clothes, which were popular among the girls of my age, for example. Those dresses made of white nylon with big red flowers – my mother said they were unhealthy. It didn’t matter to me as they looked so attractive. A lot of girls wore them and I continued to ask my mother to sew me one in spite of her persistent refusal. Or those velveteen camping shoes, which I wanted so much, that I still remember the soft burning sensation that I felt every time when I saw them on the feet of some lucky girl.

             We lived in a seaport city and sailors brought a lot of attractive things from abroad, which their wives then sold at a high price at the famous Odessa Flea market named "Tolchock". In fact, it was not a genuine flea market as a considerable part of goods there were new and expensive. And it was not surprising that the imported clothes and shoes were so expensive – they looked much prettier than those plain and uncomfortable things that our shops were full of. My parents didn’t have enough money to buy such expensive garments. Mother had worked as a draftswoman, but she stopped working because of the problems with her eyes when I was about seven or eight. Father’s salary was not too high and they were building the house at that time. Besides my parents didn’t want to earn money in some illegal or half-illegal way which were widespread in our country. People were eager to deceive the law and get some extra money to add to their modest salaries. They called this style of life “spinning”. My parents weren’t able “to spin” and they didn’t want to, actually. Sometimes Father took additional work to do at home, though it was not officially approved. Mother was working hard in the kitchen garden and bred chickens, but she didn’t want to sell her produce at the market, though it would have been a good legal way to increase our income. I think she particularly disliked selling because her mother used to be fond of it.

             My mother's attitude often confused me. For example she didn’t consider the lack of nice clothes or poor interior of our house as something upsetting. She just didn’t see all of this with my eyes - she saw only a high ceiling and big windows. She spent her childhood in a thatched hut with tiny windows where adults could reach the ceiling with the tips of their fingers. In winter the distant corners of their dwelling were covered with hoarfrost even when the stove was hot.

             My problems with clothes looked just laughable when my mother began to tell that it was a custom for villagers to walk barefoot till the first snowfall, or that small children never had their clothes washed - mothers just sewed their collars together and they were wearing their garments till they turned into dirty rags on their shoulders. And, of course, new coats and boots, if they were lucky to get them, were always too big as children were supposed to wear them for several years.

         Unlike what we have to eat nowadays their food was natural, though nourishment in the villages one couldn’t call healthy as after short periods of comparative abundance they usually had the time of half-starvation. They had never had enough milk, sugar or butter, it was a rare pleasure. Yet, as my mother told me with bitterness, they always had some nice food, laid in store for feast days. It was the only time when her mother cooked a lot of tasty dishes, which were so different from those disgusting things that she usually made. I think my mother’s loathing of feasts came from that time when she watched her mother’s guests devouring heaps of dainty victuals that their family was deprived of on ordinary days.

          The only things my mother regretted losing after she left the village at the age of twenty were the picturesque nature of the place and the taste of nice water, which they took from the springs and artesian wells. It was so delicious, especially in comparison with what people had to drink in the city, that my mother couldn’t get used to it for a long time. At the beginning of her life in the city she used to go by tram to the place, where a spring with tasty water miraculously survived. There she stood in a long queue with the other fans until an awful accident happened. Fortunately my mother was not there at that time, but she was told that, for some reason, maybe because it went downhill in this place, a tram derailed and a lot of people from the queue were killed. Some time later, as my mother told me, relatives of the victims, stricken with grief, came and covered that place with cement or asphalt and that was the end of the spring.
          This disaster, however, didn’t put an end to my mother’s affection for nature, which took its origin from the beneficial land, where she was growing up. She always remembered with nostalgia the forest, where she used to go with her granny and the river, where her father used to swim. Unfortunately, she didn’t cherish the same feelings for majority of people, who lived in those nice parts and whom she considered ignorant, superstitious and ill-disposed. I am afraid they really were, but at least they had all the reasons to be embittered and distrustful, because the time of my mother's childhood was one of the hardest periods in the history of our country.     

                   

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe
4. The settlement in the steppe (the ending)

My mother's stories (chapter three - the ending)

My mother's stories
chapter 3
 The settlement in the steppe

(the ending)

              We moved to our hut in spring when I was seven – just before I had to start school. I think I can vaguely recollect the improvised fence made of the wire and iron pegs, which showed black among thick steppe grass. I can’t remember anything else, but I know how it looked like here in spring before the city expansion spoilt the environment. Of course, the air was fresh and sweet, the blooming fields spread out to the horizon in the north and the salt lake surface glistened like silver under the sun in the west. The new fence was built soon and the land was turned into a thoroughly cultivated kitchen garden by my mother’s eager hands. Here she was in her element – she loved growing plants and breeding chickens. And for me it was a completely new world to explore.

             In this world there were a lot of different plants, insects and birds to watch or to play with. And what a temptation it was to walk there where far away the fields met the sky. Horizon – it was a new thing for me too. You can’t see it when you live in the city.

             I remember once I persuaded my new friend, who was only four (three years younger than me), to go to the fields. I was eager to explore a wild garden in a gently sloping hollow at one or two kilometers distance from our dwelling. But we passed only one or two hundred meters when my friend felt scared and refused to go further. We were still arguing, standing at the place from which the whole open space of fields could be clearly seen, when my friend’s father came running and scolding. He took her in his arms and we went back home. I felt disappointed and uncomfortable, shuffling in their wake, knowing, that my friend could be spanked for that, probably even flogged with a leather belt. If I remember correctly, I didn’t get even a proper reprimand for my willfulness.

            Nevertheless, my life hugely improved since we had left the factory region. There weren't many children in the new settlement. But they were mostly of my age or younger, and all of them respected me as I was a good pupil at school and, more than that, I could draw and invent new games. I used to spend a lot of pleasant hours, playing “hide and seek” in the forest shelter belt near the railway or different active games on the lawn between the two belts or sitting near the fire in the dark, telling scary stories.

         To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstraions
2. A merry-go-round
3. The settlement in the steppe

My mother's stories (chapter three)

My mother's stories
chapter 3
The settlement in the steppe

     

          Those five years, during which we lived in the factory region, were the hardest in my childhood. I lived in the place I didn’t like and played with the children, who disliked me and were mostly older. Who knows how many times I ran home, crying after being knocked or pushed to the ground, before my mother lost her temper and rushed into the yard, shouting and promising to kill everybody, who touched a hair on my head? Things improved more or less after that. I remember how a girl, who often beat me, knocked me down as usual, but as I was going to run home in tears, all the children surrounded me asking not to complain – otherwise this girl would be flogged by her parents with a leather belt. I was shocked after I learnt about the belt, but when they offered to punch her back instead, I couldn’t raise my arm. Were they trying to provoke me to have a real fight or was it their idea of real justice? I am not sure about that even now when I am much more experienced.

         So it was a great relief for me to move to a new place. My father received a piece of land beyond the boundaries of the city and it took at least 40 minutes to walk to our place from the last tram stop. The environment was almost unspoilt by human presence there and it made such a nice difference after living in the factory region. I remember how delighted my mother was as she told me about a hare, which crossed their way, when she and my father were walking to our plot for the first time. When we moved there, a small cottage and a well for imported water had already been built.

          I was sure that my father got this land as a worker of a big factory, which produced agricultural machines. Our authorities’ policy was to attract people to work at factories. They gave some advantages to workers: the possibility to buy goods, that couldn’t be found in ordinary shops or vouchers to health resorts with trade union discounts. Why couldn’t they give plots of land either?

         Nowadays, in spite of my mother’s memory problems, she still remembers a lot of details from her childhood and youth. So, after careful questioning, I learnt I was wrong about the land. My mother’s story was that Father received it as an orphan when he was still in the army as an extended–service man. There was some conflict because of this land with his captain. My father was promised a flat in an almost finished new building. The captain, however, intended to get this flat for himself, and he managed to persuade my father to take his own apartment in the factory region instead. Father agreed because he was told it was a very nice place at a short distance from the sea. But after we moved there my parents discovered, that the captain’s flat was wet with some water pool under the floor, where frogs began to croak before the rain.

          At that time one family couldn’t have more than one dwelling. So, when the captain learnt that my father had hid the fact that he had a flat and got a piece of land, where he had already built a small cottage, he tried to take it in his possession too.

         The captain had already had his flat, but it was not too difficult to deceive the law. People usually used names of their relatives for that. My parents, on the contrary, couldn’t do this even if they were able to overcome their reluctance to break the law: Father was brought up in an orphanage, Mother came from a village and didn’t like her relatives very much. So she didn’t think long – she took me and moved to our hut among the fields. Father didn’t want to move, but after living alone with frogs under the floor for company, he gave up and joined his wife and daughter. Later they returned the keys of the flat with frogs to some official. Nobody was tempted by it any more – it stayed empty. The last news about it was that someone had stolen glass from its window frames.

           

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations
2. A merry-go-round

My mother's stories (chapter two)

My mother's stories
chapter 2
 A merry-go-round

The everyday reality during that period of my childhood was not too bright. In comparison with multicoloured demonstrations it was dull and gray, because this was the main colour in my surroundings. The air was not good either and it was not surprising. We lived in the factory region near the crossroad, which was overcrowded with cars even then, when not many people could afford to have their own vehicle. Our dwelling was one-storeyed and wet with a tiny front garden. It was situated in a common yard with similar dwellings adjacent to each other and the shell rock wall behind them.  There were one or two exits into the similar yards, and in this tangled maze of yards a big amount of children were playing, fighting and running around. A huge puddle filled almost all our yard after the rains, and people usually crossed it, walking on the separate bricks they had put in there. Once I stepped aside, running after other children, got my feet wet and had a really bad cold after that.

         A small plant, just behind one of the shell rock walls, was rumbling and clanking all day long. At the back of the yard there was a big scrap-heap and an awful common toilet with all its dirt and smell, where my mother forbade me to go. We didn’t have any water pipes inside our apartment, of course – only a common tap under a big willow-tree in the yard.  

         The only attractive thing about the place was that it was not far from the seashore. The sea could not be seen from our yard but it was heard sometimes. On our way to the seashore we had to walk past our own rubbish heap and a lot of others too. Maybe this is the reason why I hate the sight of rubbish among the grass so much.

         I forgot everything about the sea itself except that once the water was so transparent that I was not afraid of it and allowed it to support me. I was sure I was swimming on that day, although my parents said I had a false memory. Maybe they were right and it was only my father’s hands that supported me when I imagined myself swimming.

         My recollections were often different, especially from my mother’s. I could never come to an agreement with her about them. She assured me I had never been in the park where I was swinging, for example. My father and aunt confirmed the fact but it could be my friend’s family who took me there. Or maybe again it was just my imagination that I was swinging in the park as I longed to go there so much. The park was not too far from our dwelling, however all my relatives, even my aunt, refused to go there with me. And, of course, they didn’t want to go to the Central Park where I could ride a real merry-go-round. I went there for the first time with my classmates when I was 17. It was the end of our last year at school, just after “the last bell celebration”, during which our teachers declared how happy they were to have taught us and asked us not to forget our school years. We didn't care much for those sentimental speeches and just waited for the ceremony to end. After that we promised to meet each other at the bus stop and rushed home to have lunch and get some money for entertainment. To my surprise, when I said we were going to the Central Park and asked for money, my mother began to say something so unfair and offensive, that I got angry and ran away without money, forgetting completely, that my friend had to come and pick me up. Bus tickets were very cheap – so it was not a problem, anyone could lend me this sum, but I needed money for a merry-go-round and an ice-cream at least.

         I could never understand why my mother often tried to spoil my pleasure, when I had a real longing for something. And it was not greediness. That day, when I went to the Central Park with my classmates, she gave the money on my entertainment to my friend, when she came to our house. The sum was even twice bigger than I had asked for.

         And it was always like that. If I asked her for something too persistently it was the right way not to get anything or to have my pleasure spoilt – just as it was with a rubber goat when I was four or five. It was a cheap toy but for some reason I wanted it very much. My mother said if I behaved myself for the whole day she would buy it. I remember how difficult it was for me to control myself. And I knew one wrong step and our agreement would be cancelled. When I got my toy in the end I felt it was not worth it.

         It was actually a wise thought for a girl of my age. So maybe there was some truth in my mother’s belief, that I was the best and the most intelligent at the age of five. As a proof of it she used to tell two stories. One – how my aunt was complaining about her boyfriend to my mother. I was listening to their conversation for some time and then asked in surprise: “Why don’t you split up with him?” And another one – how my mother didn’t manage to place me in a kindergarten and I offered to lock myself up when she was at work. I remember as I used to sit alone at home, drawing in my sketch-book some series about a family of mice or looking through the window. It was very nice of me, of course, to be so responsible and brave. However later, as I was growing up, I felt more and more irritated, listening to my mother’s stories how I deteriorated since the age of five. Now, fifty years later, sometimes I think – maybe my mother was not so wrong after all.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

1. Festive demonstrations

My mother's stories (chapter one)

    This is just a short announcement for those who’ve been reading “Five favourite things since my childhood” more or less regularly. I decided to divide my story into two parts. At first it was supposed to be five short stories united under the title “Five favourite things since my childhood”, but when I reached the fifth story “Travelling” I couldn’t start it properly for a long time. Maybe it happened because there was no travelling in my childhood – only dreams about it. So I started to write about trips and walking tours with my husband and children and my story moved forward easily enough. But gradually I noticed that I couldn’t stop writing and the story about my love for travelling turned into an actual travelling through time. After some search I found the place where “Travelling” should be finished. The following story I called “My mother’s stories”. Actually, it’s my stories too – just a mixture of them, an attempt to understand why everything in my family and in my country was going on as if people had a goal to spoil their life as much as they were able to.

My mother's stories
chapter 1 
Festive demonstrations

        I started writing this story unaware that I did it. Actually I had been writing another story, which was supposed to have five short parts united under the common title “Five favourite things since my childhood”. However, when I reached the fifth part “Travelling” I couldn’t begin it for a long time – no beginning satisfied me. No wonder in that as there was no travelling in my childhood except one trip to my grandmother’s village when I was five. My story moved forward easily enough as soon as I started to describe my adult life when I did have trips and walking tours – all these things that I still love so much. Yet, somehow imperceptibly for me the story about my love for traveling turned into an actual travelling through time. So I found the place where this transformation happened and gave the following story a new name.  I called it “My mother’s stories”. Although, it’s my stories too, just a mixture of them – an attempt to understand why I spent my early years listening to my mother’s stories about her travels around the country, but the most distant place that I reached in her company was the center of the city.

And it was not so easy for her to go even there. How often the trip, which we were planning, was cancelled because she couldn’t find her purse or hair-pins or because of several raindrops that fell from the small gray cloud in the sky. Sometimes being especially reluctant to go anywhere she easily provoked me to some rudeness and exclaimed with relief that we were staying at home after that. There was perhaps a note of gloating in her voice too or at least it was how I felt it, being utterly upset after our trip was cancelled.  It was different with my father. We liked to discuss the only trip to the village that I made with him and my aunt. Besides, we loved to dream about different nice places where we could go together. But the time came when I understood it was only talking – nothing more. From time to time I pestered my mother with requests to go to her mother’s village, but her face darkened every time I mentioned it. And every time I asked her to go anywhere else I heard I was just like her mother having an itch in my backside and it was an argument I was never able to defeat.

*  *  *

        It’s a natural desire of any child to explore the outer world. My grandson, for example, always cried if his mother or I left home without him when he was only six months old. This feeling of bitter disappointment that you were left behind – it seems to me I still remember it. Did I have a lot of opportunities for exploration in my childhood? Small shops, the cinema nearby and my aunt’s factory dormitory – these were my usual places to go to. I loved being at my aunt’s and having all those young women and girls’ attention. Most of them had recently left their villages. I reminded them their younger sisters or nieces, I suppose, and who knows, maybe - their own children, whom they left behind in an attempt to find a better life in the city.

      And in November and May we had festive demonstrations at the center of the city. My mother didn’t like them and preferred to stay at home, but I loved going there with my father. The sea of red flags, multicoloured balloons, flowers and cheerful well-dressed people – that was my impression from them. It was much later that I began to find our demonstrations formal and boring, and the huge portraits of communist leaders, which people were carrying – ridiculous. Nevertheless even at the time of my early childhood my father tried to avoid carrying one of the portraits or flags, and we escaped half-way to the tribunes at the main square of the city, where our authorities were waiting to greet us and listen to our shouts of “Hurray!” in response.

      It was much more exciting for me to stand in the crowd on the pavement, staring at the endless column of demonstrators. I liked watching little girls in smart dresses with huge bows on their heads and large decorated trucks, where people in costumes performed different scenes from famous books or films. Some time later we left the crowd and went to roam the streets, decorated with red flags and bright banners, which proclaimed: “Peace, labour, May”, “Freedom, equality and brotherhood”, “For peace in the world” and so on. I used the huge letters of the slogans to sharpen my reading skills, but I don’t think I understood their meaning. The comprehension came later and deeply inside I still can’t accept the fact, that all the nice things, declared on those banners, can not be achieved by human society.

     At the time of those happy strolls with my father through the brightly-coloured city I followed him in high spirits, totally unaware of my future disappointment. In the end, we headed to the city garden, where a local photographer took a photo of us near the fountain, and then Father used to buy two portions of my beloved ice-cream for both of us. It was a really good ending of all the entertainment. When I was in my teens, I still cherished warm feelings about the demonstrations, but it was rather a memory how I used to love them. In reality I was glad not to wake up early and my father also preferred to stay at home on his day off.

         Only once again I had this half-forgotten festive sensation on the first of May. It was my first year at university. On the warm sunny day I was walking with my friends in a column of girls in the gymnastic costumes along the central streets of the city. We had blooming branches in our hands and, as someone invisible commanded, raised them high into the air. It was really exciting walking there, knowing that everybody was looking at our young smooth bodies and legs. We crossed the main square of the city, full of inspiration, raising cheerfully the flowering branches above our heads to the bravura sounds of music, and the announcer proclaimed solemnly: “Long live our Soviet intelligentsia!” But after we passed the platform, where our leaders were standing, waving slightly their hands at us, we discovered that nobody took care to give us some hiding place to change. So we refused to do that just among the square and ran in our costumes to the university along the almost deserted streets, when suddenly someone, the cleverest of us, offered to find a shelter for changing in one of the empty yards, that we met on our way. It was very thrilling, like in films about spies, to go there and change.

        After that last adventure the only entertainment we had during the demonstrations was to giggle when we were supposed to cry “hurray” because one of our student mates, trying to cheer us up, began to shout in a hoarse loud voice long before we reached the tribunes. If my memory doesn’t deceive me at the time of my early childhood even adults’ attitude to such social events was different. “Thaw” – that was the term used for the time just after Stalin’s death and the ending of his bloody regime. It was the time of the first space flights and great hopes – time when people believed in scientific and technological progress and felt optimistic about their own future and the whole mankind in general. Many years later I was talking with Americans about that period in their history and learnt that at that time their people also joyfully believed in the bright future which John Kennedy promised them.

To be continued…

(c) Anna Shevchenko

Five favourite things since my childhood: TRAVELLING (part three)

5.    Travelling.

       

Of course we were eager to have a better look at Gorbachev’s summer cottage. One guy from our company tried to swim along the coast in its direction at night but failed because the searchlights began to look for the cause of disturbance very energetically. So we decided to try again at the day time. We swam one or two hundred meters towards the ships – we didn’t dare to swim towards the villa of course. Our friend’s wife was a bad swimmer so she was in flippers, but I got tired worse than she as I was in my glasses and didn’t want them to be splashed. 

          The distance was too great, and we didn’t discover anything interesting. Only that the roof we had seen belonged to the smaller house, for service staff supposedly, and the villa itself looked the same: an orange roof and white walls. Maybe there were marble stairs leading to the beach, I’m not sure, and a lot of green colour around. I forgot what kind of plants they were but at such a distance we couldn’t really see it properly.

         We were planning to repeat this camping holiday next summer but it never happened. We had some financial difficulties – so we went to the sandbar instead. It was in 1991 actually and I regretted a lot we weren’t in the Crimea in August as we planned. It would have been so exciting – Gorbachev was trapped in his villa with his wife, and I am afraid the same ships stood on their guard in the sea.

         We didn’t know it was the beginning of the end of our world and the new life was about to start. It was already starting but I don’t think anybody could indicate the exact moment when it actually began. Did it start maybe when they stopped to pay our salaries regularly? But this was nothing compared with what was to come.

       Some time later they stopped paying our money at all. Then food disappeared from the shelves in our shops. When it appeared again in more or less noticeable quantity, it was too expensive for us to buy. My husband went to several scientific conferences abroad and tried to find a job there but failed. We got thin because of the lack of food but we were still haughty. My husband was giving private lessons only of English not physics because he wanted to improve his English. I tried to be a tutor and gave up, had some temporary teaching job and refused to continue though I was offered to stay. The new world was ruthless but we still didn’t understand that and continued to pass our beloved sandbar every summer right up to the time when our marriage followed our late country and collapsed too.

         After some period of half-starving existence and still deeply in shock I went to sell newspapers stubbornly refusing to try teaching physics again as I wasn’t good at it. Maybe watching me selling press for 13 hours a day was the last straw that caused my father’s death when he was only 69.

                

So this was the hardest period of my life and my country as I could remember. Nevertheless when we both began our recovery the first thing I did was cycling with my children around the salt lake Kuyalnik. It was about 70 kilometers trip during a day. I was not in a good form and hadn’t ridden a bicycle for several years. This, I think, deteriorated my problems with veins in my legs but I have never regretted it. I remember my first feeling of joyful surprise when I discovered that the world I loved was still there with its wide green fields, bright blue sky and fresh air with sweet and bitterish odour of steppe grass.

 I joined my children only twice after that and then the doctors told me I couldn’t overload my legs like that any more. I tried different treatments: pills, ointments and swimming in the salt water of the lake and the sea as the vascular surgeon recommended. And I bothered my friends with conversations about my plans how to bring my legs to a condition as they were in my youth - everything for the purpose of joining my children in this annual summer trip around the lake. It was for me as a journey around the world in miniature. I pestered my friends with this for 2 or 3 years before I understood that they were smiling behind my back thinking I was slightly touched in the head. I knew they liked me like that – just a weirdo but I didn’t want to be tiresome. So I stopped talking about that.

        

But I couldn’t resign myself – I woke up early on the day of the journey and helped my daughter with cooking but when my children were leaving I was hiding inside the house at first. Some years later I began to go out with them and as they were standing in the street, young and strong, with their friends and their bicycles I took the first photo of the trip, But every time as they were leaving without me I felt a prickle in my heart. 

           

I hadn’t ridden my bicycle for three or four years for doctors said I was not allowed to. But then, with some encouragement from my daughter, I began to cycle again – using compressive breeches and within short distances at first. Some time later I discovered that when I was in an especially good form, usually in the middle of summer, I could even take a journey of about 20 kilometers once in one or two years. And it was definitely better than nothing.

        

Once or twice a year my friend from university phoned and told me about some excursion she was going to have with her colleagues. I refused to join them only twice: once - when the only attraction of the trip was a winery and the second time – when it was too expensive for me. Mostly I was ready to go anywhere only to break the monotonous course of life – just to feel the fresh wind on my face and see pure blue sky with fluffy white clouds above my head. And was not it enough for happiness to watch the winding stripe of the road unrolling in front of my eyes or a narrow path running among the grass, promising new impressions and new adventures?

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1. THE SNOW  
2. THE NEW-YEAR CELEBRATION
3. THE ICE-CREAM
4. DRESSES    
5. TRAVELLING (part one)
6. TRAVELLING (part two)